MAGA Misery
The president's Fourth of July festivities were a mess
The 200th anniversary of the United States brought two years of celebrations before the actual bicentennial, on July 4, 1976. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip accompanied President Ford on a tour of the land her predecessors had lost, a spectacular parade of ships sailed from New York City to Boston, 50 wagons recreated the settlers journey on the Oregon trail (none ate each other after an unfortunate winter in the Sierras), our most prestigious LARPers reenacted Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, and Johnny Cash served as grand marshall of the July 4 parade in Washington, D.C. The city inaugurated a new Smithsonian and the city’s first subway line to mark the occasion.
So what did Americans — a little older, a little more ragged — get this year? The answer is not much of substance. The National Mall hosted a mediocre “fair” full of MAGA-adjacent companies, and on the morning of the Fourth of July hundreds of members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched around D.C., masked and toting Confederate flags and surrounding Black Americans on their metro commutes. Hours later, after weather delays and a brief standoff between Trump supporters and law enforcement (where have I heard that one before), the president delivered a bizarre late-night speech that did not so much commemorate the semiquincentennial as reiterate the many grievances he has with the nation he leads. Cue the July 5th fireworks, which the president bragged would be the largest in American history. Minutes into the show, the smoke grew so thick that revelers who endured the day to watch could barely make it out through the miasma.
