The New Republic

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.

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.

The sky is actually falling at the Great American State Fair.

The stage for Freedom 250’s July Fourth celebration fell apart during rehearsals Thursday, with a large component of the structure’s ceiling falling roughly two stories down and landing behind a group of dancers and musicians. Miraculously, no one appeared injured.

The stage is falling apart at the rehearsal for Freedom 250's July 4th celebration. pic.twitter.com/bPbg94hp6X

— Aaron Parnas (@AaronParnas) July 2, 2026

Online commenters were quick to flame the stage’s apparently dangerous construction.

“That’s what happens when you don’t consider merit in hiring,” wrote one X user.

“This is why you never let Trump select the subcontractor based on percentage of kickback,” commented another.

Even a lawmaker joined in on the roast.

“Feeling more and more like the Hunger Games,” wrote Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie.

Practically every component of Trump’s wildly expensive plan to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary has turned out to be a dud. The $15 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool failed to rid the iconic monument of algae; a multi-week lineup of music acts had to be cancelled after practically every artist pulled themselves from the program; and a fleet of buses carrying a contemporary retelling of American history have failed to make a splash in their journey across the country.

The Great American State Fair was supposed to be the centerpiece of the celebration, yet even it is more of a potemkin village than a sincere homage. The booths, which offer space for each state to represent its heritage and culture (pet a replica of a bison at the North Dakota pavilion, or walk away with a bag of chips from Maine), are ideologically pitted against the seismic presence of the federal government and Trump’s authoritarian expansion (banners featuring Trump’s grim face flank the event, while a small-scale replica of his proposed “Triumphal Arc” sits center stage). As The Atlantic’s Kelsey Ables put it, “the president is bringing down the mood.”

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Thursday that a grand jury had indicted former Olympic canoeist David Hearn on charges of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

The indictment seems rather flawed, as Hearn, 67, maintains that all he did was dip his hand into the pool and touch a piece of peeling paint.

“I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told The Washington Post the day after his arrest last month. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

At a press conference Thursday, a reporter asked Pirro why Hearn was being charged with a felony over something so small, and she struggled to explain.

Pirro: He caused damage and that damage was over $1000.

Reporter: How do you prove that?

Pirro: With an expert.

Reporter: With his bare hands?

Pirro: We believe it's his bare hands, both hands.

Reporter: Do you believe it was damaged before?

Pirro: He damaged it!… pic.twitter.com/LmtTZueKZU

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 2, 2026

“There was an effort, a violent effort, to rip up the sealant from the pool, and irrespective of whether or not we think that there is some situation that preceded it, we can state, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that he caused damage, and that damage is worth over a thousand dollars,” Pirro said.

When asked how she could prove that, Pirro said, “With an expert,” and urged the reporter who asked the question to come to the trial. The reporter incredulously asked if Hearn used his bare hands, to which Pirro affirmed yes, both hands. The reporter then asked if the pool wasn’t already damaged before.

“Oh, he damaged it. He damaged the pool. He damaged this pool,” Pirro repeated. When the reporter brought up videos showing that the pool’s paint was already peeling, Pirro said, “Well, good. I’m glad you got that evidence. Come on in the grand jury and you can testify.”

It all seems nuts, as the poor state of the pool, from algae growth to peeling paint, had been documented for quite some time before Hearn visited it. The paint had been peeling because hydrogen peroxide was dumped into the pool in a vain effort to kill algae growth. Hearn is clearly being made a scapegoat to satisfy President Donald Trump, who is blaming nonexistent vandals rather than admit he messed up the pool.

A heat wave in Washington, D.C., is making attendance at President Trump’s July 4 festivities even worse.

U.S. Capitol Police have already restricted Thursday night’s rehearsal for “A Capitol Fourth Concert” to essential personnel, posting on X that they came to the decision after consulting with the Capitol’s Office of the Attending Physician.

“For safety reasons, the public will not be able to attend tonight’s rehearsal concert,” the post read. “Everyone is sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. The National Weather Service is forecasting an extreme heat watch with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.”

The post added that an update will come Friday by 10 a.m. on the status of the full concert, which is scheduled to take place from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday night.

