Nobody said it was easy to be a pioneer. On a broiling Saturday, July 4th, when the mercury bolted past 38 degrees and the sky over Washington was filled with fighter jets, thunderstorms threatened to outdo the attempt to put on the biggest fireworks display in the history of the city on this, its 250th anniversary.Say one thing for Americans: they show up and they believe in this thing. Doesn’t matter whether your people landed here from Leitrim or Cuba or can claim bloodlines to the Winslows, Bradfords or Mullinses arriving on the Mayflower. Whether in Manhattan or the industrial cities or the wheat farms or any of Fitzgerald’s Lost Swede Towns, they all marked this Saturday. You cannot spend a July 4th here without being impressed by the energy and earnestness with which the people in this country express their appreciation and devotion to the straightforward, yet endlessly nuanced, idea of being American.And what a preposterous delight of a day. What an opera.Down around the Mall, at about noontime, the confusion is general. Along vast sections from the Lincoln Memorial across to the museums are dozens of visitors, on hire bikes and scooters, on foot, making their way blindly along narrow pathways beside 12ft steel fencing, about as tall as the Berlin Wall. The mood is extremely good, and tolerant. People wish the National Guard, in their heavy uniforms, a happy Fourth. Daniel Picazo is zooming around on one of those lethal-looking balance scooters. He explains that his friends sent him on a scouting mission to find a good spot to watch the fireworks later in the evening. “I would say the Fourth is just kind of a celebration of our independence and how long we have been together as a country,” he says when asked what this day means to him.“It’s a day we can come together and celebrate our culture and love for our country. Every citizen loves where they are from. I guess Americans have a reputation for being super-gung-ho about it on this day. Celebrating our success as a country. And that’s what it means to me. You just revel and reflect on the ...I dunno …the culture of your country.”Picazo is 32, Cuban-American and recently moved to Washington to take up a position as an operating room nurse. He’s made an effort for the day, wearing American flag trainers, socks, shorts and tank-top, all layered with denim. It’s as if the rig-out has been inspired by cutting and pasting Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA album. Daniel’s up for a photo for The Irish Times but, as we spoke, the silly phone has overheated and we say good luck. It’s as well. Everyone looks destroyed form the heat, as if they were running the Marathon des Sables in patriotic summer gear and have just now dropped out after kilometre 89. It’s dangerously warm. But the crowds are coming out. When the world refers to the ‘pioneer spirit’ in relation to America, there’s a good chance this is what they mean ... there is a pathological reluctance to moan about setbacks or hardships On a shaded corner of St John’s Church at Lafayette Park – where, six summers ago, Donald Trump famously held up a Bible as protesters were tear-gassed – I come across Clayton Noyes and Caroline Beauman. They are celebrating the day by trying to convince their fellow Americans that the way forward is through the consumption of LSD, or peyote, or ecstasy or psilocybin, or any of the “Schedule One” drugs, banned by the Government, that, they believe, will expand the consciousness. “Cognitive liberty,” Beauman explains. “It can change the world, man. If everyone took a little drop once in a while they would realise how f****d up everything really is. It helps you see the love in the world.”Clayton Noyes and Caroline Beauman spreading their message on July 4th, 2026, in Washington. Photograph: Keith Duggan The couple have a young daughter and are in the process of converting a school bus into a fully-functional home so that they can light out for the territory. Noyes builds outdoor swimming pools for those who can afford to have them in their back yards – a phone-book-sized clientele here in Washington.“But the one reason to do that ... [with] us in our mid-20s ... it is beyond a dream to be able to purchase a home in this economy,” he says.“It’s very intense. And we don’t want to be planted somewhere for the next 30 years paying a mortgage.”We get into a conversation about MK-Ultra, the CIA experiments on mind control that ran from 1953-73. Both can quote chapter and verse and apologise for the depth of details. The past is never dead, and all that. Just last month, the Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who serves as chair for the taskforce on the declassification of Government secrets, opened a hearing on “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MK-Ultra Experiments”. Noyes and Beauman believe there has been no transparency – and that there is a good reason for that.“They know it opens our brains and that it will make people say f*** the system,” Beauman says.