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The mainstream media treated President Donald Trump’s extremely narrow win in 2024 as if it were a landslide victory. While it was surprising that so many people voted for Trump after his disastrous first term, it wasn’t like had been given a massive mandate from the public. But soon after Trump’s victory, the press—which already spent years normalizing Trump’s racist and corrupt…

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The 250th birthday of the United States is upon us, and the milestone year happens to be falling in the midst of a presidential administration that has made the concept of patriotism … tattered. President Donald Trump and his underlings have carried out, implied, or outright said some things that question just how patriotic their “Make America Great Again” movement really is.

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Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Trump deflects from Reflecting Pool failure by arresting ‘vandals’…

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DeSantis administration still controls immigration detention center site. By Liv Caputo for Florida Phoenix A Miccosukee Tribe member wants her nation to be the new protector of the so-called ”Alligator Alcatraz” site, calling Friday on Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to give it the territory to conserve. But there’s a problem. The DeSantis administration…

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Five years after launching an ambitious mental health program, many schools have struggled to get it up and running. Hundreds more have yet to try. By Christine Mai-Duc for KFF When Taletha Washburn and the staff at Plumas Charter School first heard that California wanted to help schools treat more kids struggling with mental health, it felt like a well-timed remedy for a rural…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | JD Vance reveals baby-making secrets—and it’s as gross as it sounds…

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President Donald Trump has trundled his way—in pathetic fits and starts—through a caricature of America, one with his own extremely limited personal soundtrack. It’s filled with Lee Greenwood, Italian classics from the weird conservative guy who wrecks opera songs, and Kash Patel’s girlfriend bellowing a pitchy “Star-Spangled Banner.” But what about the real soundtrack of America?

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For our special print issue on the country’s 250th anniversary, we asked about 100 historians and other public intellectuals to make some lists for us that summarize the nation’s high and low points: our best and worst presidents; the images that most sharply define American history; the greatest works of art; and more. The results are fun, fascinating, and give a real and true sense of the sweep of our history.

Now it’s your turn! Take this reader survey and tell us what you think the right answers are—and see where yours stack up compared to our experts and to other readers. — Editor Michael Tomasky

History—in this case, through the pen of Thomas Boswell—does not record for us the context in which Samuel Johnson offered up the famous quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” According to samueljohnson.com, the English intellectual and polymath just blurted it out on the evening of April 7, 1775, providing no context or explanation of what was on his mind. Some biographers apparently believe he was thinking of William Pitt the Elder, and the former prime minister’s frequent invocation of the term.

We do, however, have more thoughts on the matter from Johnson that have survived. The year before, Johnson—something of a mixed bag, politically, but an ardent foe of slavery long before abolitionism became a movement in Great Britain—wrote and delivered to Parliament a speech he called “The Patriot.” It was election time, and Johnson was laying out for the assembled some of his ideas about the duties of public service, and what patriotism does, and does not, mean.

Herewith, just a few choice quotes:

“To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace.”

“Still less does the true patriot circulate opinions which he knows to be false. No man, who loves his country, fills the nation with clamorous complaints, that the protestant religion is in danger, because ‘popery is established in the extensive province of Quebec,’ a falsehood so open and shameless, that it can need no confutation among those who know that of which it is almost impossible for the most unenlightened zealot to be ignorant.”

Finally, in his closing peroration, Johnson urged the next House of Commons to “unite in a general abhorrence of those, who, by deceiving the credulous with fictitious mischiefs, overbearing the weak by audacity of falsehood, by appealing to the judgment of ignorance, and flattering the vanity of meanness … arrogate to themselves the name of patriots.”

As we watch (or avoid watching) Donald Trump trying to turn the celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday into a celebration of Donald Trump, we would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s thoughts. In wondering what he might think of the president’s ideas and actions this week, there is very little mystery. Let’s review a couple of those actions, as reported by Politico Playbook Friday morning:

• You saw that ridiculous video of Trump “talking” with the AI Teddy Roosevelt? Well, this was meant to be part of a “living museum recreating Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier experience,” as envisioned in a “planning document” from America250, a bipartisan, congressionally chartered, decade-old plan to launch various commemorations. “It hoped to draw 250,000 visitors for a nationally televised celebration on July 1 featuring A-list performers, immersive historical programming, a drone spectacular and, ultimately, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library’s grand opening.” Instead, it launched with a visit from Trump.
• The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a decades-old Washington summer fixture that always takes place on the National Mall, was given the boot this year and forced inside the Smithsonian Castle to make way for Trump’s Great American State Fair, which has been drawing fewer attendees than a lot of Little League games.
• Finally, it almost goes without saying that the Trump administration stiffed America250, according to Politico. Congress appropriated $150 million to the project, but organizers have received just $25 million to date. Democrats also alleged this week that some America250 donors were tricked into donating to Trump’s personal semiquincentennial organization, Freedom 250, which is responsible for the UFC fight at the White House and the ongoing fair. (Naturally, Freedom 250 is not subject to congressional oversight, and it can keep its donors private.)

But these, of course, are minor matters that will pass. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

These are venal acts. But as July 4 approaches, it behooves us to remember specifically that they are unpatriotic. Or worse: They are aggressively anti-patriotic. Real patriotism is truthful and humble; it tolerates and even welcomes dissent, and, understanding that the people rule in a democracy, it serves supporters and detractors equally; it seeks justice rather than revenge; and it understands that to seek profit from office is abhorrent.

That’s Trump. A treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civil idolatry; in fact, let’s throw “idolatrous” in there too. And if you don’t understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

Let’s close with a few more thoughts on patriotism from some people who actually knew it means:

George Washington: “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

G.K. Chesterton: “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”

Albert Einstein: “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism—how passionately I hate them!”

And maybe my favorite, from Clarence Darrow: “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

There is still much to celebrate about the United States of America—its art and literature and music, its scientific achievements, its physical beauty, and of course the principles of liberty it introduced to the world 250 years ago and toward which we daily and yearly strive. The anti-patriots do have the upper hand right now, but more and more people are seeing through them. In addition, they are also making real, Johnson- and Darrow-esque patriots of millions who were once disengaged. That is something to be hopeful about, and to celebrate, this weekend.

This midterm election cycle has delivered us a number of unhinged primaries. There was the Texas barnburner between Republican Sen. John Cornyn and corrupt state Attorney General Ken Paxton. In South Carolina, Rep. Nancy Mace’s erratic behavior dragged down her bid to become governor. And California’s gubernatorial primary was upended by a horrific sexual misconduct scandal involving now…

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On New Year’s Eve, fireworks bloomed behind the Washington Monument. Along the side of the 550-foot structure, a birthday candle was projected, flickering as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. This spectacle kicked off Freedom 250’s countdown to the semiquincentennial and was followed by animated neoclassic-style graphics overlaid with audio narrating the nation’s “discovery, expansion, independence, and future.” As the narrative unraveled and onlookers watched Christopher Columbus sail across the sea and settlers in wagons push westward, there was no mention of women or people of color.

This display, along with the announcement of a UFC fight on the White House lawn, an IndyCar grand prix near the National Mall, and the Great American State Fair, made it clear that this year’s semiquincentennial is more about creating spectacle in service of President Donald Trump’s idea of America than it is about honoring American history. With each event, the complexities that have brought America to where it is today are erased or sidelined in favor of blind patriotism—a celebration of an uncritical American story centering predominantly white men. 