Similar warnings are hitting the Great American State Fair; organizers have already had to cancel a rodeo demonstration scheduled for Thursday night. Attendance at the fair overall has been depressed, and some visitors are complaining about the weather. U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer had an audience of maybe 25 people when he spoke about tariffs on the main stage Thursday afternoon.

Many booths at the fair don’t have air conditioning, leading at least one visitor to overheat. She told a reporter she finally found relief at a baptism tent, where she took a dip to cool down.

Great American State Fair goer tells our @JenDelgadoFOX many of the booths she went to today didn't have air conditioning, she overheated, said she saw stars and needed medical attention -- found the baptism tent and took a dip to cool down pic.twitter.com/Smufj0GN8g

— Homa Bash (@HomaBashNews) July 2, 2026

Even without the heat, the fair is coming across as tacky, with empty booths and a lack of energy. The food is expensive, reviews are abysmal, and people aren’t coming, enraging the president. When it hasn’t been hot, it’s been raining. America’s 250th anniversary was already going poorly thanks to Trump, and now the weather may cement the once-in-a-lifetime event’s status as a failure.

Two major polls of the Maine Senate race dropped this week, and they told the same story: The race is incredibly close, and Democrat Graham Platner has real work to do among the working class. He’s running an aggressively left-populist, antiestablishment campaign targeting the billionaire class—and boasts lots of blue-collar appeal—but GOP Senator Susan Collins is way ahead among those voters. Why?

The surveys—one from The New York Times and the other from Fox News—offer good and bad news for Platner. But they’re worrying some Democrats because a loss here deeply complicates the path to Senate control. Without Maine—which voted against Donald Trump by seven points in 2024—Democrats probably must win four out of five seats in Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and North Carolina. Trump won all five states—most by lopsided margins—and now Democrats lead in the last but are tied or a bit behind in the others.

The Times survey has Platner up two among likely voters overall, 49–47, and the Fox poll has Collins up three, 50–47. It’s a dead heat—it’s winnable, but he should probably be leading by more given the state’s Democratic lean, which is being outweighed by the brutal press he’s sustained over his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence against women.

But note this: In the Times poll, Platner trails among voters without a college degree, a proxy for the working class, by 37–58. In the Fox poll, that’s 41–56. What’s driving this? One possibility: The Times poll has working-class voters saying Platner has “good character” by 37–57 and “the right kind of moral values” by 36–57.

On the plus side, Platner leads in the Times survey among women by 52–44, among young people by 59–32, and among college-educated voters by 66–32. But Platner’s candidacy is all about his blue-collar aura: He’s a tattooed oyster farmer who speaks openly—in that deep, gravelly voice—about his trauma from serving in combat. Though his backstory is somewhat more privileged (his father is an Ivy League graduate and lawyer), he speaks in a left-populist idiom that seeks to connect with working people’s struggles. So his numbers among them are concerning.

Here’s the upshot: This race is awfully close, and importantly, Platner is running behind the Democratic Party as a whole in Maine. Voters there want a Democratic Senate by 54–42, so his 49 percent support lags that. By contrast, in Times polling, all the Democrats in other red states—Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, North Carolina—are outrunning their party.

I talked about all this with Rebecca Katz, a top Platner adviser. Asked about his numbers with working-class voters, Katz noted that the race has been heavily nationalized, leading them to initially fall into their familiar pattern of opposition to Democrats. Many of these voters, Katz said, have been introduced to Platner via a massive barrage of negative ads and some very bad news cycles.

Katz said the political landscape in Maine—a largely rural state where retail campaigning will really matter—provides Platner with a unique opportunity to grow among that demographic. She noted that he’s already done over 60 town halls in rural areas, and pointed to an intriguing dynamic: People in these areas are coming to listen.

“They are curious about him,” Katz told me, noting that Graham is already somewhat outperforming losing 2020 Senate candidate Sara Gideon among working people.

If one criticism of Democrats is that they don’t show up and talk to rural and working- class voters, well, Platner is certainly doing that. The theory seems to be that despite his bad stories, Platner is compelling enough to open the door to getting an audience with these constituencies, and then to reach them in a fresh way.

“Graham is a different kind of candidate,” Katz said. “He grew up in a rural community. He’s one of the only candidates running who’s actually worked with his hands. He will continue to connect with more rural and conservative voters.”