“They figured that out with MK-Ultra in the 60s and they burned all the evidence.”They tell me their parents support president Trump. And for the past few hours, they’ve had good fun with the Make America Great Again supporters heading down towards the Great State Fair. They have no animus towards the Maga movement: it’s a big land and a broad church.“We consider ourselves patriots and we are celebrating today,” Noyes says as Beauman nods.“I don’t think you can consider yourself a person that loves others and nature if you don’t also love your country and where these people come from,” she adds. “I love this motherf****n’ country. I love the trees in it. I love the people in it. I’m patriotic about it.”By noon, the waiting line for Trump’s much-maligned fairground is three hours. A long line, too, has gathered for admittance to the viewing area for tonight’s fireworks. People are wilting, though. There’s an animal energy to the heat. But the marvel is that there is no grouching. When the world refers to the “pioneer spirit” in relation to America, there’s a good chance this is what they mean. There is a pathological reluctance to moan about setbacks or hardships. When they get together at these mass occasions, some sort of Oregon Trail mentality takes hold. It doesn’t matter if this particular trail involves the hardship of standing in line in the blazing heat for a table at the Old Ebbitt Grill. “It was hotter yesterday,” one guy wearing cut-short Uncle Sam dungarees says cheerfully. “There was a 100 per cent chance of dyin’ of a heatstroke yesterday. Today it’s just 90.” There are a lot of Southern accents and every strata of society, from deeply tanned Baby Boomers with the pinched faces redolent of a Dorathea Lange collection sucking on 100s in Maga outfits to crisp-pressed couples who look as though they’ve stepped from a Lauren catalogue and are immune to the heat. Many visitors are parading gold-tinted guest lanyards, hanging them from their necks like Olympic medals. People have travelled enormous distances to be here. Outside Joe’s Seafood, the fish-and-steak place on 15th and one of the few restaurants at which Trump has dined since returning to office (he took the cabinet there), I bump into a celebrant who announces himself only as “T”. He’s wearing nifty head gear and has crossed the continent. “I’m from California. Let me tell you why,” T says.A man who introduced himself only as "T", in Washington on July 4th. Photograph: Keith Duggan “Inside the 50 states of the United States there are 574 independent countries called Indian Nations. And today is also the birthday of the 30th president, Calvin Coolidge. And he signed into a law for Indian citizens to vote. That’s why I’m here. Our values line up with the Republican Party. We have a traditional life, family values, respect nature. We were being influenced by a lot of bad lawmakers and it led to a lot of tribal infighting. People took advantage of that – especially the Democrats. Now inside a lot of tribes there’s crime and drugs and a lot of bad things going on. But we have a right to vote, unlike illegal immigrants.”By late afternoon, I’d figured there was no point in waiting for hours to get into the State Fair on the unimpeachable grounds that I am not American, and France vs Paraguay was on soon. By now, the flyovers of all kinds of military planes were taking place hourly. They moved at insane speeds and with terrific noise. Everyone gawped upwards, including people driving cars, craning forward over the steering wheel like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas. One flyover took place just as we watched Kylian Mbappé on television, belting out La Marseillaise in the stadium in Philadelphia. It felt as if the plane was in the actual bar: glasses may have trembled. “Just think,” the guy beside me said. “That could be the last sound you ever get to hear before you get the shit bombed out of you.” Later, across from the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, a group of us stood outside watching as the sky suddenly darkened and a gust of wind caused summer chairs to scatter and a new batch of planes – “Thunderbirds”, someone ventured – streaked across the city. Phone updates promised bad weather now. It was impossible not to feel a bit sorry for the tens of thousands who had lined up for hours in that midday furnace to get into the Mall. In the early evening, a biblical rainstorm fire-hosed the entire area and evacuations were ordered. Already, an afternoon parade had been cancelled at short notice. At 7.36pm local time, the US Secret Service issued a notice with the ominous headline “SAFE HAVEN locations”, which included the Jefferson Memorial, the Museum of Natural History and the Ronald Reagan Building. Meanwhile, as dusk fell, lovely blooms of indie fireworks displays began to flare – along with lightning. In other major cities, the night was beautiful. The television networks showed the Boston Pops doing their thing at the Hatch Memorial Shell on the Charles river. There was a clip of Doris Kearns Goodwin, talking about what it is to be American right now, amid the poisonous political partisanship and the fears that all of this – the ongoing Experiment – may some day just cave in under its own weight.