The Freedom 250–backed Great American State Fair on the National Mall runs through July 10. Al Drago/Getty An equestrian performs during a rodeo on the first day of the Great American State Fair. Anna Moneymaker/Getty

But state commissions are also celebrating the anniversary. And some of them are doing a far better job honoring the country’s complexity. These groups, formed by state governor appointments, legislation, and executive orders, are also political and flawed. But they are focusing on their communities, choosing to use the semiquincentennial as a moment to embrace diversity and make history more accessible. This anniversary is more than a celebration; it’s a chance to reexamine America’s story and take stock of those the federal government would rather censor from the larger narrative. 

As these separate state commissions facilitated conversations with local communities, they found that more than any spectacle, people wanted to see themselves and their ancestors in the celebrations of 250 years of the United States. 

In Rhode Island, one of the original 13 colonies, locals know their history and take pride in it. Lauren Fogarty, the commission’s program coordinator, said there’s been an opportunity to hear from more families about their personal connections to the Revolution, including from descendants of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, the first Black battalion in US military history. Although the history of the regiment has often been overshadowed, the anniversary and one of the commission’s grant recipients, the Rhode Island Historical Society, provided an opportunity for author John Rees to discuss the experiences of those soldiers during and after the war at an April event at the John Brown House Museum.

North Carolina’s commission has drawn attention to the Edenton Tea Party, where a group of 51 women gathered to pledge that they wouldn’t buy British goods, one of the earliest instances of women’s political activism. This history is presented in one of the children’s books the commission created in celebration of the semiquincentennial. The commission has sold roughly 3,700 of the three children’s books. It recently secured funding for another children’s book, this one focused on Martin Black, one of the 14 Harlowe Patriots, a group of free Black men who fought in the Revolution.

In Illinois, the state commission created a free passport, similar to the National Parks Passport, that includes nearly 60 sites across the state, illuminating how “people in Illinois have made good on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence,” said Gabrielle Lyon, the Illinois commission chair. “The idea is to connect things that have happened locally here to the formation of our national story.” They’ve distributed 100,000 of them as of June. The passport includes the Elijah P. Lovejoy memorial for the journalist and abolitionist, who was killed by a mob for wanting a free press. It also includes Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, the remnants of the largest pre-Columbian Native American civilization north of Mexico. 

State commissions have also bolstered the work of the expert agencies and organizations that already had programming planned around the semiquincentennial. “No one really needed a commission to say, ‘Hey, here’s what you do and how you do it,’” said Cameron Bean, Georgia’s commission chair. He said people, organizations, and nonprofits needed to “have a commission that said, ‘Hey, how can we serve you?’”

So rather than investing a large portion of its funds into hiring staff or a planning committee, Bean said the Georgia commission decided to focus on giving out grants, helping raise sponsorship money, and promoting events like the African Film Festival Atlanta, the African American Heritage Symposium, and a musical about pioneer women that uses traditional quilt patterns as a storytelling tool. Jason Mancini, vice chair of the Connecticut commission, said over the last three years, his commission has been able to award over $800,000 to over 80 organizations in the state.  

“We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.”

Locals have responded positively to this grassroots approach. It doesn’t pull people out of their counties or municipalities to celebrate somewhere else; it allows them to celebrate where they are. As Ansley Herring Wegner, director of North Carolina’s state commission, put it, locals might “see the Washington Monument lit up like a birthday candle on their TV, but we’re going to be at their events. We’re at their parades. We’re at their soccer tournaments.” These grants can also help revitalize third spaces, bring new audiences to organizations that have been working in the state for years, and reinforce the idea that every place has played a part in this country’s history.

Lyon, the Illinois chair, remarked that this year’s celebration has taken a more inclusive approach, setting it apart from previous milestone anniversaries. She said that in 1776 and 1976, festivities left out many Americans, but in 2026, Illinois was committed to inviting as many voices as possible into the commemoration. 

In Rhode Island, Fogarty said she spoke to all 39 municipalities to tell them about the semiquincentennial. The Utah state commission held monthly meetings at which community members could share national and local updates, giving them a chance to amplify each other’s work, draw inspiration from one another, and collaborate with groups they hadn’t worked with before. 

These conversations resulted in events and programming across the states that spoke directly to local history and culture. In Connecticut, an exhibit of different artists’ depictions of the American flag opened at the Fairfield University Art Museum. Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution loaned the Continental Army’s North Carolina brigade sketch to the state. In Boulder, Utah, a local artist spent 250 hours carving handprints into a boulder to commemorate a yearlong commitment to volunteering.

Bean, of Georgia, noted that this variety in programming is a good way to meet people where they are. The hope is that there is something in which everyone can find value and enjoyment.

Some programming also resulted from more complex conversations with communities about reckoning with American history. Mancini has had a long history of working with tribal communities and communities of color, both in Connecticut and outside the state. So when it came time to plan as a commission, he said the group had some hard conversations with Black and Native community members who expressed that they didn’t feel they had been seen as a part of America’s story thus far. 

He recalled one commissioner who represented a Black community organization that had been vocal about the hundreds of Black men who served in the Colonial militia but hadn’t been recognized. “We want to tell those stories,” Mancini said. “We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see themselves today and they can see themselves tomorrow, and they can see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.” 

Cyndi Tolosa, the Connecticut commission’s project manager, listed other initiatives members had hoped to do to make things more inclusive, such as translating more materials into Spanish and doing more outreach in Spanish-speaking communities. She also noted organizations like Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, which was working to create dialogue about immigrants’ and refugees’ contributions to Connecticut and the US.

Although there have been positive responses to this approach, some, like tribal communities in Connecticut, still express apprehension. The founding documents the semiquincentennial celebrates refer to “merciless Indian savages,” and the political and legal framings for much of America’s history have leaned on erasure and extermination. Mancini noted that while some tribes wanted to be vocal, others wanted to keep the commission at arm’s length, a sentiment he understood. Lyon dealt with similar conversations in Illinois with many marginalized communities.

“I think complexity is where we need to be and get comfortable,” Lyon said. “And that’s what’s most interesting and important about this moment. So some people want to be involved, some people choose not to. The commission’s approach has tried to be inclusive and specific and historically accurate to the best of our ability, but also to connect what’s happening now.” 

A year ago, after participating in a panel about Indigenous perspectives on the 250th for a Virginia state commission event, Kitcki Carroll, executive director of United South and Eastern Tribes, met Virginia’s honorary chair, Carly Fiorina. As the event wrapped up, the two continued a conversation about Indigenous perspectives and the anniversary that would later evolve into an event in April that will be released as a documentary this week.

It included a panel surrounding tribal nations’ inherent sovereignty and the United States’ treaty obligations to them, a conversation about creating greater visibility for Native Americans, and a fireside chat with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Carroll noted that the day was meant to be an opportunity to pause and understand the costs associated with the establishment of this nation.

Having more discussions about the ugly side of America’s history serves to “make sure that for the next 250 years that we are not dealing with the same shortcomings and failures that we dealt with during the first 250 years,” Carroll said.

Despite all the work state commissions are doing, it hasn’t been a seamless process. Some commissions have had to navigate funding shortfalls. DOGE cut the funding of the humanities organization unofficially coordinating the celebration in Illinois. Since North Carolina hadn’t passed a budget since 2023, when it ran out after two years, its state commission had a “base budget” of $0. Both commissions have been fundraising and using their own funds and networks of resources to move forward with events.

“From my view, the opportunity is not just about celebrating the 250; to me, the drive, what keeps me going, what I’m inspired by is the idea that the legacy of this moment is the strengthened cultural infrastructure that is at the heart of the American experiment,” Illinois’ Lyon said.   