Asked to respond to the oft-heard argument that seeking working-class voters with Platner’s type of leftist politics is a chimera, Katz insisted this doesn’t jibe with what they’re seeing at town halls in working-class and rural areas.

“Mainers are focused on their cost of living, health care, corruption, and whether anyone in Washington is actually fighting for working people,” said Katz, a founding partner of Fight Agency, the firm that does Platner’s media and strategy, along with rising progressive strategist Morris Katz (no relation), who helped recruit Platner.

In this understanding, Platner’s appeal can get these voters to at least listen to his agenda of breaking billionaire control over elections, Medicare for All, a more progressive tax system for small businesses and corporations alike, a billionaire minimum tax, and protecting and expanding social welfare programs. That agenda is somewhat to the left of many mainstream Democrats. But it’s aimed squarely at what’s really driving voter concerns, Katz notes, which matters more than the details, and Platner is the one to make that case.

“There are people coming who are not into politics but are intrigued by Graham,” Katz said of the town halls. “He’s an outsider.”

Asked to respond to Platner’s struggles with working people, Adam Green, the head of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee—an early booster of Platner’s candidacy—acknowledged that he has more work to do among them. But he cast this as an opportunity. “Most working-class people who are low-propensity voters don’t know him yet,” Green said. “But once they do, he’s an obvious fit for them.”

Katz, for her part, said other big dynamics here deserve attention: This is likely to be a change election amid deep anger at establishment politicians. The Times poll finds 61 percent of Maine voters say the country is on the wrong track, 60 percent disapprove of Trump, large percentages say Collins is too old to serve, and Democrats hold a nearly 20-point enthusiasm edge.

“The big question of this race is whether or not voters are willing to vote for change,” Katz said.

The political graveyards are full of men—mostly men—who boasted of the right kind of populist and biographical appeal to reverse Democratic losses among working people. Indeed, different factions in the party are already battling over the meaning of Platner’s candidacy, with progressives and socialists insisting it will show their agenda to be broadly popular and moderates insisting that chasing working-class voters with that sort of leftism is a fool’s errand.

But, unsatsfyingly, the outcome is unlikely to turn on Platner’s precise policy prescriptions or his exact ideological leanings. It will more likely be decided on whether Collins’s special hold on the Maine electorate is spent, particularly after her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the overturning of Roe v. Wade; whether Trump’s unpopularity will be enough to nudge voters to risk a different kind of challenger; whether Platner’s able to reach just enough persuadable voters to allay concerns about his past conduct; and a thousand other intangibles involving turnout and last-minute voter decisions.

Ultimately, it may all turn on good old-fashioned shoe-leather politicking. And whatever you think of Platner, one thing that can’t be denied is this: He’s certainly willing to work hard enough to win.

Yet another Republican lawmaker is missing in action.

Florida Representative Neal Dunn’s office told Punchbowl News Thursday that he won’t be voting unless Republican leadership says they need him.

Donald Trump put the 73-year-old lawmaker on blast in March, prematurely revealing at a White House event that Dunn was suffering from a terminal heart problem and would be “dead by June.”

“Congressman Neal Dunn of Florida had had some real health challenges, and it was very serious, and had had a pretty grim diagnosis,” House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted at the event at Trump’s behest. “I mentioned it to the president. I said, ‘Congressman Dunn is a real champion and a patriot because he’s still coming to work, and if others got this diagnosis, they would be apt to go home and retire.’”

“What was the diagnosis?” Trump pressed.

“It was—I mean, I think it was a terminal diagnosis,” Johnson said.

“He would be dead by June,” Trump interjected, before Johnson confessed, “That wasn’t public.”

Dunn has not been on Capitol Hill since June 11 and has so far missed 11 votes, according to his voting record. Nonetheless, he has not announced any plans to truncate his time in office. In January, Dunn released a statement indicating that he would not seek reelection, though the former Army surgeon is apparently not planning to formally bow out before the end of his term.

Dunn has a bad track record with missing votes. Since he entered the House in January 2017, Dunn has missed 246 of 4,992 roll call votes. That means the septuagenarian has missed at least 4.9 percent of the votes that took place during his term, according to an analysis by Govtrack.us, which is much more than the median of 2.1 percent missed by other representatives.

