As he rode desperately from Charlestown one spring night in 1775, warning nearly every house of a British invasion, Paul Revere did not yell “The British are coming” indiscriminately on his path. Such a cry would have given him away in a region crawling with loyalists, and his mission depended on secrecy. Instead, Revere whispered a warning sotto voce, house by house, and more to the effect of “The Regulars are coming out,” referring to the mainstream British army.By the time he had arrived in Lexington around midnight, entire towns both knew of the advance and sent dozens of their horsemen to warn others.Another icon known for midnights made her call known Friday night, equally sotto voce. She brought tidings less of war and more of peace, love, and at least one rendition of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”Taylor Swift, the second-most famous American, celebrated the most important moment of her life as the country was commemorating the most important one of its, the two seemingly in conversation precisely because they didn’t talk much. “Speak now,” the preacher said, but she is not the kind of girl to rudely barge in on an Independence Day occasion. Yet Swift’s closed-door gathering with all of America’s tightlipped boldfaced, along with AMC chief Adam Aron, couldn’t but mark a patriotic celebration — the country’s most durable cultural product declaring its independence, at least from two decades of singlehood and singing about wedding-day fantasies, as the clock turned to July 4. At midnight.Amid a coterie of pop icons and media hosts, fashion models and social influencers, Hollywood celebrities and Nashville singers, the Regulars were most definitely not coming out, unless you counted the people lined up and woo-ing down 31st Street and across Seventh Avenue, behind barricades. But it was a kind of British-style gentry the MSG assembled made for just the same.A certain irony has attended the labeling of the Swift-Kelce union a “Royal Wedding,” as so many outlets did, on a day marking the freedom from such hegemonic madness. Yet watching the festivities from behind its tall keep-away tarps, one couldn’t help but feel like maybe the name carried some truth and we had indeed traded one form of monarchical submission for another: the fiat of kings for the rule of celebrity, the deference of the throne to the thrall of pop singers — the do-no-wrong authority of those blessed by birthright to the infallible aura made possible by charted singles. Where such bargains leave us remains up for debate.As the drone shot of the New Yok skyline revealed itself at midnight, there she was, Lady Liberty, and there she was, the other woman, the one on the bleachers, occupying the same frame as the Empire State Building, tonight lit up blue to honor the girl who loving was red on the night she wore white, Miss Americana’s glow as shiny as that made of copper. One if by land, two if by sea. And now, another signal, this time in purple from a beacon high above Madison Square Garden.While such lights of independence shone, the first-most famous American was feeling left out. Seeing the allusion, via ampersand, to the one who nipped at his pride flashing above MSG, his social-media team engineered an overthrow with their own signal. “Trump Is Your President,” his version of the purple sign said, attempting to reclaim a throne long marked for elimination.Over the previous 24 hours, on X and on Instagram, the president enacted his own Swift-ness, reconstructing “America’s Eras” via images of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Neil Armstrong and the Miracle on Ice, all giving way to multiple pictures of Donald Trump, and video of Elvis, Iwo Jima, Mickey Mouse and Mary Lou Retton, also all giving way to pictures of Donald Trump. He even appropriated Swift’s Eras Tour handle, “It’s a long time coming.” The Regulars, again, were not.The next night Trump would try to affix his place in the pantheon with a speech at the National Mall, serenading the crowds that had gathered even as Mother Nature kept trying to send them home. This followed a few weeks in which Trump’s vision of a 250th celebration continued to be vanquished by those he sought to command, first by Bret Michaels and then later by algae. After so many losses that he was getting tired of losing, Trump tried to stave off defeat like Major General Benjamin Lincoln at the Siege of Charleston, with about the same level of success.He spoke grandly of American capabilities, joined by the crew of Artemis II and a flag flown by the Wright Brothers. “There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome. There is no place we cannot go. There is no goal we cannot reach. And there is nothing that Americans cannot do.”