America’s 250th Celebration Is Donald Trump’s Lost Cause

We’re closing in on July Fourth and the nation’s 250th birthday, and right on time, the all-knowing digital algorithm deposited a memory from 2015 on my screen: That year, burning the Confederate flag on Independence Day was in vogue, sparked by the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. My fondness for desecrating rebel iconography is not restricted to either a national holiday or a national tragedy—we should have fully conquered the Confederacy when we had the chance, instead of allowing them to commemorate their traitorousness. Maybe those nine parishioners would be alive today if we’d done a better job discrediting that toxic ideology.

That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth. When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration. At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his “Great American State Fair,” Trump announced that “America is back.” Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that “a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”

As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: “The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,” Trump said. “In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.

All of this is definitely a product of ego, but it’s also highly reminiscent of Confederate kitsch. Trump’s drive to commemorate himself, which has even run afoul of some of his fellow Republicans, is animated by the same idea as the Lost Cause: to lend legitimacy to a period of betrayal and to ensure this malevolent force lives on. Allowing the Confederacy to commemorate itself was a profound failure on our part, and it seeded the earth for the weakening of our democracy. As Trump plans to sully the District of Columbia’s skyline with his triumphal arch (now with more fist!), I can see history repeating: Trumpism as the new Lost Cause.

I am hardly the first to evoke this comparison. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote back in 2020, Trump spent his Independence Day marinating in a variety of Lost Cause grievances: the decision to remove the Confederate iconography from the Mississippi state flag and NASCAR events, the renaming of the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, along with the usual suspects (“the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing”).

As Graham noted at the time, Trump’s Lost Cause fetish was his campaign schtick, the red meat he used to rally his base. In 2020, that playbook failed, in no small part because the Covid-19 pandemic was foremost on the minds of voters. But Trump played the same game in 2024 and won back the White House. And as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Rivka Maizlish wrote last year, the “unrelenting propaganda of the Lost Cause” returned with a vengeance. The names of Confederacy luminaries stricken from U.S. military bases were restored, there was a renewed push to whitewash the sins of slavery, and the Civil War era’s insurrectionists were conflated with the nations’ Founders. It’s no accident that Trump believes our latter-day insurrectionists should be the ones to get government reparations.

As Maizlish noted, ’twas ever thus:

Lost Cause mythology is central to Trump’s movement. He romanticizes the gender and racial hierarchies of the Old South, valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols, and demonizes those who would remove Confederate memorials as “angry mobs” trying to “wipe out our history.” The Confederate anthem “Dixie” played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.

Trump is now deep into his dotage (and perhaps his inexorable decline). He has no campaigns left to run and no further need to worry about uniting the American people to build some kind of sustainable electoral coalition. These days, the president is motivated entirely by thoughts of his legacy. But the Lost Cause schtick remains the same—only now it’s manifesting itself in his relentless pursuit of various vanity projects and alterations to Washington, D.C.

The possibility that he might not be remembered seems to vex Trump, whose administration moved with the same sort of alacrity to forestall the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center as it did in fighting its inane war with Iran. As Brian Beutler reported in his Off Message newsletter, Trump’s name only came off the building because Ohio Democrat Joyce Beatty, as an ex-officio member of the center’s board, had the standing to sue over the matter and she took the opportunity. Some other Democrats who had standing for the same reason decided to pass, including House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and outgoing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Beutler hails Beatty as a model for other Democrats to follow, given what can happen to a country when a traitor to the Constitution is allowed to remain commemorated. Every lasting monument to Trump is really a monument to accommodating his misrule, celebrating his corruption, and a signal to the public that it’s OK to forget his criminal legacy and accept the Trump era as legitimate. “It will be much easier to arrest the normal process of forgetting,” writes Beutler, “if Democrats embrace the goal of Trump humiliation now. If peeling Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center is just a taste of what’s to come.”

Tearing Trump’s various architectural vanities down isn’t what I’d call a top priority. Like TNR’s editor, Michael Tomasky, I think Democrats need to commit themselves to freeing us from the iron grip of oligarchy and radically reshaping the Supreme Court. Still, as Tomasky wrote earlier this week, we should look to future Democratic presidential candidates to follow in the footsteps of Beatty and commit to a cosmetic de-Trumpification. It would send a strong signal that the party will brook no attempts to commemorate a discredited president—and that it has the stomach for the civic deworming this nation needs to kick off its next century.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Did you land here looking for an account of the Republican Party’s latest angry crashouts and epic meltdowns? Well, you’ve come to the right place. From Truth Social to Capitol Hill, Donald Trump and his merry band of hangers-on are in incredible disarray. Led by a corrupt idiot, they are mired in a dumb war they can’t win, overseeing an economy that’s eating the livelihoods of ordinary Americans, and even facing some internal blowback as Trump’s demands for an increasingly varied array of vanity projects and a slush fund to reward his criminal goons are getting spiked by his GOP allies.

