This past weekend, celebrations were hosted around the US to mark its 250th anniversary.
The capstone of the 250th Independence Day was the Salute to America Celebration and Fireworks on the National Mall in the capital, Washington, DC.
It featured daytime military flyovers, the Joint Armed Forces Orchestra, speeches and an evening fireworks display — alongside massive localised events like the One Philly: Unity Concert in Philadelphia and America’s Block Party at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Summerfest in Milwaukee.
The celebrations took place in a volatile political climate, with America more divided than it has been in a very long time.
The problematic second term of Donald Trump has been characterised by divisions within the Republican Party, the country’s backtracking on global commitments pertaining to climate change, tariffs that have devastated national economies, wars and military interventions in foreign countries including Venezuela and Iran.
Also, the assault on diversity and inclusion programmes and policies, and the violation of the US constitution in various areas.
This was evidenced in who celebrated the anniversary and how.
Millions of patriotic Americans, disillusioned by the self-serving approach that the Trump administration has taken with these celebrations, opted to facilitate their own celebrations, devoid of the partisan character that has defined the celebrations over the past months.
One of the things that I found myself thinking about as I followed the celebrations is the ways in which Americans have sought to separate themselves from Trump, and to rewrite history on what the country has historically represented.
When the story of the Holocaust is told, the person at the centre is Adolf Hitler and his henchmen like Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Reinhard Heydrich, Wilhem Keitel and Martin Bormann.
But what people rarely think deeply about are the millions of Germans, ordinary men and women, who supported the Nazi regime.
The Nazi’s strength was derived from the complicity of millions of German people who worked for, or in various ways supported the murderous regime.
Americans, some doing so from a genuine place, would have us believe that the problem is Trump and the sycophants who are surrounding him — the likes of Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and so on.
But when we reflect deeply on the matter, we realise that Trump is a far lesser problem than the millions of ordinary Americans who put him in office not once, but twice.
These are voters who knew who and what he was.
Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records by a New York State Supreme Court jury before they went to the polls and elected him.
He was a known fraudster who had swindled students and charities alike.
He was a sexual abuser who would later be found civilly liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of writer E Jean Carroll, who publicly disclosed that he had sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store dressing room during the mid-1990s.
Significantly, since the 1970s, more than two dozen women have publicly accused Trump of sexual misconduct.
Above all, Trump was violently anti-democracy, racist, xenophobic and war-mongering long before millions of ordinary Americans decided that he was the right man to lead the country.
The shocking insurrection on January 6 2021 that saw a violent attack on the US Capitol in Washington DC, carried out by a mob of Trump’s supporters, did not happen in a vacuum.
It happened in a context where Trump had repeatedly made provocative statements supporting and encouraging violence.
He would later describe the rioters as patriotic and revolutionary.
Americans re-elected this same man a few years later.
He won by a significant margin and successfully swept all seven key battleground states.
These are issues that Americans must contend with in this moment — the reality that Trump may not at all be an aberration, but a reflection of who America has always been.
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