Author: Trudy Rubin

WASHINGTON — The Great American State Fair on the National Mall should have been the rousing centerpiece of America’s 250th birthday celebration. Instead, it is a perfect tribute to President Donald Trump.

With its cheap, slapdash imagining of Trump’s America and its constant political homage to POTUS and MAGA, the exhibit has little to do with commemorating the Declaration of Independence, U.S. history, or American culture. The exhibits lack even the delicious, tacky, lively atmosphere of state fairs (the few visible animals I saw were all fake).

With few exceptions, it is a vapid, empty insult to the best aspects of this nation.

When I remember the Semiquincentennial, I will be thinking more about scenes of Brazilian soccer fans visiting Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and warm interactions between locals across the country and visiting World Cup tourists. These personal exchanges may offset some of the hostility so many countries feel about Trump’s foreign policy.

And yet, I’m glad I visited the fair on Monday because it reminds me of how different the president’s vision is from the real America that is ignored in this tribute to Trump.

A true celebration could have displayed the best of this country, what the United States has gotten right, while providing the moment for serious reflection on what has gone wrong — and what needs desperately to be remedied at home and in our foreign relations. No matter how uphill that struggle seems under Trump.

Instead, the Great American State Fair mainly consists of several long, white, one-story buildings fronted by fake Greek columns and punctuated by closed doors. The structures extend on either side of large expanses of mall greenery which were almost empty, as the 88-degree heat sent the scant numbers of visitors inside in in search of air-conditioning.

Behind those doors are small exhibits by each state (11 of which, including Pennsylvania, opted out due to the politicization of the fair or cost concerns), or by U.S. government departments (including “WAR”) and agencies and religious groups. Most state exhibits are tourism displays with posters, literature, or videos, with a few exceptions like South Dakota, whose state historic commission mounted excellent posters about the vivid characters, including women and Sioux leaders, who settled its land.

Towering over the few attendees out in the sun is a 110-foot Ferris wheel (which has been mostly stationary because of electrical problems) and a small mock-up of Trump’s planned and controversial Arch of Triumph topped by gold angels.

The image portrayed is of a country isolated from its own people and the world.

However, visitors can collect Trump literature from AMAC (the Association of Mature American Citizens), listen to a Bible lecture, and hear how “America shall be saved” from a group called “The Great Awakening.” They can bid for a $700 “marriage getaway,” sign up their children for a Trump savings account, or fill out a recruitment form for the U.S. military or U.S. Secret Service. They can also view a copy of the limited edition “Patriot Passport” with Trump’s photo on it inside a glass case at the U.S. Department of State exhibit and get a free paper copy.

Trump, Trump, and more Trump. The Washington celebration of our 250th birthday wasn’t supposed to look this way.

Congress started planning for this anniversary in 2016, when it created America250, a bipartisan commission that was supposed to program nonpartisan events for all Americans. The idea was to unify the country in celebration.

Its original plans were focused on a parade through the capital with “diverse floats” and marching bands, along with an energetic festival of the nation’s cultural diversity on the mall organized by the Smithsonian.

Anyone who has ever attended the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the mall can imagine how wonderful this could have been. On one occasion when I was there, one side of the mall was celebrating the culture of India and the other Louisiana and Cajun culture, with bands of old-timers and their acolytes playing washboards, banjos, and accordions, while tents dished out Cajun food.

This year, one side of the mall might have hosted cultures of the immigrants who have built America, and the other could have presented tributes to the Declaration of Independence, its impact around the world, and how its flaws regarding slavery and women were remediated by law.

Instead, Trump squeezed out America250 by virtually replacing it with Freedom 250, which is partly funded with taxpayer money and partly by donors. The New York Times has detailed how donors were offered access to Trump for million-dollar contributions.

Instead of funding projects connected to key moments in the fight for American independence, Trump’s group focused on his MAGA agenda, his love for spectacle, and his person. Thus, his vision of America’s 250th birthday celebration has centered on his arch, on a $60 million UFC match on the White House lawn, and on an IndyCar race through the capital scheduled for August. As for the fair on the mall, it has been focused on an opening (political) speech by Trump (after most planned musical acts withdrew due to the fair’s partisan nature), and another rally on July Fourth.

