A bitter anniversary: The American ideal turns 250 amid turmoil

These days, a revolutionary document — denouncing 27 “abuses and usurpations” by a tyrant — is circulating in Donald Trump’s United States. Among other grievances, it accuses the tyrant of “obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners,” obstructing “the administration of justice,” “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world” and dispatching “large armies” to cities.

That document is the Declaration of Independence.

This Saturday marks its 250th anniversary. And, amidst the ongoing “No Kings” movement — a series of citizen protests rallying against Trump’s authoritarian tendencies — it could serve to prove, once again, what Mark Twain (allegedly) said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

The text pinpointed the birth of a nation on July 4, 1776, with uncommon precision. It also served — via Thomas Jefferson’s inspired prose — to illuminate a globally impactful ideal to which this imperfect and battered democracy still aspires.

Jefferson, then a 33-year-old Virginian politician (and already the owner of human beings inherited from his father), expressed the ideal in the second paragraph of the text, perhaps the most famous in the history of political rhetoric. It begins like this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

As a significant anniversary, this one invites a totemic examination of conscience for a society that’s becoming increasingly less patriotic, especially among young people. Only 31%, according to Gallup, say that they are “very or extremely proud to be American,” down from 78% in 2015. The polling firm concluded in another survey that 77% of the population believes the Founding Fathers wouldn’t be happy with what their descendants have done with their creation.

Today, as the world has just met its first trillionaire (Elon Musk), some questions posed by the Declaration of Independence — a document whose opening lines are memorized in school — remain as relevant as ever: why are men still not created equal? And what has become of the American Dream?

Trump’s return — with his insatiable thirst for executive power — has revived interest in what comes next: the colonists’ grievances against King George III of England, recorded in later, more prosaic paragraphs. Therefore, among the latest publications surrounding the commemoration, the contribution of historian Robert Parkinson stands out. He has written a book — Tyrants and Rogues (2026) — that examines these grievances “for the first time in 120 years.”

He had already planned to write it, but Trump’s return spurred him to finish it quickly.

“[The document] speaks about the corruption of the judiciary, executive orders, civilian control of the military, how you get justice... There’s also stuff in there about immigration and citizenship. Does it sound familiar?” the author asks, in an interview with EL PAÍS. “The preamble contains some of the most beautiful sentences ever written and sets a mission statement that is worth our time, but it’s also a reminder that, for many people, this still isn’t a land of opportunity. That’s always been the problem.”

To try to decipher the state of the so-called “American Dream” at such an ailing age, EL PAÍS spoke with nearly two dozen historians, activists, White House allies and politicians. The aim was also to understand what it means that the anniversary is taking place amidst the administration’s campaign to rewrite history through threats against museums and universities, while blurring the separation of church and state. The Trump White House has been issuing decrees about “restoring sanity” and returning to a narrative that inspires “a renewed love” for the United States, sidelining uncomfortable issues such as slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples.

“Present-day concerns often influence the questions we ask of the past,” Frank Cogliano warns in a conversation with EL PAÍS. The historian has written and edited a dozen books on the American Revolution, the last two of which were published in June (The American Revolution at 250. Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding and Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours, with Peter S. Onuf).

A professor at the University of Edinburgh, he defines the Declaration of Independence as “an impossible standard” that’s almost beyond reproach, but which must be read in light of the contradictions of those who signed it at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. “The man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned at least 607 people over the course of his very long life. We know that a fifth of the people in the colonies, now new states, were enslaved on the fourth of July 1776. And that those colonies were kind of claiming territory that was inhabited by Indigenous people,” the historian reminds us. “Even so, it’s fair to acknowledge that it’s an inspiring text that has set the bar very high; very few countries have such explicit principles whose fulfillment their citizens have been able to demand for these past 250 years.”

Cogliano describes Trump’s attempts to whitewash history as “simplistic,” but also as proof that Americans are “smarter than their leaders think,” because they aren’t going along with it so easily.

“Jefferson is America writ small. His complexity can be explained as the dilemma between those eloquent words and his [denying] the fundamental rights of people of African descent. If we solve Jefferson’s problem, we can solve America’s problem. Good luck,” the historian jokes.