Many of the state commissions see this commemoration as a moment to honor the value of community. It’s a reminder of all this country has been through, a time to celebrate our differences, and an opportunity to rely on one another. North Carolina’s Wegner said that as a public historian, the semiquincentennial is about giving history to the public in ways they can understand. This happens through the networks they’ve created, the evergreen educational resources that people can reference, and the highlighting of libraries, museums, and nonprofits whose work doesn’t stop after the semiquincentennial. 

As the Fourth of July fast approaches, the state commissions’ efforts to give texture and complexity to American history are a reminder that America’s story belongs to all of us and doesn’t start or end with the founding—or a fireworks show. While thinking about our history, we can consider what, and maybe who, we hope will be displayed on the Washington Monument in the next 250 years. 

A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Why America 250 won’t save the GOP in the midterms…

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On a glorious morning walk about a week before America’s 250th birthday, I was listening to Jon Stewart’s podcast on that theme. I recommend it. One of the things he discusses with his historian guests, Yale’s David Blight and Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed, is the Declaration of Independence, which both historians called a “dangerous document” in terms of its focus on the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler.

Indeed, as my colleagues David Corn and Tim Murphy pointed out exactly one year ago, certain of the tyrannical acts my co-author, Thomas Jefferson, cited as grievances in that founding document are uncannily evocative of the usurpations of our current presidential administration.

You can agree with that or not. But whether you are MAGA or a democratic socialist, it’s worth reading our founding document in full. It’s not too terribly long, and—problematic language notwithstanding—it offers some perspective as to the frustrations of the men, flawed as they may have been, who laid down a case for independence and a foundation for the American experiment.

Ben Franklin famously responded, in 1787, to the question of whether we had a republic or a monarchy: “A republic, if you can keep it.” And with that, I turn over this post to Mr. Jefferson and his peers.

In Congress, July 4, 1776 — The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

John Hancock [et al]

Happy Birthday, America!

Last year, The Atlantic reported that President Donald Trump had queried advisers about putting the delicate original copy of the Declaration of Independence on display in the Oval Office. “Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original,” The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer wrote. “Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession.”

Trump eventually settled for displaying a copy, but the document has clearly been on the administration’s mind—perhaps predictably so, given the semiquincentennial celebrations Trump will soon preside over. It was announced in April, for instance, that a limited edition of passports this year would feature John Trumbull’s iconic painting of the draft declaration’s presentation to Congress alongside the text of the declaration—with Trump’s portrait overlaid on top of it, naturally.

Trump has spent much of his second term symbolically grasping for the kind of monarchical deference most Americans believe the declaration was written to reject. In February 2025, for instance, the White House posted on social media an image of Trump wearing a crown and captioned it “LONG LIVE THE KING.” But substantively, the depravity of this administration’s policies has mattered more and angered more. And in surveying them, more than a few commentators, some here at The New Republic, have noted that the transgressions of Trump’s presidency bear an uncanny resemblance to the very grievances against Britain listed in the declaration. Trump’s unilateral demolition of federal agencies and programs, the biographer Stacy Schiff and Mother Jones’s David Corn and Tim Murphy have written alike, certainly recall the declaration’s charge that King George III had “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The charge that George III had “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners” also works as a précis of the administration’s immigration policy. “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world,” “imposing Taxes on us without our consent,” “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”—as Schiff writes, “for many who read the litany today, the resonance is unmistakable.”

The text of the declaration is the arena we return to, time and again, to debate America’s purpose and American identity. In recent decades, its self-evident truths have been flattened into truisms—innocuous clichés, available to all, that commit our leaders to vanishingly little.

True as all this may be, one needn’t refer to the Declaration of Independence for reasons why Trump is unfit to govern. And the declaration did more than separate us from the impetuous king about whom it offered a handy list of complaints. Exactly how much more, of course, has been contested throughout our history—the text of the declaration, it might be said, is the arena we return to, time and again, to debate America’s purpose and American identity. In recent decades, its self-evident truths have been flattened into truisms—innocuous clichés, available to all, that commit our leaders to vanishingly little. Those who signed it 250 years ago understood the possibility that they had condemned themselves to death. Today, the Declaration of Independence is the safest, most sterile ground in American rhetoric. But it needn’t be. The declaration and its history are instructive because they offer us reasons not only to resist would-be kings, but to make our own claims against the systems that foist would-be kings upon us. The declaration, even today, can be read as an invitation to a task that presses upon us as or more urgently than the cause of independence did: to “alter or to abolish” the systems destroying our country and our world.

As the conflict that would eventually be called America’s Revolutionary War began—and as many Americans today would likely be surprised to learn—the overwhelming consensus even among America’s patriot leaders, a radical minority of the Colonial population, was that British parliamentary monarchy remained the greatest system of government ever devised, and that King George III bore little to no responsibility for the Colonial policies that had angered them. It was wayward parliamentarians, “wicked Ministers and evil Counsellors,” John Jay had written to mainland Britons on the First Continental Congress’s behalf in the fall of 1774, who had trampled on the colonists’ rights as British subjects, and the remedy was a return to the British constitutional order as the colonists understood it, not a break from it.

And in a pattern that seems to recur throughout American history, delegates were sent to the Continental Congress with explicit and futile instructions to heal the growing divide any way they could. On March 16, for instance, the Delaware Assembly told its delegates to take up whatever measures “as shall appear to them best calculated for the accommodation of the unhappy differences between Great Britain and the Colonies, on a constitutional foundation.” Just over a month later, those “unhappy differences” finally culminated in a chaotic day of skirmishes between British troops and already mobilized militiamen at Lexington and Concord, just outside British-occupied Boston.

Even as open conflict broke out, Colonial leaders still hoped for rapprochement, although attitudes were changing. By mid-January 1776, Congress and attentive colonists had learned of a royal address to Parliament where George had accused them of mounting a rebellion “for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire” and welcomed foreign assistance in the fight to suppress it. Parliament had also passed the Prohibitory Act, banning trade with the Colonies and declaring that Colonial vessels were to be treated as “the ships and effects of open enemies.” And in November 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, had issued a proclamation promising freedom to all slaves willing to fight for the British Army—a decision, in the opinion of South Carolina Continental Congress delegate Edward Rutledge, likelier to “work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies, than any other expedient, which could possibly have been thought of.”

These were the escalations that elevated independence to serious discussion for the first time after years of clear and consistent opposition from most patriot leaders, to the delight of radicals like John Adams, who mused that the Prohibitory Act, in particular, had already amounted to an “Act of Independency.”

It nevertheless became increasingly clear to many delegates and thinkers that Congress would have to formally clarify the Colonies’ new place in the world itself—partly so that the Colonies could engage potential allies abroad as a state rather than as a mere rebellion. And though Congress wouldn’t formally take up the independence question for months, the situation across the Colonies was shifting radically as royal governments were toppled and replaced. From the winter of 1775 through the spring of 1776—with varying levels of enthusiasm, willingly or not—the leaders of a Colonial rebellion became Founders. And even in the throes of political upheaval and an intensifying war, at least some of them took it upon themselves to consider, philosophically, what the fundamental purposes of the governments they were establishing would be. “All speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man,” John Adams wrote in “Thoughts on Government.” And thinkers “ancient and modern, Pagan and Christian,” including Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, and Muhammad, had established that true happiness consisted in the pursuit of virtue. “If there is a form of government then, whose principle and foundation is virtue,” Adams wrote, “will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?”

On May 10, Congress passed a resolution recommending that each of the Colonies “adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general.” Five days later, it narrowly approved a preface to the resolution assigning blame for the Colonies’ woes to “his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the lords and commons of Great Britain” for the first time. The resolution also declared that it was “irreconcileable to reason and good Conscience, for the people of these colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain.” One delegate, Adams wrote in his diary, “called it, to me, a Machine for the fabrication of Independence. I said, smiling, I thought it was independence itself: but We must have it with more formality yet.”