Unity out. Division in. Who cares about celebrating our founding document and the aspirational values on which the country has been built, when Trump can have circuses that celebrate only him?

And that is why I point to the World Cup games as a sign that Americans still know how to display their best qualities as a people. What particularly moved me was watching the huge kilted Scottish contingent break through sometimes insular Bostonians’ reserve when it belted out John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” at Fenway Park.

Americans are so much better than this sterile exhibition on the mall. In the warmth displayed across the country to World Cup visitors they have shown a welcoming nature still unsullied by Trump’s efforts to make people hate the other.

Back in the states and cities, many celebrations of July Fourth will probably still capture that warmth. It still exists. In Philadelphia, history museums are doing a terrific job of commemorating the declaration.

But you can certainly skip visiting Trump’s Great American State Fair, which reveals his total disdain for what this holiday really means.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, I can’t help recalling my 1999 visit to the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan, whose dictator had a fetish for white marble architecture decorated with gold.

As I drove around the dusty capital of Ashgabat, it was impossible to escape Saparmurad Niyazov’s face.

It was emblazoned on banners hanging from government buildings and appeared on every denomination of paper currency. Statues of the dictator (I learned there were more than 2,200 of them in a country of 4.2 million people) loomed all around the city. The oil fields of this desert backwater funded Niyazov’s whims. Much of the country’s budget went into his private slush fund — all while he slashed resources for healthcare and renamed the months of January and April after himself and his mother.

What sticks out most vividly among my memories, as President Donald Trump turns our nation’s Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself — festooning government buildings with huge banners of his face and holding a political rally on the mall Wednesday to kick off July Fourth events — is Niyazov’s arch.

The three-legged arch, sitting in the center of Ashgabat, supported an observation tower that, at 226 feet, soared higher than the nearby presidential palace. The structure was topped by a 36-foot gold plated statue of the Asian potentate that rotated constantly to face the sun. Perhaps if the planned 250-foot high “Arch de Trump” ever gets built, and blocks the view of Arlington National Cemetery, the face on the gold winged figure atop the memorial will look familiar.

It seems all dictators and wannabes have the same instincts: to build grandiose monuments of marble and gold, the bigger the better, in order to impress their subjects with their magnificence. Back in Ashgabat all that seemed bizarrely amusing. Whoever thought it could happen here?

Instead of honoring the country’s founding values and documents in this year’s celebrations, Trump is performing like a wannabe Niyazov of Turkmenistan.

The main point of the Declaration of Independence was that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” i.e., the people. The 13 colonies were quitting the British Empire because they refused to submit to a monarch who tried to rule by decree, rather than respect the elected representatives from the colonies.

Trump, who disdains any restraints on his powers and wants to rig election rules so they guarantee GOP victories, is turning the meaning of the Fourth of July on its head. I find it personally painful how this distortion has changed attitudes toward the United States all around the world.

For decades I’ve reported on the struggles of other countries to achieve the kind of free elections that most Americans have taken for granted for decades. I had the privilege of bearing witness to struggles for some form of democracy in the Soviet Union and China, in new post-Soviet nations, during the 1980s upheavals in the Philippines and South Korea, during the Arab Spring revolts, in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, and during the post-Taliban interval in Afghanistan.

Those who struggled for the right to choose their leaders often paid a terrible price. More often than not, their struggles failed or have been reversed after brief periods of freedom.

Throughout those struggles, the U.S. election system was a lodestar – even though reformers abroad may have opposed specific U.S. foreign policies or the U.S. exercise of overweening power. That admiration was especially evident in the ’80s and ’90s inside communist countries that were trying to break away from their past.

Russians listened to Voice of America (now nearly shuttered by Trump) and would eagerly query me about U.S. politics on my yearly visits to Moscow during those decades.

In 1989, I shadowed then-President of the Soviet Republic of Russia Boris Yeltsin for a day when he visited the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted inside Independence Hall. He asked the National Park ranger how the American colonies apportioned power between states and central government after independence. I realized only later that he was preparing to take Russia out of the Soviet Union and wanted tips on how the Founding Fathers managed their exit from the British Empire.