But he’s not the only Republican who’s been missing in action. Representative Tom Kean Jr. was absent from Congress since March 5, sparking a Washington brouhaha that lasted until Tuesday, when he suddenly appeared before the House floor to share that his inexplicable multimonth absence was due to depression. Notably, Kean has voted repeatedly to block paid sick leave for his constituents.

The Department of Justice accidentally released the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on President Trump’s handling of classified documents in a legal case last month, according to a legal filing published Thursday.

DOJ lawyers sent the sealed report to lawyers for Carmen Lineberger, who was charged with stealing the report by emailing it to herself disguised as a cake recipe. On June 3, DOJ officials handed over discovery items on flash drives to Lineberger’s lawyers. Included in those drives were documents embedded in electronic messages that were required to be disclosed. On June 9, the defendant’s attorneys reported they found three documents and contacted the government to confirm if they were supposed to be part of discovery materials.

After they reviewed the documents, DOJ lawyers confirmed that they were actually copies of Smith’s report. Defense attorneys told the government they stopped reviewing the material before examining the report itself, deleted the discovery materials they had downloaded, and handed the flash drives back to the government. Thursday’s legal filing was to notify Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over Trump’s classified documents case.

The accidental leak has to be embarrassing for the government, considering Trump’s successful effort to keep the Smith’s report hidden from the public after he won the 2024 presidential election. The defense counsel could have leaked the documents, but considering that their client was accused of improperly handling them, chose to follow the rules.

The situation is ironic, considering Smith’s report was all about how Trump allegedly mishandled classified documents by keeping them at Mar-a-Lago instead of returning them to the government. Smith’s case wasn’t allowed to go to trial thanks to Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissing it on flimsy grounds. It seems that the public may never know the full details of what Trump did.

The White House is trying to break a fireworks record on Saturday—but doing so will likely cost taxpayers a pretty penny.

The Trump administration has not communicated how much the July 4 celebration will cost, or who is expected to foot the bill for the pyrotechnics display. There has been no public record of the company behind the show, Pyrotecnico, receiving a standard government contract for the job, as has been the case with Washington’s previous July 4 celebrations.

In lieu of concrete digits, NOTUS’s Anna Kramer reached out to several fireworks companies for a rough estimate on the show’s price tag. They projected the cost in the millions.

“You’re talking a many multimillion-dollar production, without a doubt,” James Woods, the director of sales at Pyro Shows in Tennessee, told NOTUS. Pyro Shows assisted in one of the previous world record-setting fireworks displays in Dubai in 2014.

Woods told NOTUS that some of the individual shells used in the upcoming celebration could cost anywhere between $50 to $1,000. NOTUS estimated that if even “3 percent of the devices used in this show cost $50, that would total $1.3 million for those devices alone.”

This year, the Freedom 250 celebration has promised a record-shattering 40-minute display beginning at 10:30 p.m. that will use more than 860,000 explosives. They’ll be set off along the Reflecting Pool, as well as in West Potomac Park and off of eight barges on the Potomac River.

The current record is held by the Iglesia Ni Cristo, a church in the Philippines that earned the Guinness World Record title in 2016 for lighting 809,000 fireworks during a New Year’s Eve event.

Another fireworks professional, Kellner’s Fireworks owner Bob Kellner, hypothesized that even if the entire record-setting show were composed of “filler” shells (the cheapest explosives possible, sold for around $2 a pop), the display would still cost a minimum of $1.7 million. But only hitting that bare minimum is highly unlikely, as more sophisticated fireworks cost significantly more.

There is just one federal record offering details about the upcoming semiquincentennial. A document from the Interior Department, dated December 2025, dedicated $1.5 million to Garden State Fireworks to man the display. But that was months before Donald Trump promised to launch “the LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY” on Independence Day 2026.

NOTUS reported that Garden State Fireworks has been responsible for the capital’s July Fourth show for the last decade, and typically receives a contract between $250,000 and $300,000 for the display.

President Trump bought hundreds of stocks the day before he paused tariffs and caused the stock market to rally.

