“You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.”

That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people. The only thing he had to do was—for once in his life—not act like an insane egomaniac.

He couldn’t do it.

As things are developing, we’ll remember the story of America’s grandest commemorations as follows:

Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself. Last night, he posted the following indictment of his own program on his Truth Social platform:

Translated into plain English, the president was complaining that seven of the nine acts scheduled to headline the July 4 weekend musical program canceled within 48 hours of one another because they realized that the event was degenerating into a hyperpartisan salute to Trump personally. His proposed solution? Replace the canceled acts with a Trump rally speech! A speech that will focus on Trump’s outrage that a judge blocked him from renaming the Kennedy Center after himself!

On July 4, 1776, Congress declared not only the severance of the political tie between 13 British colonies and their former homeland but also the end of monarchical government in the United States. For 150 years before 1776, the American colonies were ruled by a sequence of queens and kings. The names of those monarchs were inscribed on the American map: Virginia, Jamestown, Charleston, Annapolis, Georgia, and in innumerable King Streets and Queen Streets. Then, on one parchment, the new nation repudiated its political origin, and declared that “all men are created equal.” Whatever those words meant, however much slaveholder hypocrisy attended them, they promised a republican future for the people of the land.

The man who assumed responsibility for organizing the 250th commemoration of those words instead decided to make the day a royalist celebration of himself: seeking to emblazon his face on coinage and currency, displaying his image on banners in downtown Washington, and scheduling the central event of the celebration—a televised cage fight—for his own birthday on June 14. A cage fight may seem to some a barbarous way to honor Thomas Jefferson’s great manifesto. But many Americans will enjoy it, and on an occasion such as this, there’s room for a wide range of activities. There’s no room, however, to elevate the presidency created by the revolution of 1776 into a gaudy cult of personality. Trump’s drive to transform July 4, 2026, into a colossal national Day of Trump instead has triggered a rebellious update of the “Spirit of ’76.”

The Americans alive in 1776 shared and read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” That pamphlet denounced, 250 years before the event, the pretensions of Trump’s version of America 250: Government by kings, Paine wrote, “was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones.”

Trump’s effort to rebrand the semiquincentennial as the Day of Trump left no time, budget, or effort available for the true purpose of the anniversary. As his own self-celebration has fizzled, a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. The Reflecting Pool will be repainted too blue by an overpaid no-bid contractor. The statues on the Memorial Bridge will be gilded too brightly by another overpaid no-bid contractor. There’s a project to erect an Albert Speer–style triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. But Trump has failed to deliver the victories that the arch might have memorialized—and as the war in Iran has stalemated, so the plans for the arch have stalled. Most symbolic of all, the White House is flanked by a stop-start construction site where the East Wing used to stand. Trump shook down government favor-seekers for enough money to begin work on a presidential ballroom complex, but he did not shake enough to finish it. Now the taxpayer is being asked to pay the balance. A federal judge has ordered work paused pending a vote in Congress, and Trump has whittled down his majorities in the House and Senate to the point where he apparently cannot pass a funding bill. If he loses control of either house in November, construction is unlikely to resume. Instead of a Trump Ballroom, the most conspicuous feature of the Trump White House in 2026 is a gaping Trump Hole.

The greatest of all Fourth of July orations was delivered in 1852, on the 76th anniversary of American independence, by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York. In the opening passages of that speech, Douglass observed ominously: “The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times.” Yet even as Douglass foresaw the coming Civil War and lamented the nation’s flaws, he still expressed hope that “high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny.” Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment. But the nation honored by the glorious moment still retains the power of recovery and renewal praised by Douglass. As we contemplate the farce of Trump Day, we can turn our imaginations to what yet might be for America at 300.

We as individuals may or may not live to see it, but we can believe in it all the same. We can believe in it all the more fervently for this experience of living through a chapter of American history that so flagrantly betrays the Founders’ hopes and so arduously tests the Founders’ legacy.