Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
THE BEST LAID plans of mice and monarchs don’t come without a few glitches. But Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration is rapidly descending into a national farce of Fyre Festival proportions.
Conflating the US President’s 80th Birthday with America’s 250th celebration was inevitable, as were the monarchial pretensions, Napoleonic L’Etat, c’est moi undercurrent and nod to the Roman emperors’ penchant for gladiatorial combat as entertainment.
A week ago, the merger seemed plausible if unimaginative. Trump’s Big Birthday would be the springboard for almost three weeks of celebrations, kicking off with the UFC cage fight extravaganza on the White House lawn.
A series of spectacular concerts (their words, not mine) featuring America’s greatest stars and music legends (ditto) would follow while the National Mall transformed itself into a giant fairground for the 16-day Great American State Fair jamboree.
In the meantime, Washington DC’s memorials and monuments would receive a $100 million (€85.84 million) Trump-themed makeover and a drive-by dousing of 24-carat gold leaf. The US President is throwing the stuff around like a demented King Midas. So far, so Trumpy.
Like any Birthday celebration, it wouldn’t be complete without a few epic tantrums from the toddler-in-chief. One fit of pique was prompted by a 92-page federal court order that could be distilled as follows: reopen the Kennedy Center and take your name off the building. Pronto.
A second meltdown was triggered by the tsunami of no-shows. It’s been a standing joke in DC for decades that Republican presidents couldn’t get a kick in a celebrity stampede. Not since Elvis visited the Nixon White House has any self-respecting performer wanted anything to do with a Republican presidential event.
As befits a former reality TV star, Trump has a smattering of D-listers – Kid Rock, Mel Gibson and Mike Tyson amongst them – in his orbit. But unlike Clinton or Obama, he can’t pick up the phone and summon Springsteen, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga like he’s ordering a pizza.
For Trump, who craves the adulation of those who despise him and despises those who idolise him, this is the bitterest pill of all.
No sooner was his line-up of past-their-prime performers announced than the cancellations followed. Apparently, Martina McBride, the Commodores and Young MC were labouring under the illusion they would be taking part in a national celebration of America’s semi-quintennial, rather than an orgy of MAGA triumphalism.
Their decisions to skedaddle prompted a fresh spate of rage-posting; Trump threatened to axe the week-long series of concerts and replace them with a mega rally featuring the US President as the sole star of America’s 250th celebrations.
Now it looks like that might be his only option as Freedom 250 morphs into Fyre Festival 2017; by Monday, the all-star line-up of music legends had been whittled down to Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, supported by C+C Music Factory and Flo Rida (Geddit?). Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of the latter two. Be worried if you have.
Nothing says America’s best days are behind it like the resurrection of one half of Milli Vanilli, the 1980s duo that lip-synched every song they ever recorded, as a headline act. It’s the perfect post-parody performance for the times we live in. But on Wednesday, Fab Morvan, the remaining half of Milli Vanilli, pulled out. “This is not what I signed up for,” he said. (Or possibly lip-synched).
And so Vanilla Ice, whose one hit has been co-opted as the anthem of white supremacists who cheer on the brutal assaults of Trump’s immigration henchmen, is the last act standing. Will the denouement of the Trump-era play out to the strains of a 1980’s rapper chanting ICE ICE Baby! Across a cultural wasteland?
Even the synthetic jewel in the tin crown of Trump’s festivities – the cage fighting extravaganza on the White House lawn to mark his 80th Birthday – has run into difficulty, with several of the UFC’s biggest names refusing to take part.
Apparently, the UFC snowflakes draw the line at being asked to kick the bejesus out of each other amid humidity levels that would wreak havoc on their hairstyles and fake tans. These testosterone-enhanced avatars of MAGA masculinity also object to sharing their muggy perch on the White House Lawn with the bugs and mosquitoes that will vastly outnumber an audience that will be one part military recruits with preapproved body mass indexes and four parts billionaire Trump buddies and GOP megadonors. Former UFC champion Belal Muhammad, who declined the UFC’s invitation to take part, described the setup as being akin to the Hunger Games.