Trump isn’t capable of sorting out any of the nation’s myriad problems—dilemmas mostly spawned by his relentless pressing of the “cause another problem” button. So he’s up late, whining to anyone who will listen that this is all everyone else’s fault. This week, he spent the wee hours angry at the Michael Smerconish podcast for hosting Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, who claimed he was “coerced into testifying against Trump.” The president made one of his trademark staggered-caps replies: “Michael Cohen has come out and unequivocally stated that the Radical Left Prosecutors, Tish James and Alvin Bragg, pressured and coerced him to testify against your favorite President, ME, when they made him the key player in their Political Witch Hunts.”

Trump has also been monomaniacally preoccupied with the crashing and burning of the concert he’d planned for America’s semiquincentennial, a word that I’m looking forward to forgetting how to spell. Some weeks ago, it was announced that an array of aggressively tertiary-to-pop-culture performers had been lined up to play for the president’s pleasure. That bill has since dwindled to Vanilla Ice, who says that he would be willing to perform for Vladimir Putin and the Iranian mullahs, and Flo Rida, whose absolute commitment to getting that bag—any bag—would have a Saudi royal exclaiming, “Have some shame, habibi!”

We know that this was a humiliating moment for Trump because he once again went on Truth Social to tell everyone about it. “We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he wrote.

That’s all pretty rich coming from someone whose every online utterance is a tantrum laced with either petty complaints or high-test AI slop. Past targets of his ire include “Dumocrats and RINOs” (with Thomas Massie, Thom Tillis, and Bill Cassidy coming in for specific scorn), the Supreme Court (this time spurning Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett), critics of his Iran war blundering, the judge who ordered his name be stricken from the Kennedy Center facade, and, of course, the Iranian people, against whom he routinely threatens war crimes. Pope Leo, in particular, seems to be living rent-free in Trump’s head at all times.

The fact that Trump has chosen a midterm election year to become ungovernable is piling increasing pressure on those few Republicans who want to appear to be capable of governing. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who like Mitch McConnell before him seems to be hyperaware that allowing his GOP colleagues to go as feral as they’d like to would hurt their reelection chances—has reached a “breaking point” with Trump over several matters, including the nomination of Bill Pulte to be the director of national intelligence and the proposed “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—which seems to have been shoved back into some sort of procedural limbo after Democrats successfully raised a hue and cry over it.

Republicans like Thune have a hard row to hoe right now. I’ve spent no small amount of time trying to figure out if there is any problem the GOP can solve in timely enough fashion to save their bacon for the midterms, and the conclusion I keep reaching is that this is simply a physiological impossibility for a party that seems to only have whining and trolling in its locker. This week, we saw some excellent examples of what Republicans are capable of doing: In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee, in an effort to stick it to the LGBTQ community, declared it “Nuclear Family Month” (with no evident concern for the affordability crisis affecting those families). Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the state Republican Party made news for holding a moment of silence for the corrupt cop who killed George Floyd.

Sorry to throw the thesaurus at this, but this is all stupid, puerile, insipid pissbaby nonsense. But it’s also the ne plus ultra of Republican ideas—right now and for the foreseeable future. Trump may still hold sway over his party, but the main evidence of his influence increasingly just seems like rot. The only real question now, as Trump mashes “send” on another hundred inscrutable Truth Social posts, is how much of that rot creeps into our lives—and how quickly we can evict these crashout kings from power.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Donald Trump last year amassed one big beautiful rap sheet of scandal and criminality, with multiple instances of corruption that made Teapot Dome look quaint. But the president’s bogus new “settlement” with his own administration’s IRS, which he had sued in January for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns in 2020, hits scorching new heights of depravity. The deal’s contours were bad enough when it looked like Trump was simply going to take a small fortune of taxpayer money and line his own pockets. But that was last week: The new plan is for $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to be set aside as a slush fund, which Trump will effectively control, to pay out to January 6 insurrectionists and political cronies that he believes were wronged back when the Department of Justice wasn’t his mobbed-up plaything. Some of the worst people in America are already lining up for payouts.