The other big question is whether the “American experiment” — as its 350 million subjects like to call this democracy — will survive Trump. It’s unclear whether the Founding Fathers’ design of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (1789) was prepared for the emergence of such a figure.

The petrified system that stems from these documents has gone half a century without amendments to the fundamental text. And today, the Supreme Court — controlled by a conservative supermajority — advocates for an “originalist” interpretation of the law.

“[The current president] is [the Founding Fathers’] worst nightmare. They built a highly fragmented and counter-majoritarian system aimed at constraining executive power to allow us to survive a demagogue like Trump,” says Steve Levitsky, co-author of the bestselling book How Democracies Die (2018). “But there were a bunch of things that they could not possibly anticipate, like political parties. They did not anticipate the inevitable expansion of the modern administrative state. And they couldn’t anticipate that, because it never happened before Trump, that a single leader would gain personal control over a political party that in turn controlled all of the branches of government and the whole administrative state.”

Will it survive? “Probably,” Levitsky notes, “but not thanks to the design of our democracy, but rather because [our] institutions have put down very strong roots, for better or for worse.”

For now, the tentacles of Trumpian revisionism cannot reach the gentle hill on which Jefferson built the mansion overlooking his plantation, just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. He called it Monticello. Two Sundays ago, it was peak season there for historical tourism.

The estate is managed by a private foundation. And none of the tours offered to visitors spare the details that tarnish the great man’s legacy. Jefferson believed that “Africans were inferior to whites,” according to Parkinson, but he also expressed certain anti-slavery ideas that others removed from his first draft of the Declaration. This was because the glue that held the 13 colonies together (they distrusted each other) was “the two things everybody seemed to agree on is that they are terrified of two things; Native massacre and slave insurrections.” Jefferson refers to these latter people in his most famous text as “merciless savages.”

Trump has attributed the failings of his predecessors (Jefferson would eventually become the third president and George Washington the first) to the fact that they were men of their time. However, most historians consulted by EL PAÍS aren’t convinced of this argument. There was an alternative: of the 56 signatories of the Declaration, 15 (including Benjamin Franklin) were not slaveholders.

“As a historian, I think we always have to approach the past on its own terms, and that takes humility. The further back you go, the stranger the world gets. The question isn’t whether to ignore the uncomfortable parts or fixate on them. It’s whether we actually understand them,” says Daniel Gullotta, a professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, a conservative-leaning institute at Ohio State University. “Judging the founders purely by our standards tells you a lot about us and very little about them.”

The Monticello tour that goes into the most detail is also the longest. For two-and-a-half hours, an eloquent and empathetic guide recounts the lives of these enslaved people and the 30-year relationship their owner maintained with one of them: Sally Hemmings. It began after the death of his first wife, in Paris, where they both witnessed the French Revolution.

Jefferson and Hemmings had six children together, two of whom died in infancy. The other four were freed upon the death of their father, who never acknowledged them. Not even, the guide explained, when no one was watching: the politician wrote some 20,000 letters and kept five diaries simultaneously (the most famous of which was an inventory of his human possessions), but in none of those pages did he refer to them or to Hemmings, whose property he bequeathed to his eldest white daughter.

Except for this reporter, the rest of the participants in Sunday’s visit were Americans. They received the information with expressions of disgust and disbelief. At the end of the tour, when it devolved into a kind of group therapy session, a Black woman expressed her frustration at “all that’s unknown about the [people] who lived, subjugated, at Monticello.” A young white high school teacher said she had signed up so that she would “be able to teach her students better.” The others applauded this intention.

The visitors were under the impression that they had received information that’s long been ignored by most of their compatriots. However, thanks to the work done by historians like Annette Gordon-Reed — who proved, back in the 1990s, that the Hemmings affair wasn’t a “legend” — Jefferson’s contradictions have long been “self-evident truths” that can be upheld.

These days, the nonfiction bestseller lists in the United States aren’t dominated by books like Freedom Round the Globe (2026), in which Sarah Pearsall innovatively offers a history of the American Revolution in a global context. Instead, you’ll find contributions from two Fox News hosts, as well as a book written by Eric Metaxas, an intellectual closely associated with Trumpism.

What should be the response to the uncomfortable information about the American Revolution? Well, the answer leads us to a culture war, pitting two irreconcilable sides against each other.