“What they used to say in the Great Depression is we’re at the end of our country, right then. Those are the words they used,” Kearns Goodwin said in her brisk northeast accent.“And the thing we can take hope in is not that we have the right leaders at the right time – it was the citizens who acted. One of the moments when Lincoln was called a liberator – he said ‘don’t call me that’. It was the antislavery moment and union soldiers that did it all. When Teddy Roosevelt comes in and is able to soften that class warfare and deal with the Industrial Revolution, he already had before him in the cities the settling houses that had been formed and the social gospel and religion. The union movement was there for FDR and of course the civil rights groups for Lyndon Johnson. And then you get the women’s movement, the gay rights movement. It’s up to us, the citizens. That is what history has to tell us. We have to be like those colonists now. They had a boldness to them. We have it in our fibre too. We are not a different people now. We have to do what we have to do and be active citizens and get the right things happening in our country.”A banner of US president Donald Trump hanging from the department of labour building in advance of July 4th festivities in Washington. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images She is right about that. They do have the fibre. In Washington, the president sent a message out to his peeps.“Storms bring luck whatever the occasion,” he said. “They also make events a little bit more exciting. We will wait it out. I don’t care if it’s two in the morning or an hour from now.’ But the prestige flyovers timed for the night sky – the Spirit bombers, the B1 Lancer with afterburners – were cancelled. By 9pm, the State Fair had been cleared of people and, according to a Fox News reporter, “thousands upon thousands of people are out on the streets in DC, not really sure where to go, what to do.”On social media came fractured reports of deep annoyance and even panic. Earlier in the day, I’d met Cassandra Lawrence and Jonathan Paarlberg on their way from an anti-administration protest at the National Archive. They’d driven five hours from North Carolina to be in the city. “This entire system was designed this way by the billionaires,” Lawrence said.“To keep us down and at each other’s throats. We are going to have to bridge the gap somehow.”Paarlberg agreed there was one unifying thing about this Fourth. “Everybody actually does believe in freedom,” he said. “Everyone is actually against tyranny. But too many people have failed to realise they are living under tyranny. They have taken a lot of propaganda and platitudes and turn everything in a certain direction. Americans believe in freedom. And Americans don’t believe in fascism. But they are failing to recognise that we are becoming more and more fascist every day and the people at the top intend that.”Cassandra Lawrence and Jonathan Paarlberg in Washington on July 4th, 2026. Photograph: Keith Duggan Meanwhile, for the hundreds of millions of Americans celebrating at home, the networks broadcast an extraordinarily polished choreographed multi-city national show – as though the World Cup was an off-Broadway production. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the daft, glorious scale of the place. On it went. In Chicago, Billy Corgan sang 1979 as fireworks broke over Lake Michigan and the entire panorama of sound and vision was very beautiful. It was all leading up to the late night address by the Big Kahuna. The origin story of the road that Trump and America have taken over the past 80 years to arrive at this hour will take many, many decades to fully untangle.Lee Greenwood came on to sing the Trump anthem, God Bless the USA, and then Trump was on stage, with an hour left of the Fourth of July. The world tends to think of the Founding Fathers as fusty ancients in wigs. But they were just kids. On July 4th, 1776, James Monroe was 18, Alexander Hamilton 21 and Jefferson 33. Combined, their ages do not reach that of the 47th president. They would have marvelled at his age.“Good evening, America,” president Donald J Trump began.“If you think that was easy, it wasn’t.”Ended there, it might have been a perfect, even unforgettable address.Perhaps as well to leave the Americans there, whether tuning in for the address or dropping out. Was it a happy Fourth? Well, with the skies filled with pyrotechnics and the dogs cowering and the downtown bars busy on a storm-riven, torrid Saturday night when the great American cities fairly dazzled 250 years in, the citizens seemed to be having a fine old time, with or without a little drop to help them reach cognitive liberty. And if not happy, then always, always, in pursuit.