In May 1989, Chinese students erected a 33-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy statue in Tiananmen Square inspired by the Statue of Liberty. I was in Poland at the time, observing that country’s first free parliamentary elections on June 5 that were won by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement. But on June 4, I watched with horror on television, along with Polish colleagues, as the Chinese army sent tanks into Tiananmen Square.

Yet, despite hundreds to thousands of deaths (the exact figure is still unknown), Chinese democrats didn’t give up. In the 1990s, I reported on their efforts to press the central government to permit village, and then town, elections. I interviewed law students at top universities who traveled to small villages to instruct peasants on their rights according to Chinese laws that were ignored by officials.

This progress has been totally reversed by China’s hard-line dictator Xi Jinping, who also crushed democratic institutions in once autonomous Hong Kong. But as recently as 2023, it was inspiring to hear Hong Kong high schoolers, who were protesting the ongoing crackdown by Beijing, recite from memory their rights under law as they had learned in civics classes. Since then, such classes have been banned, and students must memorize rote lessons on “patriotic education” or “Xi Jinping thought.”

It saddens me now to hear self-exiled Russian liberals or Hong Kong democrats or visiting Chinese who once worked for some form of democracy at home, express shock at Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions and efforts to rig elections. Repeatedly, I get the same questions expressed with genuine bewilderment: Why isn’t it possible to stop him from doing this? How is it possible that this can happen in the United States?

Ukrainians, who have fought bravely for more than four years to save their independence from Vladimir Putin’s imperialism, ask me how a U.S. president can back a dictator who hates the West, and wants to restore the Soviet empire. As Independence Day approaches, POTUS continues to ignore the parallel between Ukraine’s courageous struggle for freedom and ours long ago against the imperial British.

Europeans have given up on Trump, and I understand why, having watched Vice President JD Vance at the 2025 Munich Security Conference praise far right, neo-Nazi parties and demean Europe’s democracies. Trump, Elon Musk, and other MAGA acolytes continue to support extremist Europeans whose values would make the Founding Fathers gag.

So it isn’t surprising that a new Pew Research Center poll reveals a steep decline in the popularity of the United States worldwide, especially over the past year. Only a median of 37% of adults polled across 36 countries hold a favorable opinion of our nation. Only 23% express confidence in Trump’s leadership of world affairs, ranking him behind Putin and Xi.

But what is even more striking is that only 39% believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its own citizens. This is how the world now views a country that was once seen as a beacon of democracy.

During July Fourth celebrations across the country, in places far away from Trump’s pollution of the capital, I hope Americans will reflect on what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us 250 years ago. For inspiration, reread the Declaration of Independence and brainstorm with friends, colleagues, and family on how to prevent the president from desecrating its principles at the polls come November.

MUNICH — Last year, at the Munich Security Conference, where top U.S. and European leaders gather each year, Vice President JD Vance gave a shocking speech that nearly broke the NATO alliance of democracies that had kept the peace in Europe for 80 years.

Vance claimed the threat to Europe was “not Russia, not China,” but rather came “from within” our NATO allies themselves — falsely accusing European democracies of stifling the radical, pro-Russia, and sometimes neo-Nazi parties that the Trump White House openly supports. The veep never even mentioned the threat from Russia, or its war on Ukraine.

The acrid impact of that speech has hung over U.S.-European relations and the future of the NATO alliance over the past year.

“Under Destruction” was the title of this year’s conference, held at the elegant Bayerischer Hof hotel. Its annual security report opened with these grim words, aimed at the “current U.S. administration”: “The world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction — rather than careful reforms and policy corrections — is the order of the day.”

And yet, this year, I heard a startlingly different tone from European leaders. Stunned by Trump’s demands and disdain, awakened by Russian aggression against Ukraine and much of Europe, furious at President Donald Trump’s threats vs. NATO ally Denmark to seize its sovereign territory of Greenland, European leaders have woken up to the need for dramatic changes — though not in the way envisioned by Trump.