Soon, they would. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee offered a resolution declaring, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States,” and “That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.”

But while conditions were more favorable for independence, the resolution was stymied by a dilemma: Many delegates weren’t allowed by their instructions to back independence, a move that, ideally, would be supported as close to unanimously as Congress could manage. So the resolution was tabled as the Colonies, localities, militias, and other groups took it upon themselves to draft not only new state constitutions, but new instructions for the congressional delegates and other resolutions backing independence, some of which are collected in the historian Pauline Maier’s American Scripture. And some of these documents justified independence in terms that would have been familiar to readers of Enlightenment-era political philosophy, including the work of John Locke. “Whensoever therefore the legislative shall ... endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people,” he wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, “by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”

Meanwhile, a committee that Congress had put together in anticipation of new instructions approving independence was already at work on a declaration. Among the five men whom Congress appointed—Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, New York’s Robert R. Livingston, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—it was Jefferson who would take the lead on the draft, given his relatively light workload (Congress was a mess of overlapping committees that drew upon everyone’s time), and perhaps because a Virginian might have been seen as a more moderate and thus legitimate voice on the question of independence relative to a figure from the tempestuous North like the already-infamous Adams.

But as it happened, the document Jefferson and the committee produced was quite grand, beginning with a preamble that framed the question of independence in elemental human terms. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” it read, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Some of the declaration’s complaints, made “to a candid world,” are well-remembered, like taxation without representation and the quartering of troops. Others, like the charge that Britain had raised “the conditions of new appropriations of lands” out West and backed attacks from “the merciless Indian savages” against frontier settlers, have been decidedly less celebrated over time.

The account of Colonial history offered by Jefferson in his initial draft of the declaration is, it should be said, fascinatingly unhinged in places. In one line edited out of the final document, for instance, it is claimed that colonists had settled America “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain.” And in one section Congress deleted altogether—one of the most extraordinary and mystifying passages Jefferson ever wrote—blame for the slave trade is laid almost entirely at George III’s feet. The king had “waged cruel war against human nature itself,” he thundered, “violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death, in their transportation thither.” And attempts to abolish or restrict slavery, he alleged, had been suppressed out of a determination “to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold.”

Jefferson, like many of the men who would sign the declaration, was nonetheless a reliable customer at the market where men were bought and sold. It’s thought that he owned more than 610 slaves over the course of his lifetime, including Sally Hemings, whom he raped at the age of about 14 or 15, and the children she bore with him.

Jefferson’s character and the character of the country being written and legislated into existence would eventually be judged by the terms established in the declaration’s second paragraph. An earlier pass at the Lockean ideas it would contain had been made by fellow Virginian George Mason in his Virginia Declaration of Rights, which proclaimed, in already familiar and widely used language, “That all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” and also declared that the people “hath an indubitable, unalienable and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish” bad governments.

On the whole, Jefferson and Congress’s reworking of those words was an improvement:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The nuances and differences in language here—between Locke’s “life, liberties, and estates,” Mason’s lengthier construction, and the declaration’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for instance—have been a gift and subsidy to historians and political philosophers ever since. But whether one takes the “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of material prosperity or believes, like Jefferson’s co-draftsman Adams, that pursuing “happiness” is a matter of pursuing virtue, the declaration’s second paragraph is, plainly, about the protection and enhancement of human agency—and, as far as at least Jefferson was concerned, not merely the agency of white men either. As Harvard’s Danielle Allen has observed, the question of whether “all men are created equal” should actually be read as an assertion of universal human equality is functionally answered by Jefferson’s deleted clause about slavery, in which he unambiguously refers to slaves—“persons” whose “rights of life & liberty” had been violated, including not only nonwhite males, but women—as “MEN.”

Ultimately, those words would matter less to the American cause, in the near term anyway, than the declaration’s final proclamation—that the 13 Colonies were “Free and Independent States” with “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

On July 1, Congress returned to consideration of Lee’s resolution declaring independence, and a final vote was taken on the 2nd, with all states but New York—still waiting on instructions supporting independence that the state would approve a week later—voting in the affirmative. The American Colonies, Pennsylvania newspapers immediately reported, were now a country. “The Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.... It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

With the 2nd of July firmly and obviously established as the day Americans would commemorate their independence, all that remained was the issuing of an official document announcing and explaining to the world what Congress had already done. Delegates collectively and carefully edited the draft of the declaration presented to Congress. To Jefferson’s frustration, their edits were rather extensive in places—tempering or eliminating Jefferson’s most tendentious claims most of the time and making the text more rhetorically fluid and graceful. On July 4th, Congress finished its work, approved the document, and sent it off for printing and distribution.

In the following weeks, the declaration would be read up and down the new country—to legislators and troops in the field, in town squares and taverns—and independence itself would be celebrated often raucously.

The British, meanwhile, long convinced that American patriots had been bent on independence to begin with, read the document incredulously, taking particular exception to Jefferson’s listed grievances, which critics alleged had been wildly exaggerated or made up entirely, and to the hypocrisy of denouncing Dunmore’s proclamation in a document that made appeals to human equality.

Despite the declaration’s glaring contradictions and British protestations, it fulfilled Congress’s practical objectives. The French eventually lent their indispensable aid not to a mere Colonial insurrection but to an independent American state, drawing the British into war with France and allied Spain.

And Americans, naturally, began memorializing the anniversary of the nation’s arrival in the world well before the war ended. When Congress decided to commemorate the first independence day in 1777, it began its preparations belatedly. The 4th happened to be the earliest a celebration could be put together, with all the “pomp and parade” Adams had hoped Americans would take to on the 2nd. That change stuck. The declaration itself, however, would fade from public consciousness for some time—it was little read or remarked upon after the war’s end and directly referenced only rarely in state bills of rights and the discourses surrounding the Constitution.

Partisanship eventually changed things. Democratic-Republicans, hoping to lionize their founder, Jefferson, and denigrate the Anglophilia of their rival Federalists, found the declaration useful to both ends, particularly after the War of 1812. And by the 1820s, relative stability and security in the rapidly growing and expanding republic finally afforded Americans the luxury of nostalgia. As the country looked back to a founding generation whose improbable project seemed to be succeeding, the declaration became a national totem. Its text, Jefferson wrote in the last letter he sent before his—and Adams’s—deaths on July 4, 1826, had been “pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world … the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.”

Many of the chains that had yet to be broken, of course—at Jefferson’s own Monticello and elsewhere—bound the limbs of American slaves. And in the deepening political and social crises of what we now call the antebellum era, the tension in the declaration between its claim that “all men are created equal” and the reality of slavery was resolved by the defenders of slavery by rejecting the claim. “Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it,” John C. Calhoun said in an 1848 Senate speech.

Abolitionists, meanwhile, inevitably found inspiration in the declaration. Even in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”—a now much-beloved and republished jeremiad against patriotic pomp in the face of slavery—the Declaration of Independence was, to Frederick Douglass, “the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny,” and a document that embodied “the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice.” “It is scarcely necessary to search for new truths,” he said in another address, “till the old truths which have been uttered from the Declaration of Independence until now, shall have become recognized and reduced to practice.”

