The Fourth of July and the sad promise of a riotous 250th American birthday party in 2026

One of America’s founding patriots, John Adams, a delegate from Massachusetts at the assembly in Philadelphia that had voted to declare their independence from Great Britain, wrote to his wife, Abigail, the day afterwards to describe that momentous decision.

With lead drafter Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman, Adams had helped craft the new country’s “Declaration of Independence”. The document became the foundation for what citizens thought about their new country and what they hoped it could become. 

As an expression of the political ideas of the Enlightenment, the declaration has had a major influence on the leaders of other liberation movements, including Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh.

His declaration of Vietnamese independence in 1945 stated, “‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.”

Despite frequent difficulties in delivering the mail back in the 18th century, John and his wife, Abigail, maintained a correspondence between themselves over decades, even when war or great distances separated them.

He quietly relied upon her common sense and astute judgement far more than most people realised at the time. Adams eventually became the country’s first vice-president and then president, after George Washington, and his chief confidante remained his wife. (Notably prickly, Adams was also responsible for the Alien and Sedition Acts — statutes embraced by Donald Trump in his own policies. History has its ironies.)

In a letter to Abigail on 3 July 1776, in the immediate afterglow of his excitement over that vote for independence, John Adams wrote: 

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. [The actual vote came on the 2nd of July, but its public dissemination came two days later, on the fourth, thus the annual holiday.]

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.

It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. — I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. — Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Nostalgia and hope

Like most American children, I came to love the Fourth of July, just as Adams had predicted we should. Until I was a teenager, I lived in a small town near Philadelphia, the city where that very declaration had been written. 

On this holiday, there was a local parade with detachments of fire fighters and their fire trucks, veterans organisations, scout troops and school bands — and maybe a modest military honour guard for the national flag, probably from some local military reservist detachment. 

During the day, there was a swimming competition at the local community pool, the obligatory picnics and barbecues (braais), and then, to cap off the day, there was a fireworks display once twilight yielded to night. (Because New Year’s Eve in America comes in winter rather than mid-summer, naturally that holiday doesn’t get the kind of treatment in America that it receives in South Africa.) Perhaps nostalgia is not a flawless guide to memory, but I still recall 4th of July celebrations through the pleasure of a child who could be part of a great national event.

Those childhood Fourths of July came along at the peak of the post-war baby boom, during President Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms of office. It was during the Cold War, yes, but that was a time largely without shooting wars. And it was a period of what, in hindsight, could have felt like a time of deep national satisfaction: Things were good, and they would certainly get better, so most people believed.

In the years that followed, however, the rise of the counterculture, the civil rights and feminist revolutions all exploded on the scene, even as the Vietnam conflict and the growing protests against it greatly roiled the waters of that earlier era. Even so, during those contentious years, around the nation, people still gathered to enjoy their picnics and to watch the fireworks displays, even if angry debates and more threatened a rupture of the national consensus.

Still, together with Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July continued to represent one of two nodal points of the nation’s historical storyline.

Fast forward to 1976. In that bicentennial year of the country’s independence, the horrors of Richard Nixon’s presidency, and of the Vietnam conflict, had been put aside as the nation strove to forget what those two deep blots on the nation’s history had meant. The nation seemed ready to breathe more easily with the bicentennial commemoration. 

The national calendar was filled with celebrations and events. Those “tall ships” — the beautiful, classic sailing vessels that serve as training ships for many of the world’s navies — arrived in New York City en masse for a breathtaking display; the National Folklife Festival on Washington’s National Mall delivered an exciting week that led to a sparkling outdoor concert and the inevitable fireworks. And other events, displays and concerts took place all around the nation. In 1976, the holiday was not a partisan affair.

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Later on, for my family and me, in the years after a three-year period of assignment in the United States from mid-1976 to 1979, we were again living and working abroad in Asia and Africa. While our official celebrations of the Fourth of July in each country we lived in did not include fireworks, we worked to create festive, non-political events designed to be inclusive.

These events brought together resident Americans, friends and associates from among the respective host countries’ populations, as well as host nation official representatives who delivered messages. While they were generally anodyne words, they spoke to good bilateral relations — as well as hopes for better.

Sometimes we could draw upon the talents of a local choir, such as the Asihlabelele Choir in Eswatini (Swaziland), to sing medleys of traditional American patriotic songs at our official receptions, in addition to the two national anthems. (My wife and several of her musical colleagues did similar duty in Japan, drawing upon both an American and a Japanese repertoire to entertain the assembled gatherings.)

While there may have been strife in the world, celebrations of the Fourth of July still seemed to be a moment where we could embrace the hopes John Adams had for future generations.

Trump’s public glorification

Sadly, this year feels different, and next year may be worse. Just a few weeks ago, America’s incumbent president hijacked what had originally been planned as a restrained celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the American army and attempted to turn it into something else entirely. That may be a foretaste of worse to come. 

The parade on 14 June became a rather lacklustre affair that supposedly had been designed by Trump to rival the magnificence of Paris’s traditional Bastille Day parade, the pomp and ceremony of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London — or one of those massed parades comprising thousands of uniformed personnel, tanks and missiles on mobile launchers that take place in Pyongyang and Moscow.

But the jumped-up parade on 14 June was effectively kidnapped into being a birthday parade in honour of the president, despite subsequent White House denials that anything like that had even been contemplated.

Beyond that parade, and looking forward, remember the president has demanded his “One Big, Beautiful Bill” — a massive budget and tax bill covering nearly the entire government — must be passed by Congress and delivered to him for his ceremonial signing on the Fourth of July.

Assuming it passes with both houses of Congress in full agreement of all its provisions by that date — something still uncertain by the time of this writing — Trump will undoubtedly insist upon staging a glitzy signing event to coincide with the nation’s birthday — and thus his own public glorification.

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But we should not forget that next year, Trump will still be president as the country marks its semiquincentennial (250th) birthday. You can be assured Donald Trump will want a gigantic event commemorating both the country’s birth — and his own. After all, as one French king once put it, L’etat c’est moi [I am the state], and you can bet Donald J Trump believes in that adage as well for his own land. 

But any such celebration in 2026 will come amid the mid-term election cycle for the entire House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and hundreds of state and local offices. Trump will undoubtedly be girded for battle as he excoriates his enemies, and probably will still be blathering on about blaming Joe Biden for all the economic, diplomatic and other problems his administration faces halfway through his term of office.

Included in this, almost certainly, will be using that claim for his inability to end the Ukraine War or the conflicts of the Middle East, as well as the dislocations and ructions he himself has brought about in the global trading system, as he constantly changes the nation’s tariffs.

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But on 4 July 2026, Trump almost certainly will be confronting demonstrations against his ICE and deportation policies, and the shrinking social welfare net (including cuts in Medicaid, SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and many other programmes), and the ballooning national debt and government budget deficit brought on by his “One Big, Beautiful Bill”.

On the Fourth of July itself, he will be wrapping himself in the flag, or as many of them as he can hold, as he attempts to capture the national celebrations on the Mall of the anniversary for his own glorification. He will be unable to resist such a temptation. 

The country’s 250th birthday party will become contested, partisan territory, if Donald Trump has any say in the matter. Remember, he once promised, “he alone can fix things”. But it may well turn out that he will only be able to devastate them. If he could but know, John Adams’ shade would not be pleased as yet one more national symbol becomes coarsened and personalised by this president. DM