“Europe has just returned from a vacation from world history,” stated German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who like other leaders here, recognized they had depended for too long on an American ally they trusted for their postwar defense.

Merz chose to speak first at the conference, taking a European leadership role (while insisting, with a nod to his country’s history, that Germany would “never again go it alone”).

“The international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed,” he said. “But I’m afraid we have to put it in even harsher terms. This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.”

Merz added, “It does not mean that we accept it as an inevitable fate. We are not at the mercy of this world. We can shape it. And I have no doubt that we will preserve our interests and our values in this world if we step up together with determination, with confidence in our own strengths.”

Indeed, the message of this European leaders meeting in Munich, in sharp contrast to European paralysis at Vance’s onslaught last year, was that they must and can organize to defend against Russia while protecting democratic values — and Ukraine — even if the United States won’t.

Of course, skeptics, including Trumpers, will claim that Europe has become irrelevant. But what I heard this weekend is far more realistic than Trump’s fantasies about a Ukraine deal that bows to Putin and envisions big business deals with Russia.

Pressed by Trump (and this was a good thing), NATO allies have significantly increased their defense budgets. Now that the U.S. has cut off almost all aid to Ukraine, Europe is paying for all U.S. weapons that are purchased for Kyiv, and the EU has pledged to cover most of Ukraine’s military budget for the next two years.

But, unlike the U.S. president, the Europeans recognize that Ukraine is a symbol of the threat posed by an imperialist, aggressive Vladimir Putin.

“With the beginning of Russia’s aggression, we entered a new phase of open conflict and wars, which changed the [security] situation more than we ever thought possible a few years ago,” Merz continued.

The Kremlin also pushes claims of defending its “Russian civilization” to include any territory where it falsely claims that Russians are mistreated. This could include the Baltics, Poland, parts of the Arctic, all of Ukraine, Moldova. The list goes on.

European officials are acutely aware of Russian threats, since they are the constant victims of Russian sabotage, underwater cable cutting, and political assassinations, all of which the White House downplays.

During the conference British intelligence announced they had proof that Russia had assassinated opposition leader Alexei Navalyny in prison with a rare toxin, just as Russian agents murdered a Russian dissident on British soil.

What I heard over and over was European astonishment that the White House ignores the massive slaughter of civilians by Putin, while pressing only for concessions by Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke bluntly at Munich about the need for more air defenses, but only Europe is responding.

Indeed, Ukraine was central to the whole conference, with many speakers, warm applause, and frequent sessions featuring Ukrainian military innovations, while Europeans emphasized the importance of Ukraine’s trained army to Europe in the future.

There was constant praise for Kyiv as the defender of Western values, holding the line between Russia and the democratic West.

Yet, it was clear from the American position at Munich that the administration sees the world entirely in a different light.

No doubt aware that Vance redux would have been booed off the stage, the White House dispatched the somewhat more diplomatic (but far less powerful) Secretary of State Marco Rubio who soothed European fears slightly with an emphasis on continued U.S.-European ties. However, Rubio pointedly never mentioned the Russian threat hanging over Europe in his speech. He pushed the same nationalist MAGA line about the main threat to “thousands of years of Western civilization” coming from immigrants and multilateral ties.

More disdainful was Deputy Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, who praised Secretary Pete Hegseth repeatedly and fulsomely, and insisted that the essence of Trump foreign policy was “hard-nosed common sense.”

“You can’t base an alliance on sentiment alone,” he insisted, in a discussion held in the Bar Montez at the Rosewood Hotel, without taking any questions. “Maybe there is a difference in values.” Then he laughed that he had only heard the words “rules-based international order” once in Munich so “that is a piece of progress.”

It is not clear whether the Europeans can achieve the weapons production goals they discussed and develop an integrated military force that takes over ground protection of Europe within NATO by the end of this decade. And leaders I spoke with recognize they can’t succeed alone without active partnership with — not subordination to — the United States.

But what I heard in Munich made clear that they are far more aware of the threat democracies face and the values that need to be protected than is the White House.

“We will preserve our interests and values if we step up together,” said Merz.

That is wise advice that the White House continues to ignore.