Donald Trump hijacked America's 250 and turned it into a 'theatre of the absurd'

[malaise]

The graphic is perfect😀

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/29/america-250th-anniversary-trump

This is the room where it happened. The assembly room at Independence Hall in Philadelphia where, 250 years ago this week, a group of sweating, treasonous men broke from the most powerful empire since ancient Rome. Amid a summer of trial and error, delegates including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson ratified a flawed but aspirational document to declare their independence from the British crown. The date was 4 July 1776 – but it took nearly a month for all 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress to formally sign on.

“I don’t blame them,” Maggie Burkett, a park ranger, told a group of about 40 tourists as they gazed at green baize tables adorned with books, letters, pipes and candles one recent afternoon. “These words on this page are treason, just as much as burning the king’s coats of arms was. By signing this document, you are literally risking your life. The 56 men who signed this document were brave. In my opinion, they were heroes.”

The anniversary of this date and this document should be cause for a unifying nationwide celebration. Yet two and a half centuries after a bloody revolution that humiliated King George III and installed George Washington as the first US president, the semiquincentennial has become just the latest cue for division, rancour and existential angst.

“There’s a sense of dread,” said Eddie Glaude, the author of America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. “It’s as if it’s going to descend below kitsch. It’s going to be a collage of terrible myth-making