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no kings
Trump to Make Nation's 250th Birthday About One Hideous Thing: Himself
The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity.
Jun 01, 2026
Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.
A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.
Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.
And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.
The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.
On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.
Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”
A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.
Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation.
Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.
Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.”
Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.
Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president.
The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be.
That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.
Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too.
He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.
The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture.
The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill. Behind it all, Trump is preparing to host a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, the actual anniversary, with up to twenty-five thousand spectators watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked. Dana White is producing. Ivanka is helping organize.
The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.
On July 4, 2025 — exactly one year before this 250th celebration he’s calling a birthday party — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut at the end of this year federal Medicaid spending by roughly $911 billion, along with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP, to fund their tax cuts.
— The American Medical Association estimates that 11.8 million people will directly lose health coverage.
— The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that up to 14.9 million people could be put at risk by the byzantine work requirements alone.
— The Joint Economic Committee found that under the proposed cuts, 10 million children could lose their health insurance, one in eight kids in this country.
— At least two million children are estimated to lose food assistance under the SNAP changes.
All to pay for another massive tax cut for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.
Set those numbers against what Trump’s spending on the spectacle. The ballroom built atop the rubble of the East Wing has now climbed to $300 to $400 million and Republicans in Congress are trying to appropriate a billion dollars for it, presumably so Trump can keep all those “donations.”
The “Independence Arch” — what Washington has already nicknamed the “Arc de Trump,” planted at Memorial Bridge to block the view of the Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers are buried — is projected at around $100 million, with $15 million of that already pulled from a taxpayer-funded endowment through the Office of Management and Budget.
The pool job is at least $2 million. The UFC fight on the South Lawn is whatever it costs to host twenty-five thousand people for a brutal cage match at the President’s residence.
We’re talking, conservatively, half a billion dollars or more in personal vanity projects from a president who just stripped a trillion dollars from the medical care of poor Americans and a couple hundred billion more from their food. All to glorify himself.
— At the end of this year, a single father in Ohio is going to watch his SNAP benefits drop by an average of $146 a month so Trump can paint a memorial pool the color of a Mar-a-Lago hot tub.
— A grandmother in Kentucky will lose Medicaid coverage so Trump can build a French-style triumphal arch with his name nicknamed onto it.
— A kid in Louisiana — one of the states hardest hit by the Medicaid cuts — will lose her health insurance so Dana White can promote a cage fight on the White House lawn.
Panem et circenses without the panem. Just the circus, paid for by the bread he ripped out of their hands.
The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity. They fought to be done with kings who put their names on buildings, with sovereigns who treated national wealth as personal decoration, with rulers who staged spectacles to glorify themselves while the poor lined up at almshouses.
The whole point of the experiment that began 250 years ago this summer was that we wouldn’t have a man who lived in a palace and stamped his initials on the country.
The arch wasn’t supposed to happen. The ballroom wasn’t supposed to happen. The triumphal procession down a repainted Mall, with the music acts replaced by the leader himself in front of a hand-picked crowd, wasn’t supposed to happen.
The 1925 Klan marchers thought they’d reclaimed the country for the Confederacy. They had a Republican president who looked the other way, a sympathetic press in many regions, governors in their pocket from Florida to Oregon, and a self-image as the only “real Americans.”
Their movement collapsed within a couple of years because Grand Dragon David Stephenson was convicted of rape and murder and the scandal pulled the curtain back on what they really were. Epstein files, anybody?
The lesson wasn’t that fascist movements collapse on their own; it was that ordinary Americans, when they finally saw clearly what was being done in their name, refused to keep going along with it.
Call your representatives at the Capitol Switchboard, 202-224-3121, and tell them you want the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reversed before the scam “work requirements” hit on December 31.
Support the food banks in your community: they’re about to be overwhelmed when the SNAP cuts take effect this winter. And if you live anywhere near Washington this June, you can decide for yourself whether to be on the Mall while Trump turns the 250th anniversary of American independence into a MAGA pep rally with a cage fight chaser.
If this piece spoke to you, please share it widely and consider subscribing to the Hartmann Report. The work of pushing back against the spectacle, the silence, and the slow normalization of all of this depends entirely on readers who refuse to look away and who keep passing the word along.
The 1925 Klan marchers thought the Mall belonged to them. It didn’t then and it doesn’t belong to their heirs now.
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No Kings Movement and 'All Roads Lead to the South' to Protest GOP Voting Rights Attacks
"The politicians attacking voting rights today are clinging to a shrinking vision of America rooted in fear, exclusion, and minority rule."