They’re identified by two numbers. On one side is the 1776 Commission, created by Trump at the end of his first term and reincarnated as Freedom 250, an entity tasked by the White House with organizing the semiquincentennial (a term used to refer to the anniversary). The celebrations will be held in Washington… a city that, at times, resembles Pyongyang, as it’s saturated with portraits of Trump. There will be two Trump rallies, an IndyCar race, a rodeo and even a state fair. These events, of course, follow the UFC fight that was held at the White House.

A couple of weeks ago, in a conversation with EL PAÍS, the CEO of Freedom 250 — Trump ally Keith Krach — defended the program, arguing that it’s something more than a MAGA festival. “The greatest export of this great country isn’t a product: it’s freedom,” he declared

But freedom, as Pearsall reminds us, can be used for many things. “For example, to seize Native American lands,” the historian notes. She emphasizes the urgency of “standing up and wresting the idea of 1776 from the hands of the MAGA movement,” because “revolutionary history is a much more interesting and complicated matter” than the far-right version.

Georgetown professor Michael Kazin, for his part, calls on the American left to set aside its “cynicism” and embrace a “practical” form of patriotism. “We must defend the original idea of America: that anyone who comes here and subscribes to the American ideals of individual liberties, democratic institutions and the separation of powers can integrate into the country just as well as those who share ethnic and cultural origins with the colonists.”

On the other side is the 1619 Project, a journalistic initiative by Nikole-Hannah Jones. In 2019, The New York Times proposed turning back the clock on the country’s founding to the arrival of the first slave ships from Africa. This generated an interesting debate by placing the Black experience at the center of understanding American history. The 1619 Project was also met with opposition from the most distinguished historian of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood, who died three weeks ago, on the eve of the anniversary, after being struck by a car at the age of 94.

In 2020 came the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement and the acts of iconoclasm against Confederate and colonialist statues. Many believed that the United States was ready for a new racial dawn. Six years later, however, it seems like just another missed opportunity, as well as a source of “melancholy” and “rage” for Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Black professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and one of the most respected intellectuals in the country.

“The United States has always had a divided soul, imagining itself as both a beacon of freedom and a white republic,” he explained a couple of weeks ago, in a Washington bookstore. “You can’t be true to that dual commitment without falling into contradiction.”

Glaude has just published America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (2026). It begins with the very first celebration — the 50th — which took place on July 4, 1826. That was also the day on which, coincidentally, two of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson and John Adams, died. In the book, the author concludes that these commemorations often end up becoming “moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present.”

Glaude’s portrayal of the bicentennial celebration in 1976 — a mirror in which this year’s commemoration inevitably sees itself reflected — is less positive than the image that it projected onto the collective consciousness. The bicentennial is generally remembered as a celebration that managed to reconcile a divided country, one still licking its wounds after the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of president Richard Nixon.

It was certainly important, M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska recounts. She’s the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (2017). In her book, she argues that the bicentennial brought different perspectives to the national narrative, including ones from the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist waves, as well as the struggle for Native American rights.

She explains that Americans “took the opportunity to discover a new relationship with their history, thanks to the money that the government injected into local institutions.” Museums sprang up across the country and reenactment culture (amateur theatrical recreations of the past) took root. The bicentennial also ushered in a golden age of publishing for revolutionary studies.

None of that is expected this time around. Historian Daniel Immerwahr — the author of the influential How to Hide an Empire (2023) — believes that, half a century from now, the semiquincentennial will be remembered as “the first major anniversary where one of the biggest stories, climate change, lingers in the background,” and as the first commemoration “that sees the United States declining in global power…” “Trump has exacerbated that, but he didn’t start it,” he says.

“I suspect that, in another 50 years,” Immerwahr adds, “people looking back on this time will be far more interested in what we did or didn’t do about climate change than what we did or didn’t do about Trump.”

Convinced that the anniversary will cement his historical stature, Trump has his own builder’s obsessions. He made this clear at his rally on Wednesday, June 24, when he kicked off the festivities with another celebration of his ego. For him, the commemoration will be a success if “the spirit of ’76” ends up producing a 250-foot-tall Triumphal Arch on the National Mall, as well as the National Garden of American Heroes, with hundreds of statues along the banks of the Potomac River.

Two and a half centuries ago, those waters were vital to the success of a revolution that was waged against a tyrant.

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