Donald Trump had grand designs for America’s 250th anniversary. A sprawling state fair on the National Mall. Military flyovers galore. The most powerful fireworks display known to man. And, most important, a primetime speech from the president himself, one he promised would be “really long” in what seemed like a direct challenge to the inclement weather forecastto hit Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of July.
The weather was indeed inclement. The heat led to the cancellation of the Independence Day Parade, and later in the day, incoming thunderstorms led to the evacuation of the National Mall. It was a chaotic scene, but Trump vowed to soldier on, claiming on Truth Social that he’d wait until 2 a.m. if he had to, and that, actually, storms mean good luck. “It’s Saturday night, LET’S HAVE SOME FUN,” he wrote.
Trump toggled from party boy to brave patriot warrior as the night wore on. Bret Baier of Fox News recalled telling Trump that he may not be talking to very many people if he delayed his speech to the early hours of the morning. Trump was undeterred: “He said, ‘I don’t care. It’s America 250. If they can storm the beaches of D-Day on D-Day, I can deliver a speech and keep this program going.'”
Trump evoking D-Day before giving a rally speech is absurd, but it wasn’t the only bizarre reference to history he made as he tried to commemorate the nation’s semiquincentennial.
He started with the nation’s founding. The First Amendment lays out the right to practice religion, and the founders explicitly called for the separation of church and state. Trump and the Republican Party, however, have long pushed the idea that America is for Christians first and foremost, and that everyone else should be grateful to be here if not forcibly eradicated. Trump clumsily brought God into his telling of the story of America on Saturday.
“As our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty god,” he said, adding that “a communist will never say that, that’s for sure.”
He’s right about the last part, at least, because the Declaration of Independence does not say this. The closest it comes is saying that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Trump continued to demonstrate his historical bona fides by noting that the Civil War — particularly someone escaping slavery and joining the Union army — was “a very big, big deal at the time.”
It may have been a big deal at the time, but not as much anymore, apparently, as Trump and his administration have taken great pains to rehabilitate the image of Confederate figureheads — from restoring their names to military bases to ensuring their statues are kept in pristine shape.
Trump may have referenced the bravery of the Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy while preparing to take the stage on Saturday. He was a little reluctant while speaking later about this generation of American solider. “These are the fighters and the banners of the greatest generation,” he said of veterans onstage with him. “They are the greatest generation,” he continued, presumably off prompter now. “I hate to admit that, but they are.”
Trump can’t speak eloquently about history because he couldn’t care less about it. He cares about himself, and his rambling rally speech on Saturday is far from the only way he’s tried to make the nation’s 250th anniversary a celebration of Trump. He thinks he is America and that the federal government — its levers of power and the taxpayer money it collects — is his to use as he see fit. It’s why he and his cronies keep getting richer and richer while the rest of the nation remains mired in a cost-of-living crisis.
Happy birthday, America!
Pete Hegseth gestures after giving a State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2026 in Quantico, Va.
Pete Hegseth’s ‘Warfighter’ Crusade Isn’t About Killing
Pete Hegseth, to his credit, understands one truth about the world: the military’s job is to kill people.
Hegseth, the newly rebranded “Secretary of War,” is obsessed with showcasing clean-cut troops trained to do just that. He refers to it as “lethality,” a word that he used twice in his roughly hour-long State of the Force speech on Wednesday, which laid out his vision for this new, more-violent military: a force of fit, unified “warfighters,” unburdened by the bureaucracy and norms of the past.
“No more diversity quotas, no more gender pronouns, no more identity months,” Hegseth said, pacing back and forth on stage. “Only the warrior ethos.”
If that wasn’t enough, he doubled down moments later.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department,” Hegseth said, stumbling over his words slightly. “No fanny, no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops.”
To do this, Hegseth thinks, the military needs to work out. He wants every soldier doing physical training every day. He leads group workouts at the Pentagon, hops in on PT, does pullups and pushups and flexes his muscles. This is all, broadly, fine for a Defense Secretary to do. Go ahead, engage with your troops. (Less normal, perhaps, is his obsession with monitoring troops’ testosterone levels.) But Hegseth’s CrossFit crusade isn’t really about killing.
