America’s 250th Survived Trump’s Sabotage
The president tried to make the event all about himself. He failed. And for that, the country succeeded.
We trust everyone had an enjoyable Independence Day weekend—unless you were on the National Mall and had to deal with (in addition to the usual D.C. heat and humidity) the sad spectacle of the Great American State Fair, the torrential storms, the president’s egomaniacal insistence on being seen by crowds of inconvenienced people, and, well, the president himself.
Andrew Egger is off for two weeks, but somehow we’ll keep this newsletter going until he gets back. Happy Monday.
Join Sam Stein and Will Sommer for MAGA Mondays at 10 a.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.
America Lives Abroad
by William Kristol
Well, it’s July 6. And I think I can say this with some confidence: Donald Trump tried to hijack our 250th anniversary, and he failed. Both the Declaration of Independence and our subsequent history turned out to be too weighty and too elevated to yield easily to Trump’s insane grandiosity and insistent mediocrity.
Before his July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump posted a video that showed a kind of golden sculpture of the mountain, with his image added to those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Trump’s voiceover on the video claimed, “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The president did protest too much, methinks. Deep down, or not even that deep down, he knows that in years to come, no one will think he is in their league. To say the least.
Then there was Trump’s July Fourth extravaganza. For all of his narcissism, even he knew it was a flop. As soon as he returned from the Mall, Trump turned frantically to Truth Social. He posted over 100 times on July 5, lauding his own achievements, attacking his opponents, and generally behaving like someone who sensed that the 250th anniversary, despite or because of his attempts to hijack it, made him look small. Former BBC foreign correspondent Nick Bryant , who covered American politics for decades, put it well: “On America’s 250th birthday, Donald Trump was dwarfed by history.”
And he was dwarfed by the World Cup. Trump’s 250th anniversary sport of choice was the ugly gladiatorial spectacle he hosted at the White House for his eightieth birthday on June 14. Three days later, the World Cup matches began throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We’ve had three weeks of enjoyable and often memorable contests. Who now remembers the unpleasant cage matches on the South Lawn?
Trump’s behavior over the weekend was also dwarfed by the example set by the first American pope. On July 3, Pope Leo XIV accepted a Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He spoke live from the Vatican to a crowd gathered in front of Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted—and which Trump did not choose to visit.
As the chronicler of Pope Leo, Christopher Hale, points out, “The pope opened his remarks with a sentence no previous pope could have spoken: ‘As a son of this great country, founded by courageous men and women who dreamed of liberty and of a better life for themselves and for their children, I join you in asking God’s blessings upon America’s future.’” Leo continued by emphasizing that, in fulfillment of the Founders’ vision, America became “a byword for freedom, as the country opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants, enabling them and their children to play their part in shaping the future of the nation.”
On Independence Day itself, the Pope made a remarkable visit to the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where many migrants from Africa to Europe have landed—and in hopes of reaching which so many have perished. You can read Hale’s moving account of the pope’s visit and his remarks here.
I trust—but I also believe—that Leo’s vision of America will end up prevailing over Trump’s.
This evening, President Trump will fly to Ankara, Turkey, for the annual NATO summit. For more than 75 years, NATO has been a distinctive American contribution to world peace as well as being an instrument of American greatness. We’ll have to hope that Trump doesn’t do too much more damage to NATO or further embarrass the United States on the world stage.
But we’ll also be able to watch and listen to another president, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, who embodies the principles of NATO and really of the United States, better than our president. After the summit, a bipartisan congressional delegation will head to Hungary to meet with new Prime Minister Péter Magyar, a recent example of a fighter for liberal democracy prevailing over its antagonists. Needless to say, Trump won’t be there.
The American founders. The first American Pope. Zelensky and Magyar. It is their spirit that captures the true meaning of our 250th anniversary. It is their spirit, if I can adapt William Faulkner’s line from his 1950 Nobel Prize address, that will not only endure but will prevail.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Withdrawing Troops From Europe Is a Policy in Search of a Problem… The Pentagon’s force posture review seems designed to justify a policy already well underway, writes MARK HERTLING.
A Belated Appreciation of John Adams… In the July episode of The Bulwark Book Club, MONA CHAREN interviews presidential historian LINDSAY CHERVINSKY about her book, Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic.
Voters are Sounding More and More Like Trump on Birthright Citizenship… He lost in court. But he’s bending reality to his warped point of view, reports SARAH LONGWELL, fresh off some focus groups.
Donald Trump Is Bringing Back ‘Death Panels’... There’s a good kind and a bad kind, and it looks like we’ll be getting both, observes JONATHAN COHN.
America’s 250 Great (and Awful) Years… On The Focus Group podcast, HEATHER COX RICHARDSON joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss voters’ complicated relationship with patriotism this year, and the lessons of history for rebuilding from the Trump years.
