If you had to go by the landing page for Freedom250, the mascot for the semiquincentennial celebration of America’s founding is Donald Trump . There is no better symbol. He tough-guys a finger out beneath the announcement, “WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN AGE.” It’s embarrassing to listen to someone talk to themselves when they think they’re alone; more so when they lie to themselves and believe it. But he is, if nothing else, accidentally sincere. Freedom250 is, in his mind, the peak of this Golden Age, and Trump will go to work every day to make it true.
This has been communicated to the public: The Golden Age is promised to Trump and to people like him and no one else. Outside of uniformed service members keeping imaginary terrorists from striking Trump’s algae pit, Trump’s “Great American State Fair” is drawing crowds on par with RFK Jr. hosting an Ebola Natural Immunity Festival. Like the old Onion headline about ska bands, musicians onstage regularly outnumber the audience. Fox News reporters lying about attendance are lucky that the dozen people standing on a giant empty lawn behind them are mostly sympathetic viewers. One idle pan from the cameraman, and America might see that Donald Trump went to throw a party and a golf course broke out.
As is the case with much of the Trump era, Trump has erected another perfect monument to the record-setting corruption he represents . They say the rich don’t get that way by spending money, and he hasn’t. As your eyes take in fake building pedestals hovering two feet off the ground, you immediately get how, per Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz, Trump needed only a year to take home 110 times the amount that the “ Biden Crime Family” earned in its entire confabulated existence. Put another way: You may not agree with what Freedom250 has to say, but you can see every dollar of the undisclosed private-sector donations, diverted funding and no-bid contract they didn’t spend on it. The Golden Age is promised to Trump and to people like him. Whatever the cost of the bad food, worse entertainment and a triumphal arch that looks like it was made by the company that produces poured-concrete decorations for the Home Depot garden center — none of it adds up to the $68 million stolen from the Department of the Interior. Like everything else about this welcoming Golden Age, it costs a fortune and looks cheap, but don’t worry: It also doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. In that last respect, it is at least thematically appropriate. As a wise student of American history once said, “This stuff’ll break your heart, kid.” In this respect, Trump has unwittingly created a fitting update for one of the stories we can tell about the Republic: the long path taken, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, between the idea and the reality, where falls the shadow. When you’re a kid, America looms like the omniparent. In the same sense that Trump would like, it protects and disciplines us all, and it is older than you and smarter than you, and you either don’t question it or respond accordingly when told not to. Study its history long enough, and instead it starts to feel like a well-meaning but lazy kid you’re rooting for to finally get it together. This nation’s promise — this incredibly humane idea to which we pledged ourselves — is enough to break your heart, just never so much as its being so indolently or so painstakingly again unfulfilled. Martin Luther King spoke to this issue better than anyone, 187 years past due on our promissory notes, not far from the future site of the Great American State Fair. That was 63 years and a Voting Rights Act ago.
We built room for improvement into the contract drawn up in Philadelphia in 1787, an attested goal to craft “a more perfect union.” There was always tomorrow, until Trump foreclosed on it as no longer necessary. We’re the hottest country in the world. We’re perfect already. But what Trump and his party sell today as something like Maximum America feels like the terminal stage of a disappointing child, who gives up and rationalizes that this is all he can ever be. The got-it-in-one message of the Great American State Fair and Trumpism writ large is this: We are done. Like an aimless 30-something stretching a trust-fund check every month and selling off family jewels to cover an emergency here or there, the underlying presumption is that there is no more justice or prosperity on offer and no more to pursue — or at least none for you. It’s the political expression of the infrastructural proposition that nobody is coming to fix the bridge . There will never be anything wrong with it in the eyes of the people who will never use it. There was always tomorrow, until Trump foreclosed on it. Perfection needs no explanation, and, if one is demanded, “it’s meant to be like that” will do. This is how Trump could build a Great American State Fair that inadvertently serves as a monument to America’s crumbling infrastructure made out of crumbling infrastructure. That seemingly 99.9% are staying the hell away from it functions as its own monument to Trumpism’s deadbeat solution for all problems of government and economics: Whenever too many people need too much of either, remove the people. As is the case when only eight people are watching a band that seems like “real country” to whichever fascist lanyard-dweeb approved them for the Great American State Fair, the fault doesn’t lie with the promoters but with the audience. The No. 1 obstruction to welfare solvency was letting people qualify for it. The way to fix the budget for executive branch services is to set it at zero. We will reduce housing costs by deporting people who might buy houses and create enough jobs by uncreating the applicants. The only thing outshining the vile, cheap slapstick insult of Trump’s Freedom250 Kickback Festival is the Supreme Court denying the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship. We have achieved the exact right amount of America; any observable problems are the product of the wrong Americans.
There is a mirthless history joke to tell here, about how these Know Nothings aren’t really any different from the last ones. Or another, about a de-woked Americafest that whitewashes our legacy of ethnic cleansing while the current administration screams about the criminality of denying them a new one. Or how those in power did what they wanted again, paid their friends again, half-assed the consolation prize and stopped pretending there’s more coming.
But that’s what Trump has built: a selectively edited present and a fabulist’s past. Having perfected both, there is no need of future. This is the Golden Age. It doesn’t get any better than this, and it won’t.
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