May 12, 2026
Republican state lawmakers are seizing on the US Supreme Court's recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act to continue President Donald Trump's gerrymandering spree, including in Alabama, where "All Roads Lead to the South," the No Kings coalition, community members, faith leaders, and other organizations plan to come together on Saturday, May 16, in protest.
They are set to start at 9:00 am CT at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon and the site of Bloody Sunday, "for prayer and remembrance—on sacred ground, in reverence for those who marched in 1965, in gratitude for the moral courage they showed the nation, and in faith that the same spirit that moved them still moves in us."
The organizers then intend to hold a rally at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery from 1:00-5:00 pm. People across the United States outraged by GOP attacks on voting rights are also planning solidarity actions throughout the day.
"Sixty years after Bloody Sunday, we are once again being called to meet this moment with collective action. The attacks on voting rights across the South are not isolated incidents, they are part of a coordinated effort to weaken Black political power," said Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown, co-founders of Black Voters Matter Fund, a leading partner organization of All Roads Lead to the South, in a Tuesday statement.
"But we have faced these challenges before, and we know our power," the pair continued. "Alabama has always been sacred ground in the fight for freedom, and this moment demands that we rise together once again. We are proud to stand with the No Kings coalition and people across the nation to make clear that our communities will not be pushed backward, our voices will not be silenced, and our power will not be denied."
Since Trump returned to office last year, the No Kings movement has organized three national days of action—in June, October, and March. Americans also held thousands of protests nationwide on May Day, or International Workers' Day, earlier this month.
"What is happening right now is deliberate, coordinated, and being driven by Republican politicians committed to abusing power and rigging the system to hold control for themselves and silence Black voters," the No Kings Steering Committee said Tuesday. "They plan on overturning every protection available for Black voters and will not be satisfied until they reinstate every Jim Crow-era law."
"That's why the No Kings coalition is joining in solidarity with All Roads Lead to the South this Saturday in Alabama and across the country for an emergency national protest against the attacks on voting rights by the Supreme Court and the swift effort by Republican-controlled states to disenfranchise millions of Black voters," the committee continued.
On May 16th, join civil and voting rights groups in a National day of Action in Montgomery, Alabama. Go to allroadsleadtothesouth.com for more details. #votingrights #50501movement
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— 50501: The People’s Movement ❌👑 (@50501movement.bsky.social) May 9, 2026 at 12:48 PM
GOP state lawmakers in Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas have already responded to demands from Trump and fears of losing a slim majority in the US House of Representatives by redrawing their congressional districts to favor Republicans in the November midterm elections.
Democratic state leaders in California and Virginia have tried to fight the Trump-led GOP's mid-decade redistricting by enacting new voter-approved congressional districts that favor Democrats, though both of those maps face legal challenges. Party leaders in Virginia on Monday asked the US Supreme Court to block a recent ruling against the Democratic effort.
In a case about Louisiana's districts that predated Trump's push, the US Supreme Court last month found that the state map was an "unconstitutional racial gerrymander" and eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, leading Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to suspend primary elections, even though absentee ballots had already gone out.
Tennessee lawmakers swiftly took advantage of an opportunity from that ruling by targeting their state's only majority-Black congressional district, in Memphis. As Tennesseans sued over the new map on Monday, the US Supreme Court's right-wing justices cleared the way for Alabama legislators to break up their state's majority-Black district.
"The politicians attacking voting rights today are clinging to a shrinking vision of America rooted in fear, exclusion, and minority rule. They are trying to preserve a past this country has already rejected," said the No Kings panel. "In this country, we do not answer to kings—not in the White House and not in our state houses. Power belongs to the people, and we the people will decide."
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American Society Has Proven Too Weak to Stop Dangerous, Unstable, Violent, and Egomaniacal Trump
In face of such destruction and evil, the resistance from civic society has not risen to the deadly challenge either quantitatively or qualitatively.
May 02, 2026
What are the indicators of a presumed democracy either faltering or fortifying itself against the buffeting or destructive forces of dictatorial autocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy?
Certainly, the commercial or corporate economy has developed thousands of indicators to ascertain whether the overall economy or its many subeconomies are getting better or worse. Far more than GDP, employment, profits, or inventory levels, these indicators spot trends at astounding microlevels in real time.
Who is developing the indicators for the civic community? Some groups inform us about voter turnout in micro-terms or how much commercial campaign money is flowing to candidates, or the sinking levels of local journalism, etc. But these indicators are far too few and too inadequate.
Let’s try one category of indicators that could be very useful for an introspective civic community and its supporters. The question is: “When conditions worsen, does the resistance get stronger or comparatively weaker?” Democracy in its concrete manifestations for people’s livelihoods, preparedness, and posterity decays or recovers and deepens, depending on the answer.