Trump filed his latest financial disclosure on Monday, and it shows that he made 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million on April 8, 2025, from companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), according to an analysis from investigative outlet Sludge. The next day, Trump announced that he was pausing his sweeping tariffs for 90 days, and the S&P 500 went up by nearly 10 percent, one of its largest one-day increases ever.

The timing of these trades suggests he planned to cash in, realizing that markets would rally after his announcement. Those weren’t the only suspicious stock trades he made last year, either. On August 18, Trump’s accounts bought between $250,000 and $500,000 of stock in chipmaker Intel, four days before the president announced that the federal government would take a nearly $9 billion equity stake in the company. Intel’s stock price went up 6 percent after that announcement.

Trump also bought stock in defense contractor Palantir Technologies throughout the year, publicly praising the company while increasing its federal contracts, particularly those with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of his top advisers, White House deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, also owns between $100,001 and $250,000 of Palantir stock. This year, Trump singled out Palantir on Truth Social in April and sent its stock price soaring.

By law, Trump and other executive branch officials are supposed to publicly disclose securities transfers, including stock purchases, over $1,000 within 45 days. Not only did Trump wait more than a year to disclose the April stock purchases, he didn’t disclose any other of the thousands of stock trades he made in 2025.

In all, Trump reported $2.2 billion in income in 2025, from crypto, stock trades, foreign real estate, suing news organizations, and other grifts. His administration is openly engaging in market manipulation and insider trading without any fear of consequences.

President Donald Trump is once again hawking a company in which he owns stock.

Trump announced Thursday that stock in Micron Technology Inc., a semiconductor company, had leapt nine points on the stock market following the company’s commitment to donate $250 million to the president’s Trump Accounts, the individual savings vehicle for eligible American citizens under age 18.

“Thank you Micron!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump’s thanks aren’t just on behalf of America’s children—it seems that the president personally benefited from the stock’s sudden rise.

Trump’s recently released financial disclosures from 2025 revealed that the president already owned between $1.67 million and $6.65 million worth of stock in Micron. In March, as the administration was making preparations to launch the Trump Accounts, Trump purchased between $215,000 and $550,000 in Micron stock, according to MeidasTouch.

In a press release Tuesday, Micron said the donation was the “largest corporate commitment of its kind.” At the same time, the company is facing a federal class action lawsuit over allegations of collusion and price-fixing with other chip manufacturers.

In 2025, the president raked in loads of cash in the stock market by buying or selling a whopping 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly, such as Nvidia and Intel. And Trump has a history of manipulating the stock market by boosting certain companies on social media.

This also isn’t the first time the president has attempted to boost a company tied to Trump Accounts. In December, Dell pledged a $6.2 billion commitment to the accounts. A few months later, Trump purchased at least $1 million in Dell stock, and then went on a rant about buying Dell computers.

Donald Trump has made enormous changes to the White House during his time in office: He’s paved over the Rose Garden, stripped the palms from the Palm Room, and most unforgivably, razed the executive estate’s East Wing.

But one strange detail about Trump’s bathroom renovation, revealed by New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in their new book, Regime Change, might be the grossest yet.

“New carpet was laid in the bathroom on Inauguration Day, as before,” the authors wrote. “Trump’s preference for a fully carpeted bathroom had posed a challenge for the Residence staff during his first term. The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through; the staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath.”

Carpeted bathrooms became trendy in the 1970s and ’80s, several decades after synthetic fibers—namely nylon—were first introduced as carpet materials, making wall-to-wall carpeting a possibility for American homeowners. The novel idea was initially marketed as a luxury option, extending the lush comfort of the bedroom into the washroom.

But the fad quickly fell out of style for obvious reasons. By the late 1980s, carpeted bathrooms had largely been replaced with vinyl or tile to reduce the possibility of trapped moisture and mold growth.

Trump, however, seems to have held on to the fantasy that it could be done well.

“It was important to him to have a fully carpeted bathroom, and residence staff’s solution to the damp problem, or the potential mold problem, was to get essentially a small piece of carpet and overlay it as if it was a bath mat on top of the carpet in front of the shower, and then substitute and rotate that carpeting,” Swan told MS NOW. “So, we do have some details from inside the residence, including some disputes and tensions between the president and the first lady over the interior decorating and renovating.”