Mercifully, reenactments of historic battles, a staple of previous 4th of July celebrations, are off the Freedom 250 menu. Given the ‘MAGA to the Maxx’ theme, a restaging of the January 6th Insurrection might prove more popular than a reenactment of the Siege of Yorktown.
At this point, a giant bouncy castle on the White House lawn would represent a significant upgrade.
The list of semi-quintennial-related follies is too extensive to reproduce. The gaping hole in the White House exterior wall that’s dwarfed by the adjacent bunker bomb sized crater tells its own story of incompetence and grift. The gilded white elephant of a ballroom – Trump’s unwanted bequest to a nation of ingrates – has ground to a halt, mired in lawsuits, recriminations and the realisation that American taxpayers are going to be stuck with the tab for a gift it never ordered.
Then there’s the concrete-covered Rose Garden that now resembles a Holiday Inn patio, the Presidential Hall of Fame in the Oval Office colonnade, replete with gilt-edged insults and denigrations of former Presidents.
Contracts have been awarded in open defiance of laws, norms and regulations. In each case, the urgent need to get it done before the festivities kicked off was cited as an excuse for bypassing regulations on bids and tenders. It’s unclear why the Trump administration waited until the last minute; it’s not like they didn’t know America’s 250th anniversary was coming.
As a result, Washington’s national monuments are being given facelifts by the contractor who cleaned up Trump’s swimming pool and the crew who repainted a dome in Wyoming.
The guys responsible for taking out the trash and removing debris from government building sites have, somewhat inexplicably, been awarded contracts to repair three fountains and replace marble paving around the Simon Bolivar statue. It’s not even clear that the Reflecting Pool’s Miami-style makeover will be completed on time, despite having blown through its original budget by a factor of ten.
The Arts of War and Peace, the four giant bronze horses that flank the roads leading from the Lincoln Memorial to the Arlington Memorial Bridge, are in line for a $5 million dunking in gold leaf.
Trump will find it considerably harder to gild over his personal realisation of the art of war and peace; the Iranian debacle is a pig that no amount of lipstick is going to make over.
It seems there’s only one monument in Washington DC that Trump has no interest in leaving his imprint upon: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The black granite wall situated to the right of the Lincoln Memorial is etched with the names of more than 58,000 American soldiers who lost their lives in the war that Trump, and so many of his generation’s sons of wealth and privilege, managed to avoid.
America has enjoyed a 250-year breather between King George III’s and King Donald’s respective descents into madness. 250 years of continuous, if imperfect, democracy is a record of which Americans can justifiably be proud. For a few glorious moments during those years, it lived up to, and even surpassed, the dreams of its forefathers.
And there is some cause for celebration as green shoots of resistance spring from the battlefields of America’s parched and trampled democracy. The greatest insult to the 250th celebrations – a $1.776 bn (€1.52 billion) grift that would deliver lottery-size payouts to the January 6 insurrectionists has been stopped in its tracks, along with Trump’s Birthday present to himself – a lifetime moratorium on any tax audits, liabilities or penalties owed by him or his family members.
‘Advanced plans’ for a $250 (€220) bill featuring a likeness of Trump that looks like it was lifted from his August 2023 mugshot have been stalled by pesky laws and requirements, meaning that the $250 (€220) Trump bill is more likely to end up as Monopoly money than legal currency.
A separate plan to mint a 24-carat gold coin featuring a glowering Trump with clenched fists pressed downwards onto what is presumably the Resolute Desk – a pose that perfectly mimics Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards posture – has been ‘complicated’ by the latent realisation that each $250 coin would cost the US mint $2,000 to produce.
All things considered, wishing America a Happy 250th Birthday seems like a hollow gesture. But here’s to sincere and heartfelt wishes for a speedy post-Trump recovery.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say