Space precludes citing more instances of civic resistance getting weaker while the exploiters and greedhounds get bolder, richer, more ravaging, and out of control.
The outlook is not good. With the advent of dictator Donald Trump and his dangerously unstable, violent, egomaniacal personality, the resistance from civic society has not risen to the deadly challenge either quantitatively or qualitatively.
Examples: Are many more new citizen groups (call them startups) forming all over the country to push for the removal of Trump from office via Impeachment? Are there expanding demonstrations of massive revulsions over Trump wrecking, weakening, and endangering America and the world? No. Three demonstrations with the weak moniker of No Kings, without follow-up civic mobilizations in congressional districts, doesn’t cut the mustard.
A detailed report in March by the respected V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden concluded that Trump and his administration are dismantling democracy in the US at a speed that “is unprecedented in modern history.” (See Common Dreams: “Trump Is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History’: Watchdog”.)
The institutional resistance of checks and balances collapsed before January 20, 2025, but has worsened continually since that woeful day—Congress, the Supreme Court, and many state governors and legislators AWOL or actually enabling Trump.
Let’s get into specifics on the ground. Advertising dollars are controlling more content on and access to the media than ever, with fewer public critiques, regulatory action, or resistance from civic watchdog groups.
More programming and promotions are harming children (via smartphones especially) through direct marketing to children bypassing parental control than ever, yet there are few adequately staffed civic groups or parents countering this assault. There are outcries in the media, state legislatures, and congressional hearings, but the intensity of these electronic child molesters (pushing violence, pornography, junk food and drink, and mental anguish) continues without countervailing enforced regulations and substantial powerful civic and educational responses and protections of our vulnerable children.
Our public airwaves and public lands are under more corporate dominance than ever, yet the Federal Communications Commission, the federal forest and land management protectors are either asleep at the wheel or they are supporting corrosive corporatism. The public interest watchdog presence is almost zero on the public’s access to radio and television, and is overwhelmed by the relentless encroachment on the public lands by fossil fuel, mining, timber, and other commercial predators.
A swollen, unaudited Pentagon budget fueling the ever more aggressive American Military Empire has too few civic organizations resisting the annual violation of federal law requiring all federal agencies to provide an annual auditable budget to Congress.
The burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, and taxpayer bailouts (government-guaranteed capitalism) are running amok. Large companies and mismanaged corporations go to Washington, not to bankruptcy court, which is the common option for small businesses. The conservative National Taxpayer Union reflects passivity.
More dark money PACs corrupting electoral campaigns has not provoked new civic groups of any size to stop this devastating selling of our elections that twists people’s votes and blocks progressive agendas. Even though 842 local government resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United have been passed since the 2010 Supreme Court Ruling; 22 States and Washington DC have called for a Constitutional Amendment; and 121 Members of Congress are co-sponsoring legislation to overturn Citizens United, much more needs to be done.
Gambling is now accessible everywhere and spreading from college and professional athletics, to youngsters’ smartphones. The greedy “gaming” industry and its recent sleazy cousin—the “predictions market”—are a menace and out of control. Where is the countervailing civic power to oppose this decaying of our culture? Organized religion—long the bulwark—mostly gave up its role in countering the gambling craze years ago.
After 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999 at the Columbine Colorado High School many American families demanded gun safety controls. The story of this tragedy was all over the media for days. Now there is an average of one mass shooting a day while Congress yawns. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence, “In 2022, 48,204 people died due to gun violence in the US, the second highest total ever recorded. Each day, an average of 132 people died from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes.” Again, no new powerful civic organizations are being started.
There are more tax escapes for big business and the super rich than ever. Major profitable corporations, like Tesla, paid no federal income tax last year. Meanwhile the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget shrinks, and demands for rigorous congressional hearings and investigations go nowhere. No start-up civic groups, other than Patriotic Millionaires. Where are the new start-ups to join with existing tax reform groups to stop the attack on the IRS? Candidates for office don’t spend much time talking about these gigantic tax escapees to mobilize focused public opinion to stop tax abuses by corporations and wealthy individuals which expand deficits and starve public budgets.
Space precludes citing more instances of civic resistance getting weaker while the exploiters and greedhounds get bolder, richer, more ravaging, and out of control.
Our Ralph Nader Radio Hour will soon devote a program to the absence of civil society indicators and the collapsing civic resistance to the overthrow of representative government by the corporate state.
Stay tuned and, by your questions and demands, get your politicians to make this deterioration front and center in their campaigning for this November’s election.
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