There are plenty of ways to describe this arrangement. Call it cartoon villainy. Call it criminal. For certain, call this an utterly impeachable offense. Also call this very worrisome: There is a non-zero chance that Trump will simply get away with it, now that corrupt elites dominate American life with absolute impunity. For those with any vested interest in restoring democracy and clearing out the Augean stables of Trumpism, how we respond to this is very important.

The Trump White House is a kleptocratic organ, pure and simple—one that increasingly resembles authoritarian regimes around the world. “This new slush fund is no different than what we see in other kleptocracies,” Casey Michel, frequent TNR contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, told me. “It’s a ruling figure creating a new pot of wealth that they can use for whatever they want—in this case, paying off a bunch of insurrectionists who Trump can now transform into his own personal paramilitary, without any oversight or checks whatsoever. It’s something we’ve never seen in U.S. history—but is perfectly familiar to those who study autocracy around the world.”

There is, however, a key distinction between Trump and the scores of foreign kleptocrats that Michel has spent years studying: “The only difference here is that most foreign kleptocrats at least try to hide their tracks—instead of broadcasting them to the world, like we’re seeing with Trump.” While most criminals endeavor to keep the newspapers from finding out about their intention to commit crimes, Trump does it in plain sight—either because he’s incredibly stupid or because the Supreme Court has told him he’s wholly immune from prosecution. (It’s probably both.)

But the newspapers’ early coverage of the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is troubling. If sanewashing was last year’s problem in the political press, sinwashing might be the au courant media malady. The initial coverage from The New York Times suggested that the scheme merely “could funnel money to Trump allies,” even though this was its expressed purpose. The news department also couldn’t bring itself to call it a slush fund, instead drafting “critics” to say what is plainly and objectively true (the paper’s editorial board at least named it appropriately). Elsewhere, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal found a useful euphemism, referring to the settlement’s arrangement as merely “unusual” instead of nakedly criminal. (TNR’s headline, if you’re keeping score, nailed it: “Trump Just Launched a Taxpayer-Funded $1.8 Billion MAGA Slush Fund.”) 

So I’m concerned that when Democrats return to power, the media will either be an impediment or an enemy to any effort to put things right. But at least that effort is kicking off right away. Representative Jamie Raskin told TNR’s Greg Sargent he is planning to “introduce a bill that would block the fund and other future efforts like it.” He’ll be doing so with the full support of party leadership, who will seek to bring the vote to the House floor over the Republican majority’s objections via a discharge petition. While such a maneuver will require some GOP support, Republicans in the House have in recent weeks broken ranks on the disclosure of the Epstein files—and a few have defected from the party line on funding Trump’s grifty ballroom, as well, likely killing the $1 billion that Republicans had planned to allocate to it in their ICE-funding reconciliation bill. 

Meanwhile, HuffPost’s Jen Bendery reports that Senator Chris Van Hollen will be launching a similar effort in the Senate, amending the reconciliation bill to prevent January 6ers—some of whom assaulted the Capitol Police officers who protect these politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike—from obtaining money through this slush fund. 

Taken as a whole, these efforts tick a lot of boxes for those, like me, who bemoan Democrats’ institutional timidity. If successful, this will force Republicans to take a hard vote and sign their name to this calumny. And regardless of success, it provides fodder for a massive media campaign to wreck the GOP in a midterm election year, creating a savage contrast between the president’s inattention to ordinary Americans’ financial struggles and his desire to enrich criminals with those Americans’ tax dollars.  

As Sargent noted, “Independents famously react badly to corruption.” According to a 2025 battleground survey conducted by End Citizens United, “Democrats’ journey to the majority begins with showing voters the consequences of Republican Corruption” because the topic was extremely animating for both independent voters and turnout voters. “Democrats should focus on telling the story of how honest Americans are losing their shot at the American Dream because of the corruption wealthy insiders have unleashed,” the study affirms, reaching the same conclusion that most of the political media had after the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

What can I say? It turns out that accountability really matters. Trump and his inner circle have been like the raptors testing the bars at Jurassic Park: They’ve found weaknesses in the system, exploited them for criminal ends, and when they skate, they only redouble their efforts to find more flamboyant crimes to commit. That we’re now living with the prospect of a corrupt president cutting checks to his favorite thugs and miscreants is a humbling low for this nation.