These rival perspectives on the declaration clashed most famously and significantly in the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, where Lincoln defended a reading of the declaration that clearly left no room for the subjugation of human beings, whatever their condition or station, while rejecting racial equality. “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he said in one exchange. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects–certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”

While Confederates and their sympathizers would also appeal to the declaration as the South broke from a supposedly tyrannical Union, it was Lincoln’s reading of the document that would endure. So, too, would his framing of America, in the words of the Gettysburg Address, as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and ever striving to fulfill that founding ideal—“the unfinished work,” he said of the fallen at Gettysburg, “which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

There’s little evidence that Lincoln considered expanding the rights of women an especially important part of completing that “unfinished work,” and most who shared his views didn’t. But feminists and suffragists also took up the language of the declaration for their cause—the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted by the attendees of the convention of Seneca Falls in 1848 asserted that “that all men and women are created equal” and detailed “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” And although it’s passed from memory even on the left, the declaration was also an especially important symbol for the early labor movement and its supporters. The Fourth of July, the historian Philip Foner wrote in We, the Other People, his regrettably named compilation of declaration-inspired documents, “was a day of parades, banquets, and festivals—a day for renewing the Spirit of ’76, for dramatizing the demands of the working class.”

In 1883, for instance, a weekly in San Francisco went as far as to advertise that a Fourth of July event would include the reading of “a celebrated COMMUNIST manifesto entitled ‘The Declaration of Independence’” which had been “written by a certain SOCIALIST named Thomas Jefferson.” “The gist of the Declaration is contained in the ‘self-evident’ clause,” the announcement read. “It is Justice, Reason, Truth. It is Socialism. For every man having the self-evident and inalienable right to the means of living has the right to receive the FULL product of his own labor … and his proportionate equal share of all the means of life created by past and dead generations and left by them here when they died, and now held by the thieves, robbers, nobles and tyrants of the world.”

Gradually, however, the left’s deepening ties to an international workers’ movement shaped by Marxism and class-based critiques of the American founding came to discourage appeals to the declaration and nationalist rhetoric more broadly, though there have been exceptions in the last half-century.

Meanwhile, condemnations of American racism—which the left’s invocations of the founding had rarely mentioned initially—from the Civil Rights Movement and the identity movements of the late twentieth century also influenced progressive perceptions of the document in different directions, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s rendering of the declaration as part of “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” to Black Power writings like the National Committee of Black Churchmen’s “Black Declaration of Independence,” which proclaimed that “the history of the treatment of Black People in the United States is a history having in direct Object the Establishment and Maintenance of Racist Tyranny over this People.”

These shifts in perceptions of the declaration at the margins of American politics coincided with the deepening of a mainstream consensus around the declaration’s meaning and import. “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order—the fixed star of freedom,” Gerald Ford said upon the bicentennial. “It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.” Though the Constitution had changed and would continue to change over time, he added, “the Declaration will be there, exactly as it was when the Continental Congress adopted it—after eliminating and changing some of Jefferson’s draft, much to his annoyance. Jefferson’s immortal words will remain, and they will be preserved in human hearts even if this original parchment should fall victim to time and fate.”

What do those words—“impervious to change”—mean to us now, 50 years on? In April 2025, after being shown Trump’s framed copy of the declaration in the Oval Office, ABC News’ Terry Moran asked the president what the document signified to him. “Well, it means exactly what it says—it’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.” These remarks were widely ridiculed; again, Trump’s conduct in office has given many Americans good reasons to revisit and resurface the grievances that inspired the declaration and the American Revolution in the first place. But Trump’s gloss on the declaration was, in truth, fairly similar to what we’ve come to hear from most politicians.

“The soul of America is defined by the sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God, that all are entitled to be treated with decency, dignity and respect, that all deserve justice and a shot at lives of prosperity and consequence,” Joe Biden said in a 2022 address at Independence Hall. “Democracy begins and will be preserved in we, the people’s habits of the heart—in our character … the willingness to see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.”

Barack Obama similarly contended during his presidency and campaigns that the declaration’s truths were no longer in question. “We, the people,” he said, “declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still.”

It might be reasonably protested that human equality is still not a settled question in America. What the declaration’s history tells us, however, is that the concept of human equality, as professed by abolitionists, slave owners, feminists, chauvinists, communists, and capitalists alike, itself settles very few of our differences. This is partially because the concept of human equality is inert without political commitments and acts of interpretation that put us into conflict with one another. As such, the remarkable thing about the declaration’s place in the American story isn’t the extent to which appeals to it have unified us. It’s the extent to which those appeals haven’t.

As Ford said, the declaration addresses all who read it with the same words and language. But its conflicting interpretations arise from the fact that the declaration is an invitation to participate in political philosophy—it asks its readers to consider the nature of human existence and the fundamental ends of politics. On that basis, it justifies a particular course of action in such a way that makes clear its readers—by dint of their own reason and understanding of its concepts, even in a different age and under different circumstances—may have cause to do the same.

The human right to revolution was among the self-evident truths the declaration professed and the one that made it effectual as a document. It is also the self-evident truth politicians today are likeliest to omit from their accounts of the declaration’s significance.

The human right to revolution was among the self-evident truths the declaration professed and the one that made it effectual as a document. It is also the self-evident truth politicians today are likeliest to omit from their accounts of the declaration’s significance—dropped in favor of appeals to human equality as a shared principle that might bring Americans together to solve our problems without tearing the system down. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America,” as Obama put it. “We are one people.” The promise of this civic nationalism, and of the now-prevailing reading of the declaration, was its potential to unify Americans of many ideologies and no ideology—the hope of bringing parties and peoples with profoundly divergent conceptions of America’s challenges and the solutions to them into alignment with a common understanding of America’s purpose. This was a capacious vision of American identity precisely because it was empty—one that offered a triumphalist account of where America has been and what America has accomplished in lieu of a concrete, contestable, and potentially divisive vision for where America should go. In the near-decade since Obama left the presidency, fascists have asserted themselves in that vacuum.

In 1933, by contrast, around 4,000 delegates of a “Continental Congress of Workers and Farmers” convened in Washington not only to demand relief amid an economic depression but to make the case for fundamental and transformative economic reforms. In their “A New Declaration of Independence,” they rededicated themselves to the cause of freeing mankind “from the crushing and needless bonds of poverty and insecurity” in an age of plenty. “The system is collapsing before our very eyes,” they wrote. “It is destroying itself with a destruction that threatens the historic gains of human rights and the achievements of human civilization.”

Whether the stewards of our systems accept it or not, the politics of systemic collapse have returned. Last fall, CNN found that 76 percent of Americans believe the U.S. political system is in need of either “a complete overhaul” or “major reforms”; a similar poll earlier in the year from Navigator Research found 74 percent support for the assertions that America’s political and economic systems need “major changes” or need “to be torn down completely.” This past spring, nearly 60 percent of respondents to an NBC News poll reported feeling that both the American political and economic systems were stacked against them.

Much of that discontent stems from the left’s continuing efforts to make certain facts about those systems—beyond the evils and disgraces of this particular presidency—known to the American people and “a candid world” today. In lieu of a democracy, we have political institutions that work most reliably for the rich—a constitutional order that does not guarantee the American people fair or equal representation, and where the right to vote and electoral outcomes are regularly challenged by a structurally advantaged minority. Instead of an economy that delivers the American worker just returns for their labor, the American people work within and under economic institutions that squeeze them more and more, only to deliver an ever-larger share of the economy’s gains to a smaller and smaller share of the already wealthy—including the man set to be the world’s first trillionaire—even as the costs of health care, housing, and education rise and roughly 36 million Americans languish in poverty. And rather than developing technologies that expand human capacities and enrich human life, out of a belief in the limitlessness of human potential, our most prominent technological innovators have made the American people, and all humanity, the subjects of a grand experiment without precedent in human history—the project of putting the human mind itself into obsolescence so that a privileged few, whose creations, developed in contravention of established laws, have already inundated our lives with noise and nonsense, may profit from the development of superior intelligences, while tens or hundreds of millions of ordinary people, they hope, are thrown out of their vocations.