The Times duo’s reporting revealed further interior decorating disputes between Trump and his wife, with the president often removing items that Melania had intentionally placed around the residence and stowing them away in his office.

The president’s worldview is getting increasingly bizarre.

Donald Trump posted an AI-generated clip to his Truth Social late Wednesday, sharing a depiction of himself as a white coat-wearing doctor supposedly “curing” celebrities of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

“Have you or someone you know been diagnosed with TDS? The symptoms can be relentless. Fortunately, I’m Dr. Trump, and I have a treatment plan,” the depiction says.

The video then showcases deepfakes of several actors, comedians, and talk show hosts who have been vocal critics of the president and his policies, including The View hosts Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts, Edward Norton, and John Leguizamo.

“I really was unsure I could help some of these people. They were so far gone, I wasn’t really sure,” Trump’s avatar says after several fake testimonials.

Trump then encourages viewers to “turn off fake news” and “just have a Diet Coke like me.”

The president has proven himself to be a big fan of AI-generated media, though the practice has frequently landed him in trouble. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s executive assistant, Natalie Harp, was the inner circle figure primarily responsible for the president’s late-night social media binges. Over the last several months, Harp has reportedly shared an AI-generated video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus Christ.

Trump took down both posts after they spurred immense public backlash. In the former instance, Trump claimed he did not see the section of the video that racistly mocked the former president and first lady. A White House official blamed the mistake on an editing error. In the second instance, Trump claimed he thought he was being shown as a doctor.

White House officials deleted photographs of the crowds at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair kick-off rally after the president raged at the dismal turnout.

“We’re told that the aerial image of the crowds from his rally last week enraged him so much that officials ended up deleting them,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday evening.

Dozens of attendees were seen flocking toward the exits during Trump’s kick-off address, but the president insisted the event was “packed to the brim.”

Photographs of the event showed that there was a crowd, but not a very big one, and certainly not the 45,000 that Trump claimed on social media.

Attendance at Trump’s supremely underwhelming Great American State Fair has remained visibly low, as the festivities have been beset by technical difficulties, lame programming, and disappointing weather delays.

White House staff are reportedly concerned that Trump’s rally planned for the Fourth of July will spark yet another presidential meltdown.

That rally is scheduled to take place outside on the National Mall, as temperatures in Washington are forecast to reach a stifling 100 degrees (at least). The rally will be punctuated by a massive fireworks display, currently scheduled to begin at 11 p.m. Unlike in past years, attendees will not be able to bring coolers to help beat the heat.

Trump officials misled people who wanted to donate to a bipartisan initiative to mark the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, redirecting them to donate to the administration’s own group instead, according to a congressional investigation released Thursday.

A report released by House Democrats, based on newly obtained documents and whistleblower accounts, said that the White House repeatedly steered donors towards Trump’s Freedom 250 setup instead of the America250 effort set up by Congress ten years ago.

Some donors and sponsors who sought to send funds to America250 were told by the Trump administration that they didn’t have a “green light,” and pressured them to redirect their money to Freedom 250. Freedom 250 also reached out to America250 donors with donation requests, confusing some corporate executives who didn’t know the difference between the two groups, the Democrats’ report states.

“I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed,” Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, told The Washington Post. “But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

The report goes on to detail how Freedom 250 officials explicitly steered money away from America250 towards projects favored by Trump, who undermined a bipartisan plan to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary to the benefit of himself and his allies.

For example, America250 had received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund Freedom Trucks, mobile museums that would travel around the country with lessons on American history. That grant was transferred to Freedom 250, which produced its own version of the trucks with history lessons that present a distorted image of U.S. history.

Democrats accuse Trump allies of steering away $75 million worth of taxpayer funds originally allocated by Congress to America250. The leftover money is expected to be kept by the White House. And Freedom 250’s staff is made up of many former employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which harvested user data.

Officials of the bipartisan America250 say now that they have shifted their efforts towards events outside of Washington, D.C., while Freedom 250 handles events in the nation’s capital. But the split has confused legislators and corporate leaders, and caused tensions between the two efforts, according to the Post.