Anyone out there treating this as normal or permissible business—or who believes that once this president is ousted from power we should overlook his sins in the name of “looking forward”—is just as guilty as anyone else interconnected with this web of sleaze.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Last week, I wrote about how the far right’s capture of governing institutions like the Supreme Court has put Democrats in the jackpot, forcing them to make some hard choices. Indeed, the decision laid before Democrats is one of the most famous choices ever laid out in the English language: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles—and by opposing, end them. In a troubling sign for Democrats, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has chosen the former.

At issue is the Virginia state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the amended congressional district maps that voters just approved—in a referendum that cost the Democrats some $70 million, as they painstakingly played by all the rules to get it over the line. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Spanberger offered a limp proclamation, saying that she was “disappointed” by it but that her “focus as Governor will be on ensuring that all voters have the information necessary to make their voices heard this November.”

But it turns out that Spanberger was missing some vital information of her own: a lawful solution that could save the day and uphold the will of Virginia voters. As Quinn Yeargain at The Downballot reported, the state constitution includes a provision that allows lawmakers to change the mandatory retirement age of state Supreme Court justices. The idea Yeargain poses would be to lower the official retirement age to 54 by placing a modification in the annual budget bill that’s due by June 30, pass the legislation, and replace the hack justices—all of whom are older than 54—with seven new ones picked by Spanberger.

“Democrats might prefer other solutions,” Yeargain concluded, “but if they want to see the will of the voters respected in time for the November elections, there are virtually no other options—and none with as good a chance of success as this one.”

Spanberger isn’t going for it. In fairness, as Greg Sargent reported this week, Virginia Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell have cited some logistical impediments to the plan, namely a May 12 deadline to finalize the maps in time for early voting.

Yet, wherever the GOP holds the whip hand in the redistricting wars, they are sallying forth without either seeking the assent of voters or showing much concern for procedural deadlines—in some cases, like Louisiana, Republicans are changing the maps right in the middle of ongoing elections. Which makes Surovell’s diffident attitude especially risible: “Wiping out the entire Supreme Court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like.” This is a hard thing to hear when Republicans are engineering—at warp speed—the wholesale extermination of Black political power in the South.

It’s unsustainable for our democracy to have one party that’s terrified of hypothetical blowback they might receive for violating a norm and one party vandalizing the Constitution with freedom and glee, knowing their political opponents will never force them to incur a similar cost. Democrats spend so much effort on mitigating the hypothetical radical step the right might take in the future that they’re failing to respond to the radical things they’re doing at this moment—to say nothing of the things they’re already speeding to do next. One of those things, by the way, is using the Callais decision to potentially eliminate majority-minority districts in blue states like California—or to potentially create a postelection coup in Congress.

Regardless of whether retiring the current Virginia Supreme Court would result in the electoral maps that voters approved, there are a number of good reasons why state Democrats should do it anyway. Do it because replacing the Supreme Court with one more aligned with Virginia voters will be a gift that keeps on giving. Do it because it will raise the salience of the GOP’s rush to undo civil rights gains. Do it because if the shoe were on the GOP’s foot, they would not hesitate to forcibly retire a Democratic-majority court. Do it because, as Brian Beutler writes, you cannot simply not “respond to an element of a Republican coup d’etat.”

But the biggest reason is that Democrats need to develop an appetite for the kind of hardball politics that the GOP plays. The enormity of the tasks in front of them—reversing a slew of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, rebuilding the federal government, putting Trump and his inner circle in jail—requires leaders who understand the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

For all the grim news about the redistricting wars, the grimmer failures of Trumpism keep the prospects of winning elections in reach. We should remember that the GOP’s race to create new districts is a product of their failures and unpopularity. And who knows? For all their cracking and packing, Republicans may pay a price for making their own red districts more vulnerable should Trump’s daily misdeeds and the worsening economy touch off a wave election. But those voters—who include suburban moms at No Kings rallies calling for Nuremberg 2.0 and neighborhoods full of ordinary people who’ve put their lives on the line protecting each other from Trump’s ICE goons—will expect their elected officials to take up arms (figuratively!) against this sea of troubles the GOP has unleashed, and bring it to a swift end.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Recall, if you can stomach it, the late summer months of the 2024 presidential campaign. The political press was churning out (accurate) stories about how Vice President Kamala Harris was distancing herself from some of the bolder policy proposals she’d previously backed, and many of the left were in a froth over it. But I paid it little mind. Timidly pivoting to the center was nothing new for Democratic presidential candidates, and what was the point of big policy proposals anyway? For that matter, what was the point of small policy proposals? As I noted at the time, Harris and her fellow Democrats had a bigger problem: They weren’t going to get to enact anything without the approval of Chief Justice John Roberts and at least four of his colleagues.