True as all this may be, societies have never been remade by the restatement of grievances alone. Those who seek change on the scale we deserve and hope for are obliged to offer the American people a particular understanding of human life, what human beings are entitled to, and, divisive and contestable as they may be, strong ideas about what specific political, social, and economic arrangements are best suited to the preservation of human life, liberty, and happiness. The manifestations of the concept that “all men are created equal” that we’ve come to take for granted—the ones the stewards of our existing political institutions now celebrate—were built from such ideas and from conceptions of the American project those who established this country would have found incomprehensible. Fortunately, they were only our first generation of Founders. Many Founders since have reenacted the declaration and given its words new life. Now it is up to us whether it will survive as a mere artifact or as an example.

The Supreme Court’s ruling this week on birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara totaled approximately 194 pages. I wrote earlier this week about the various positions that each of the justices took. But it is worth dwelling for an extra moment on the unusual position taken by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in just 10 strange pages.

Unlike the rest of his colleagues, Kavanaugh took the position that Trump’s executive order was constitutionally permissible but statutorily illegal. In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not block Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship, but an act of Congress that used identical language did.

At a very superficial level, this might sound sensible and moderate by implicitly inviting Congress to address the situation. Kavanaugh certainly positions the opinion—and himself—as such. On closer inspection, it might be the most dangerous and extreme view of U.S. citizenship to be articulated by the justices this week.

To understand Kavanaugh’s position, a brief sketch of the other justices’ views is necessary. Last January, Trump issued an executive order that instructed federal agencies to not recognize the U.S. citizenship of children whose parents were undocumented immigrants or living in the United States on temporary visas. A group of plaintiffs sued, arguing that this violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

That clause reads as follows: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” In the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the son of two Chinese immigrants in San Francisco had acquired U.S. citizenship at birth solely by virtue of being born on American soil. The “subject to the jurisdiction” exception was narrowed to a handful of situations that rarely apply today.

In Tuesday’s ruling in Barbara, the justices essentially took four separate positions. Five of them took what can be described as the consensus view. Americans had inherited the rule of birthright citizenship from the English common law, Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his majority opinion. Dred Scott v. Sandford’s holding that people of African descent were ineligible for U.S. citizenship was a violation of that rule, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause restored and entrenched the original understanding.

Two of Roberts’s fellow conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, took a different view. Thomas affirmed Wong Kim Ark as correct but argued a person’s domicile status—or, more specifically, that of their parents—also determined whether that person had U.S. citizenship at birth. Since Trump’s executive order was lawful in at least some circumstances, like birth tourism, the two justices rejected the facial challenge to its constitutionality.

At the same time, both justices signaled that even if their domicile-focused view had prevailed, it would not grant total victory to the Trump administration. Thomas and Gorsuch concluded that children of temporary visa holders would not be eligible, and their respective dissents largely focused on that aspect of the order. But both justices wrote that they would not necessarily reach the same conclusion for children of undocumented immigrants, especially if they had lived long-term in the U.S.

The third position was adopted solely by Justice Samuel Alito, who argued that the clause “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” He argued that Wong Kim Ark should be read much more narrowly by the court since, in his view, it showed “little respect for precedent.” Instead, Alito leaned heavily on phrasing in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which only extended U.S. citizenship to those “not subject to any foreign power,” a narrower phrasing than the clause that was ratified three years later.

Even then, Alito ultimately concluded that Wong Kim Ark was correctly decided. The Chinese Exclusion Acts had made it impossible for Chinese immigrants to be naturalized, so Wong’s parents faced a different threshold under the clause. “By establishing domicile, they had done everything within their power to express their desire and intent to become Americans,” Alito explained.

“Wong Kim Ark is therefore best understood as holding that people who are lawfully present here, establish the United States as their intended permanent home, and do everything within their power to become United States citizens can be seen as no longer subject to any foreign power,” Alito argued.

That brings us, at last, to Kavanaugh. He voted with the majority to strike down the order on different grounds from those of Roberts and the other four justices in the majority. Kavanaugh said that he found the constitutional issue to be “far more complicated” than the statutory one. In particular, he nodded to the “detailed account of history and precedent” laid out by Roberts, as well as the “weighty and thoughtful dissents” by the other three conservatives.

This indulgent phrasing gave the impression of a justice trying to strike a narrower, more moderate position. “The constitutional issue is not straightforward, much as we might want it to be,” he wrote. “That is another reason why, in my respectful view, the court should have decided the case on the narrow and straightforward statutory ground.”

What does that ground look like? Kavanaugh noted that the Nationality Act of 1940 had incorporated the citizenship clause’s exact text into federal immigration law. He concluded that the president’s executive order was illegal as a matter of statutory interpretation. Courts sometimes rely on a principle known as “constitutional avoidance,” where judges avoid answering constitutional questions if they can decide a case on other grounds.

If avoidance was Kavanaugh’s intent, he failed miserably. It is not possible to disentangle the statutory text from the constitutional text this time. The citizenship clause and the Nationality Act both use identical phrasing, including the “subject to the jurisdiction” exception. All sides in this litigation, including the Trump Justice Department, also stipulated to the justices that there is no daylight between the two versions.

To explain why they mean different things, one must explain what they actually mean. Kavanaugh argued that they could be distinguished because Congress passed the Nationality Act roughly 42 years after Wong Kim Ark. He suggested that what Congress had actually done was incorporate Wong Kim Ark’s interpretation of the citizenship clause into federal immigration law, including the four recognized exceptions that flow from “subject to the jurisdiction.”

This meant, in Kavanaugh’s eyes, that Congress could lawfully do what the president could not. “If Congress amends [the Nationality Act] or otherwise enacts a statute creating new exceptions along the lines of the Executive Order for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country, such a statute, as I see it, would pass constitutional muster,” he wrote.

This view is substantially more extreme than those of Roberts, Thomas, or Gorsuch. In a footnote, he assured readers that he agreed with Alito’s position that the “result in Wong Kim Ark was correct given the facts and circumstances in that case.” Even so, he claimed that the Wong Kim Ark exceptions were not a “closed set,” and additional ones could be discerned even if undreamt by the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters.

“Considering the four exceptions as a permanently frozen or closed set as of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868—such that there can be no subsequent exceptions recognized based on new developments after 1868—is inconsistent with the Court’s longstanding approach to constitutional interpretation in a variety of areas,” Kavanaugh claimed.

If this sounds a little un-originalist, that’s because it is. Originalists tend to hold that the Constitution’s meaning is fixed, in contrast to the theories of living constitutionalism that originalism was created to refute. That fixed meaning is typically discerned by the text’s original public meaning when it was ratified or amended. Kavanaugh would take a different approach by adapting the citizenship clause to new situations rather than applying it as written.

To be fair to Kavanaugh, he is hardly the first or only originalist to stray from the faith in this case. Solicitor General D. John Sauer also claimed at oral arguments in Barbara that the president was responding to situations that the clause’s drafters did not anticipate. Roberts gave an originalist quip in response: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Kavanaugh, perhaps anticipating this critique, argued that all of this is just normal constitutional interpretation. (Which, again, he claimed to not be doing at the outset.) “The Constitution is an enduring document, and its principles were designed to, and do, apply to modern conditions and developments,” he assured readers, before adding that it must be “faithfully applied” to “modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.”