Thanks to Trump, America250’s grants, educational initiatives, and volunteer programs have been overshadowed by Freedom 250 efforts. Officials expect to make up for their lost funds through more private donations, but the president has effectively ruined what could have been a unifying, nonpolitical celebration of the U.S. at a time when the American people could really use it.

Manny Rutinel’s victory this week in Colorado’s primaries has set up a once-unthinkable scenario: This November, in one of the most crucial swing races in the country, a former vegan activist will face off against a cattle rancher in a district dominated by meat processing giant JBS.

Rutinel, a 31-year-old member of the Colorado House of Representatives, beat his more moderate opponent, Shannon Bird, earlier this week in yet another victory for insurgent progressives. But as he now pivots to the general election, he’ll be facing Republican Gabe Evans, and an onslaught of attacks over his past statements on animal rights and meat consumption.

The eighth district, created in 2021 by the state’s independent redistricting commission, is Colorado’s only swing district, and swingy it is—voters in the district elected a Democrat in 2022 by less than 1,600 votes and Evans in 2024 by less than 2,500 votes.

“It’s reasonable to think that [the district] will just switch back and forth with whatever party is having a good year that year,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at the University of Denver. “Given what we’ve seen in other elections this year, I think there’s a very good chance it swings to the Democrats.”

The district, which includes the northern suburbs of Denver and stretches north into more rural communities, is a major agricultural region. JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, is one of the district’s biggest employers. Evans himself owns a small cattle herd and is a self-described beef producer.

As a student at Yale Law School, Rutinel gave an interview to a campus publication calling animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive industry.” That same year, he told a legislative committee in Connecticut that “the globe must dramatically shift away from animal products and toward fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains and nuts.”

Since running for Congress, Rutinel has backtracked , saying that he is no longer a vegan, and that “it’s important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make.” He’s also stopped calling for Medicare for All and a ban on fracking.

Republicans are already jumping onto Rutinel’s vegan past. After Rutinel won his primary, the regional press secretary for the National Republican Campaign Committee posted a photo on X of Rutinel as a college student, shirtless and carrying a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sign. “He is a far-left vegan activist who wants to end animal agriculture,” the post reads.

Meat occupies an almost sacred space in American politics—and a particular obsession with it on the right is nothing new. Already this cycle, Republicans have attacked Texas Senate candidate James Talarico over his past comments about reducing meat consumption: “this freak wants to BAN BBQ,” Sen. Ted Cruz wrote in an X post. In response, Talarico leaned into meat eating, posing for a photo in a Texas flag shirt while eating barbecue. At an event, he said “I deny all accusations of veganism.”

“Republicans will just be working to portray him as out of step, as too far left for Colorado. That is to some extent what they’re trying to do now with going after vegetarianism,” Masket said about Rutinel. But he’s not terribly worried that Rutinel’s vegan past will hurt his campaign. Unlike in Texas, Masket said, vegetarianism and veganism are well-established and understood in Colorado, and the more important dynamic in this election will be voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump, he said.

“November is going to be, particularly at the congressional district level, a referendum on the Trump administration,” agreed Robert Preuhs, the chair of the political science department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. The outcome in the eighth district in particular, he added, will “depend to some extent on what the Trump administration does between here and November and the extent to which Dave Evans feels comfortable endorsing those actions.”

Rutinel has established himself as a forceful critic of the Trump administration, campaigning adamantly against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and criticizing Bird for her committee vote against a bill that would prohibit local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE.

Rutinel also took a strong stance on artificial intelligence (AI). In 2025, he was a sponsor of a bill that would protect whistleblowers who sought to disclose AI safety issues. Public First Action, an AI-safety PAC, covertly supported Rutinel by giving $2 million to Latino Victory Fund, Transformer reported on Wednesday. A PAC funded by Chris Larsen, a billionaire cryptocurrency firm founder, also spent $980,000 on the race in favor of Rutinel.

Analysts say Rutinel now faces a difficult balancing act: moderating his positions enough to appeal to swing voters, while also keeping his base energized. He’ll have help: the Democratic Party is expected to spend heavily to try to flip this district. The race may wind up being a test of whether culture war issues—like Rutinel’s past veganism—will matter more to swing voters than ICE and Trump’s record.