Quick Hits
RED CARD REVERSED: We laughed, collectively, when FIFA President Gianni Infantino bestowed upon Donald Trump the first ever peace prize issued by the soccer federation. But we’re crying with joy (though, let’s be honest, we’re all just a bit aghast) now that Trump has put his well-earned FIFA credentials to good use. The president reportedly called Infantino last week to talk about the red card given to U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during the game against Bosnia-Herzegovina. The card meant Balogun would be suspended for the round-of-sixteen match against Belgium.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, FIFA reversed the suspension citing its rules that lets its disciplinary committee “fully or partially suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure” and place a player on probation instead.1 Something like this hasn’t happened in a World Cup since 1962—which hasn’t gone unnoticed by THE REST OF THE WORLD, which is wondering what integrity is left in this tournament.
The White House is doing the bare minimum of spin right now, insisting it was not pressuring Infantino, so much as just trying to get a read on what had happened. But the actual level of resources and attention this behind-the-scenes effort involved makes you wonder if the planning for the Iran war received similar care. And Trump, predictably, couldn’t help but crow. After posting an old photo of himself and Macaulay Culkin at some press event featuring the World Cup trophy, he authored another bleet thanking “FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!”
THE YEAR OF EPSTEIN: It was one year ago today that the country finally received the answers it had been clamoring for about Jeffrey Epstein, his years-long criminal conspiracy, and his connections to powerful and influential people inside and outside the government. Trump’s FBI and Justice Department declared that:
[W]hile we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.
And with that, the entire controversy died down and no one asked any more questions, or even thought about it ever again. Certainly not the president, or the FBI director, or former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who lost her job because of her mishandling of the “modified limited hangout” strategy that culminated in that infamous July 6, 2025 memo.
And certainly not Todd Blanche, who was intimately involved in all of the strategizing around the release of the Epstein files, as documented most recently in the book Regime Change. Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time, is now up for confirmation to be attorney general. And his hearings in the Senate are next week. Let’s see how much scrutiny he comes under for his role in handling the Epstein scandal, or if Republicans mention it at all.
SOCIAL INSECURITY: Neither party understands Social Security—how it works, or why it’s in trouble. As Joe Perticone wrote last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson stumbled awkwardly on the “third rail of American politics” when he suggested the House might reform the program to maintain its solvency if Republicans keep control next year. But . . .
Johnson continued to leave it unclear exactly what he’d do about that waste, fraud, and abuse, which, frankly, is not as prevalent as he and other Republicans often insist. But any proposed reform would almost certainly involve further restricting eligibility for those programs to exclude more of their current beneficiaries—along the lines of what Republicans did with Medicaid last year.
Tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse” won’t cut it (so to speak). And neither will wishing the problem away. In the Atlantic, Jessica Reidl explains what both parties get wrong about Social Security:
Let’s start with progressives. Their framework argues that Social Security is primarily an anti-poverty program for senior citizens. And those benefits, the story goes, are endangered by an inexplicable quirk in the law that applies Social Security payroll taxes to only the first $184,500 in annual wages (a figure that rises annually with wage inflation). Eliminate the cap, apply Social Security taxes to all wage income, and Social Security will automatically be funded for generations and could even pay for large benefit expansions.
The first problem with this argument is math. . . .
The conservative misunderstanding of Social Security is widely available in Facebook memes. These voters will tell you that an individual’s Social Security payroll taxes are stored in a trust fund—an extensive government savings account—until they retire, when those savings are returned to them in monthly checks. And because seniors are simply being repaid from their earlier contributions, the system would never have run a budget deficit were it not for the greedy politicians who raided the trust fund or all of the illegal immigrants who stole trillions of dollars from the program. Thus, simply repaying the trust fund and deporting the immigrants would restore Social Security to permanent solvency.
Obviously, none of this is accurate.
Cheap Shots
Like taking candy from an Infantino.
< Tim starts reading "Morning Shots" >
Trump: "“I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” "
< Tim stops reading "Morning Shots" >
And I will be the smartest, most handsomest electrical engineer of all time. FFS, we need to come up with a stronger word for this sort of delusional narcissism.
The recent FIFA acquiesence to the demands of Donald Trump was about as predictable as you could imagine. Both the president and the sporting association are incarnations of the same grasping, corrupt urges, and they understand each other perfectly.
Contemptuous of rules and regulations, they will work together when they can - as long as neither of them gets in the way of the other's true game, which is profit through domination and control.
It is important to acknowledge how much of "the good show" goes into a relationship like this. They each play to their audience and assure themselves they are just giving their followers what they want: FIFA apparently has upended player penalties in the past in order to ensure the fans get an exciting game going forward, and Trump's drive is always designed to project the strength and power his base demands.
It's bread and circuses - as long as it's understood that FIFA and Trump get most of the bread.