“Therefore,” Kavanaugh concluded, “under basic tenets of constitutional interpretation, other exceptions can be recognized when the new exceptions (i) are based on subsequent developments or circumstances that are new, i.e., largely unknown or unanticipated by the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, and (ii) are relevantly similar to the four previously recognized Wong Kim Ark exceptions.”

One could easily apply this reasoning to uphold an assault-weapons ban, for example, by arguing that the Second Amendment’s drafters could not anticipate such an efficient killing machine in the age of muskets and cannons. If past exceptions could be found, so could new ones, as well. It will be interesting to see if Kavanaugh takes this approach next term when the court hears cases on exactly that subject.

All the same, this is not a particularly laudable constitutional interpretation. By striking down Trump’s executive order on the grounds that Congress said otherwise, he essentially transforms the citizenship clause into an Article 1 legislative power. If Congress can grant or deny exemptions to the clause, then it does not really protect a constitutional right or rule of citizenship at all. Then again, most of Kavanaugh’s opinion dwells on judicial interpretation of these exemptions, so maybe it would all be up to the Supreme Court to ultimately decide.

Kavanaugh also fundamentally misunderstood why the citizenship clause exists. Both the Roberts majority and the other three conservative dissenters agree that its purpose was to constitutionalize a rule for American citizenship. They only part ways with one another on the origins, scope, and basis of the rule that the citizenship clause defines.

All three positions also recognized that U.S. citizenship carries special significance. Roberts described it as the “right to have rights.” Thomas and Gorsuch complained that the majority’s sweeping ruling “devalue[s]” American citizenship, while Alito said that citizenship was “precious.” They also seem to implicitly understand that the clause sought to place citizenship itself beyond ordinary political debate by emphasizing the case’s high stakes.

Kavanaugh’s position, by contrast, would greatly diminish the security and integrity of citizenship for everyone. Americans’ rights to participate in their political community would be fungible, partible, and malleable depending on what Congress (and, in all likelihood, the courts) decide. Even Kavanaugh himself may not agree with the logical outcome of his reasoning, since he still presumes that birthright citizenship is the norm, even as he rejects Wong Kim Ark.

I also cannot stress enough again how strange it is, almost to the point of concern, that Kavanaugh thinks that all of this isn’t constitutional interpretation. Indeed, his opinion is at war with itself: In the concluding paragraph, he states outright that Trump’s executive order “does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment” without elaboration, as if he simply started writing the opinion and stumbled upon the conclusion along the way.

It is hard to avoid the impression that Kavanaugh wanted to join Alito’s opinion but could not bring himself to do it because of public perception. In his desire to present himself as a middle-of-the-road guy on this issue, Kavanaugh adopted a nonsensical view of the entire case and fell backward into extreme propositions that go beyond anything laid out by his colleagues. Even Alito, for example, does not propose that Congress can lay out “exceptions” to the citizenship clause.

“Nothing in this opinion is intended to suggest how birthright citizenship should be addressed as a policy matter,” Kavanaugh affirmed in a final footnote. This is likely meant to assure readers that his concurring opinion was the product of carefully considered legal reasoning. In this case, it would be more comforting if the opposite were true.

In January 2025, I received a response to a Freedom of Information Act request I’d sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December—of 2020, four years earlier. The law plainly states that federal agencies have 20 business days to provide a substantive response to all FOIA requests. But ICE didn’t care.

“Before we begin the time-consuming review process,” the email stated, using the same boilerplate language I’d been given by the agency in response to other, unrelated FOIA requests, “we want to ensure that you are still interested in continuing the processing of this request.”

This Saturday is not just the 250th anniversary of the United States. It’s also the sixtieth anniversary of FOIA, one of the most critical tools for government transparency in the U.S., which has been used to uncover severe government wrongdoing. Alas, the law—or rather, the government’s adherence to it—is broken.

Over the past 15 years, in my work at the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, I’ve filed and helped to litigate dozens of FOIA requests, primarily related to federal law enforcement programs run by our bureaucracy of acronyms—ICE, FBI, DHS, DOD, and many more. It has become increasingly apparent that most federal agencies don’t take these inquiries seriously unless, and until, we take them to court. This is not how it’s supposed to work.

While the Trump administration’s mass purging of federal employees and offices has created new roadblocks to filing records requests, government resistance to the law is not new. In fact, President Lyndon B. Johnson somewhat reluctantly signed the FOIA into law on July 4, 1966, hedging on how much access the public might have, especially related to “individual privacy” and “national security.” In the decades since, both Republican and Democratic administrations have eroded the ability of ordinary people to get useful and timely information via the act.

By “useful information,” I am not talking about whether alien life has escaped from Area 51 or what took place on the grassy knoll. As the manager of CCR’s Open Records Project, every month I file FOIA requests or train advocates, lawyers, and journalists on how to draft their own. The requests we file support people who desperately need individual immigration files for detained family members, grassroots organizations looking to shed light on surveillance technology Border Patrol uses, or advocates deeply concerned with how the administration’s policies threaten transgender people across the country. But law enforcement agencies have found numerous ways to delay and ultimately force requesters to give up out of sheer frustration.

For instance, an agency might simply never respond, respond years later, send a boilerplate response accusing the requester of submitting an “overly broad” request, or, if the agency actually produces documents, redact those records so severely that they are useless. A person is then typically left with only one choice—pursue legal action—but lawyers often require thousands of dollars in fees. Even if you do get into court, agencies can still find ways to delay providing records for months if not years, often making the records irrelevant by the time they are received. And federal judges typically defer to government officials, creating an increasingly immense docket of case law supporting government secrecy rather than openness the law is supposed to provide.

A few examples from FOIA requests I’ve filed show the lengths to which agencies will go to hide the most basic information. Simple data points like the number of medical staff employed at an immigration detention center have been redacted from public view due to potential “hostage taking.” A former director of ICE’s Chicago office “lost” archives of emails when he copied them onto a corrupt external hard drive, but he should have responded to the FOIA request years before then.

As it was Congress that forced the executive branch to sign FOIA into law and later expand it, Congress has the power to do so again. But our representatives need to look beyond vague reforms such as integrating AI technology or pumping more funding into the already bloated budgets of the Homeland Security or Defense departments. I asked several colleagues with over a decade of experience writing and litigating FOIA requests to imagine more specific and concrete ways of making FOIA an effective tool for transparency.

Maryland attorney Amber Qureshi suggested that if an agency fails to comply with FOIA deadlines, courts should forbid the agency from withholding certain types of discretionary information, which it might otherwise do. “Barring an agency from applying discretionary exemptions would further FOIA’s purpose of full agency disclosure and speed up processing times,” she told me.

Andrew Free, a lawyer and investigative journalist based in Georgia, also suggested accountability measures. “Congress should authorize per-day, per-record penalties for agencies that fail to substantively respond to FOIA requests.” He noted that Washington state and New Mexico already employ similar rules in their states’ open records laws.

The incredible deference many federal judges afford law enforcement officials to hide almost any material from public view also remains a major problem. For instance, so-called “Glomar” responses, where an agency refuses to acknowledge whether it even has responsive material, should be outlawed. Congress members could create a new agency to oversee and audit FOIA, similar to the Committee for Open Government in New York, which regularly promulgates advisory opinions on the law.

Recently, a government attorney alleged that a FOIA request of ours was so large it would “shut down the government.” But none of us who continue to pursue these requests should be intimidated by such hyperbole. Though broken, the FOIA still remains a useful tool, and we need its help in combating the culture of secrecy that permeates our political class while we demand that Congress strengthen the law.