Disappointingly, Harris largely ducked what was—and is—the fight of the Democrats’ lives: the court’s wholesale elimination of the party’s ability to govern. The conservative bloc, through what I would charitably describe as chicanery, has locked down American life for the foreseeable future. They essentially possess veto power over any legislation or executive order not to their liking, and they are now moving in the direction of stripping Democratic voters of their electoral power. This is an existential crisis that affects every Democrat running for federal office, and as we barrel toward the midterm elections and then into a presidential campaign, it’s incumbent on Democrats to explain how they will confront this challenge. Or to put it another way: How will they change the Supreme Court? Because it cannot persist in its current form.

Naturally, if you ask Roberts, he will tell you this is all overblown. This week, he whinged about the public’s low opinion of the court, saying, “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” As The New Republic’s Matt Ford noted, it’s hard to see what a hypothetical high court filled with avowedly naked partisans would have done differently than these allegedly non-political actors, whose every move is laser-focused on delegitimizing and eliminating the GOP’s political competition.

The Roberts court has dismantled the Democratic Party in a number of ways. One was its 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which did away with a judicial doctrine known as Chevron deference that allows the executive branch to respond nimbly and autonomously to laws passed by Congress. Its elimination essentially allows the high court to undercut the actions taken by the administrative state to carry out laws. This is specifically bad for a party that actually uses the federal government to facilitate policy, rather than using the federal government to destroy the federal government.

But the Supreme Court has put its finger on the scale for Republicans in even less ambiguous ways in recent years. The conservative majority’s embrace of what’s known as the “major questions doctrine” has added a new layer of imperviousness to its reign of Calvinball terror. That doctrine, which is a very recent invention of the conservative legal movement, allows the justices to overturn a federal regulation if they believe Congress didn’t “speak clearly” enough when authorizing it. If you’re wondering what that means, well, it means whatever a majority of justices think it means: Over time, the major questions doctrine has allowed the justices a wide range in applying subjective and malleable criteria to rule against regulations.

The Supreme Court, by the way, has never applied the major questions doctrine to a Republican president’s actions—though Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch did contend in a concurring opinion that it should have been applied to Trump in the recent case that struck down the president’s tariff regime. In every other instance, the major questions doctrine has provided a facially neutral jurisprudential scheme to derail Democratic presidents. Democrats have also, in recent years, been sabotaged whenever the court issues a shadow docket ruling, whereas lately those unsigned rulings keep siding with Trump. As Ford recently noted, leaked Supreme Court memos have shone a new light on how the conservative justices’ shadow docket dabblings have gone from being “a simple administrative mechanism [to] a major roadblock for progressive governance.”

As if kneecapping the Democratic Party’s ability to govern isn’t enough, the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has effectively eliminated the safeguards in the Voting Rights Act that ensured the rights of Black Americans to participate in electoral politics. Ford wrote that the ruling all but ensures that “Black representation in Congress will … plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.” True enough, within days, Republican-controlled legislatures began the process of dismantling majority-minority districts.

To Ford’s mind, Democrats find themselves facing some pretty stark choices to confront a Supreme Court that has gone to such lengths to annihilate their party: “Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem.”

To pack the court, or not pack the court? This is a question that Democrats have been at pains to avoid. And to be fair, they may have other options besides the nuclear one. They could engage in jurisdiction stripping to limit the court’s ability to interfere with liberal governance. They could reform the court in other ways beyond simply nominating four new justices to turn the tide: Pete Buttigieg has floated the idea of a 15-member court split among conservatives, liberals, and ostensible neutrals. Other lawmakers have proposed we simply abolish lifetime appointments.

I could spend several more paragraphs sketching out solutions to end the misrule of an illiberal court, but the time has come for Democrats to step forward and announce what they plan to do about it. The party is no longer on a collision course with the Roberts court—the collision has happened; the wreckage is in the road. To do anything, now or in the future, Democrats will have to undo the grievous harms that imperil their party’s ability to function. In these upcoming election cycles, if Democratic candidates don’t have serious ideas of how to solve this problem, then they are not serious Democratic candidates.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.