Our tacky 250th

"With so many idiots."

Jul 01, 2026

Years ago — it was late August of 2008, to be precise — I overheard something that has stuck with me ever since.

I’d finished a gym workout and was changing in the locker room. Minutes earlier, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had announced his choice of running mate: Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, who had included her famously false “Bridge to Nowhere” statement in a speech broadcast on one of the TVs in the workout area. She’d sounded utterly inane, and also terrifying.

I was feeling glum about Palin, McCain, and the upcoming election1 when I heard the unmistakable voice of E., a fellow gym member, in another area of the locker room. E. spoke excellent, booming English with a heavy overlay of her native Ukrainian. She and her friend were wondering aloud how we’d arrived at this lamentable state of affairs.

“Such a beautiful country,” E. concluded, sighing audibly. “With so many idiots.” EE-dee-otes.

I no longer belong to that gym and haven’t seen E. in years. But I think of her almost every day, especially as we approach July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Such a beautiful country. With so many idiots.

What else can you say about something like this?

Statue of Liberty replica, Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks, California. Photo: Nancy Friedman, May 19, 2026.

Or this?

You can’t spell “semiquincentennial” without “sequin.” American flag dress, sizes S to XXXXL, $13.24 at Chinese ultrafast-fashion behemoth Shein.

And how about the so-called Great American State Fair? Not so great, writes Kelsey Ables in The Atlantic (gift link):

Trompe l’oeil sheets cover slapdash structures lining both sides of the Mall with an illustration of architecture that is supposed to be beaux arts but is so stripped down that it makes the nearby brutalist buildings look practically baroque. A boxy model of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in the center of the Mall appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup.

The fair, writes Ables, is “a dollar-store version of the grandiosity that Trump hopes will be his legacy.”

Take a closer look at that shitty-ass arch.

Here’s a headline that gets right to the point:

“Happy Fucking Birthday: An exhausted America turns two hundred and fifty”

It’s Christopher Hooks’s cover story for the July 2026 issue of Harper’s (subscriber link, archive link), and I’m betting it’s the first time “fucking” has appeared in a headline in that 175-year-old publication.

To report the story, Hooks traveled to Washington, DC, and interviewed Rosa Rios, treasurer of the United States during both Obama administrations and current chair of the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, whose public face is a foundation called America250:

Rios and her colleagues had gone to great lengths to ensure that this was America’s best birthday yet, and they had overcome substantial difficulties to do so. The Semiquincentennial Commission was conjured into being by Congress back in 2016, during that long-ago summer when the Democratic Party was convening in Philadelphia and the succession of one form of representational liberalism to another seemed pretty well secure. But the next president, and the next Congress, were not the folks the political class expected. Somebody had dropped the baton.

For starters, the current occupant of the White House “has set up his own commemoration bodies, which answer solely to him: the appropriately martial-sounding Task Force 250 and Freedom 250, the latter of which has received funds diverted from America250. These new bodies seem to be having more success organizing (usually deranged) events,” including the UFC cage matches held in DC on Trump’s 80th birthday, June 14.

But never fear! America250 has a tacky, overpriced solution for you:

Rios opened her presentation by holding up a yellow, star-shaped plushie with a friendly face. “I am pleased to introduce to you George the Star!” This stuffed version of the semiquincentennial’s official mascot, a Nintendo-ish five-pointer, was now available for sale in the visitor center’s gift shop for $35.95. “This is the first time I’m seeing this plushie, and no one is more excited than I am.” George looked like a fine fellow, but there was something just a little off about him. Aren’t the stars on the flag white? I searched my brain for yellow stars in American iconography, and the closest I could get was the Carl’s Jr. logo.