Sixty years ago, despite his reservations about FOIA, President Johnson said, “I signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society in which the people’s right to know is cherished and guarded.” As I’ve seen firsthand, the people’s right to know is no longer cherished by leaders in the executive branch, and it’s not being guarded by those on Capitol Hill. As the Trump administration goes to lengths to conceal its crimes and corruption, there’s never been a more critical time for the politicians who still believe in the principle of FOIA to not only defend it, but expand it.

As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, wealth inequality has ballooned to a historic high. Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire, and a new class of billionaires is soon to be minted as AI companies prepare to go public. And while some leaders want you to believe this type of extreme wealth embodies the enduring promise of the American dream, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, the Founders were deeply worried that concentrations of wealth would corrode self-governance and hollow out the republic from within. In their study of history, they saw how wealth inequality fueled political division, class conflict, and social unrest, eroding governance and ultimately contributing to failed states like the Roman Empire.

James Madison’s Federalist, Number 10 explicitly links political instability to economic disparity, citing the inherent tension between property owners and non–property owners. Madison saw a role for government to address economic inequality in his 1792 essay Parties, noting that it should do so “by political equality of rights ... and by withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.” Madison warned that if the state favors financial speculation, it creates an artificial aristocracy that distorts public policy and subverts democratic representation.

Thomas Jefferson was even more full-throated in his warnings about concentrated economic power. Jefferson worried powerful employers could coerce workers’ votes, thus limiting their democratic power. In an 1816 letter, Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall take warning from the example [of England] and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Jefferson believed a concentrated financial class would inevitably capture government institutions, transforming a republic of equals into a playground for the wealthy. Because of this, he championed structural limits to inequality, for instance by advocating for the abolition of laws that kept massive estates intact across generations to ensure wealth was continually broken up and redistributed through inheritance. He even authored two laws as a Virginia state legislator banning feudal inheritance practices that were in place across Europe.

Today, the Founding Fathers’ worst fears are playing out in front of our eyes.

Alongside Musk, the newly minted trillionaire, 300,000 U.S. households—those worth $50 million or more, in the top 0.2 percent—control $40 trillion, an amount comparable to the net worth of the 256 million Americans who make up the bottom 80 percent. And just as the Founders warned, this concentrated wealth is actively eroding our democracy and economy. Under our current tax code, wealth begets more wealth, and that wealth is in turn wielded to amass extraordinary power.

The American dream of working hard to get ahead looks very different for billionaires. Sure, there is an element of hard work, but it’s the system created by and for the ultrawealthy that underpins this financial success. Take Musk as an example. His companies have benefited from at least $38 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks, with billions more guaranteed in the years ahead.

Our tax dollars built the foundation for Musk’s accomplishments, and now he owns the penthouse. And here’s the kicker: After sucking up all those public dollars, Musk can exploit our tax code to choose whether he gives anything back at all to the society that trained the scientists and built the infrastructure that enabled him to accumulate such a fortune.

That’s because under our current system, billionaires like Musk are able to pay very little—and sometimes nothing at all—in federal income taxes, while ordinary workers pay tax on every paycheck. Our current tax system largely shields wealth held in assets like stock from taxation, transferring the cost of running our society onto you and me while empowering Musk to accumulate the kind of wealth and political power that corrupts democracy itself.

That type of extreme wealth is then wielded to reshape markets and ensure policy outcomes that will protect and expand this financial and political dominance. Extreme wealth concentration has eroded the “one person, one vote” principle underpinning American democracy. In 2024, for example, Elon Musk personally financed the Trump campaign’s ground operations and gave individual Trump voters $1 million per day, a legally questionable scheme that some experts argued amounted to paying for votes.

That same year, 150 billionaires collectively spent a record-breaking $2 billion on federal races, and many have been rewarded with positions of real power in the government. Trump empowered Musk to gut essential workers and services through DOGE while securing new federal contracts and ending regulatory actions that threatened $2.3 billion in potential liabilities for his companies. Trump selected Cabinet members from the top 0.0001 percent of America, and his signature tax law will reward the richest 1 percent of Americans with $121 billion in net tax cuts in 2026 alone. Is it a surprise then, that in the first 16 months since Trump was reelected, the collective fortune of America’s 974 billionaires grew by $1.96 trillion, or 30.6 percent?

Today’s extreme wealth concentration is precisely the oligarchic threat the Founders envisioned. The American dream cannot survive when unlimited wealth for a few destroys opportunities for the rest of us.

A crisis of this scale calls on us to reflect the courage that the Founders displayed in declaring independence from the entrenched power of the British Empire. We must stop pretending that merely calling for the ultrawealthy to pay their “fair share” in order to meet certain revenue targets is sufficient within a tax system that is itself so unfair and unjust.

Instead, we must declare our own independence from the influence of the oligarchy by pursuing a set of reforms that are targeted toward reducing their power and building up our own. That means using tax policy as a way to reduce the wealth of the ultrawealthy by aggressively taxing their wealth, incomes, and estates. Doing so is essential for constructing a new system that generates the revenue we need for rebuilding the working class with programs that benefit working families, such as universal childcare, affordable housing, and climate-resilient infrastructure. We must also deploy policy tools to break up the dangerous concentrations of power threatening our economic growth, democracy, and climate.

Reining in billionaire control is incredibly popular: 77 percent of voters support raising taxes on the ultrawealthy, including 65 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of independents. Three in five (62 percent) prefer a candidate who supports raising taxes on billionaires, versus just 12 percent who prefer one who opposes it—a 50-point gap. Among Democratic primary voters, that gap widens to 79 points (83–4). This is because voters are living the consequences the Founders warned of—they cannot afford housing, health care, childcare, or other basic needs. They yearn for the upward mobility of previous generations. The American dream isn’t just fading—it is being erased by billionaires who are actively enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. They wield their extreme wealth as weapons, bending our democracy to their own agenda like kings—and as the Founders foretold.

Using the tax code to break up this concentrated wealth and power isn’t radical, it’s actually our founding-era orthodoxy. It’s time for our leaders to tax greed.

If you want to understand U.S. politics, take the train.

The Trump administration’s federal budget request for the next fiscal year includes steep cuts to passenger rail. According to an analysis by the High Speed Rail Alliance, a pro-rail advocacy group, the budget proposal would slash Federal Railroad Administration funding by 81 percent. This includes a 69 percent funding cut to Amtrak.

But rural Republicans have historically relied on passenger rail. They also elected the same administration now cutting this service that they rely on. At this point, this paradox is nothing new: From cutting healthcare subsidies to immigration dragnets to costly and devastating wars, President Donald Trump’s assault on human rights and domestic programs has ensnared the very people whose support he has relied on.

So, how is this playing out with voters in real time, particularly ahead of the midterm elections?

I took the train to find out.

From Newark to D.C. to Pittsburgh, I met people across political lines. People who love Trump, and people who want to invoke the 25th Amendment. People who hope cuts to trains and other services will change conservative hearts and minds, and people who can imagine passenger rail funding going to things they view as more important.

Across these differences, one common theme emerged: Daily life in the U.S. right now costs way too much. To me, it underlined the way power has worked before Trump and will work after. If people who have been deprived of wealth and influence unite against the power players leveraging those things against us, then what could we achieve?

Well, we don’t have to play the will-he-or-won’t-he game about President Donald Trump’s attendance at the World Cup round of 16 in Seattle, where the United States will face off against Belgium. It turns out that both Trump and Vice President JD Vance are too chickenshit to travel to the terrifying no-go zone of Seattle to watch the game. It’s kind of weird that the White House isn’…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump slump continues with dismal jobs report Few jobs, high prices: the GOP’s midterms message. The right is still pissed about that birthright citizenship decision Apparently, obeying the Constitution is a “betrayal.” Fox News’ lies exposed by weak…

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