By any objective measurement, the U.S. military is plenty good at killing. We have more bombs and more planes and more ships and better-trained and equipped troops than any country in the world. The “warrior ethos” Hegseth is so obsessed with is the relic of recruitment videos from the peak of the War on Terror, the years of bearded operators with ropy muscle covered in Kevlar fabric, who kicked in doors and sniped off heads and got their hands dirty. Those guys still exist, of course. They haven’t gone away. If they’re needed again, they will be there.
But combat doesn’t look like that anymore.
On the same day that Hegseth delivered his speech, the U.S. formally withdrew from Iraq, one of America’s last active presences in the wars of occupation that defined the military for the past two decades. War is different now. It is fought with drones and cruise missiles from the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf and dusty air-bases outside of the glittering megacities of America’s Middle Eastern oil merchants. Does every soldier involved in this need a perfect waist-to-shoulder ratio? Does it physically impede America’s interests abroad to have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies? Has the existence of trans servicemembers ever stopped the U.S. military from killing even a single person that it wanted to kill, anywhere in the world, at any time?
Hegseth, I think, would say yes. He has a personal chip on his shoulder. The “woke” elements of Army bureaucracy once removed him from service at Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo on his arm that reads “DEUS VULT,” a common rallying cry for a very particular kind of extremist Christian nationalism. But most rational observers, people who are clear-eyed about America’s unparalleled ability to Blow Shit Up, can recognize that all of these arguments are battles of cultural semantics that have basically nothing to do with the military’s ability to kill. With respect to “lethality,” the U.S. military is pretty much fine. If you doubt this, ask an Iraqi.
Hegseth’s relentless focus on violent language and imagery is largely a marketing tactic for what is a more holistic cultural and political shift. Hegseth does not want a military that is indicative of America’s cumbersome, bureaucratic state apparatus in the same way that Trump is relentlessly focused on cutting red tape and federal “waste.” There are certainly inefficiencies in the federal system, but much of that bureaucracy exists for precisely the reason that Hegseth and Trump want it gone: it is a check on unitary power. Hegseth wants a united, homogenous military of soldiers who share his cultural prejudices, who share his bloodthirsty ethos, and who share his religion. In the State of the Force speech and many other recent public appearances, Hegseth has quoted scripture and explicitly referenced his Christian faith, a tacit assumption that he expects the men and women in uniform below him to be Christian. He wants a force that, in his own words, does not buy into the “fake news” media’s “disingenuous headlines about deployment lengths, patently false claims of low troop morale or flat-out propaganda.”
A more malleable military is also a better business opportunity. The Trump administration has been terribly effective at streamlining the process by which they can redistribute money to the oligarchs they choose. The so-called Department of War is no different. In his speech, Hegseth announced an initiative called “Project Meridian,” a sort of tech incubator for military contractors that will be run by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and, bizarrely, Newt Gingrich, who Hegseth said would be joined by “hand-picked private sector leaders.”
“Their work will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes without any creative limitations or restrictions,” Hegseth said. “On any future battlefield, from under the earth to beyond the moon, our American warriors will be armed with absolute technological superiority because we will have the foresight to prepare today for tomorrow.”
That’s the window dressing. There’s truth there, of course: the military does have a lot of work to do to adapt to the new forms of warfare playing out in Ukraine. Battle has shifted. But what Project Meridian represents is a shift to a faster, less regulated version of the military industrial complex. There will be less oversight. The money will move where Trump and Hegseth want it to, delivered to the tech barons and traditional defense contractors who best curry favor with the administration. This is for the good of the soldier, regardless of what Hegseth says. It does not make us more deadly. It just makes a select few — some of whom aren’t even American — that much more rich.
After all, that’s the goal, right? A prosperous, united, Christian nation, led by titans of industry who bow only to a single leader who can reshape the world on a whim. No fatties, no weirdos, no radicals. No dissent, crucially. Dissent is traitorous. As soldiers, as civilians, even, all we should think about is how to kill. Hegseth and his hand-picked private sector will handle the rest.