The 250th hijack
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It’s an odd thing to reach back 249 years into a private exchange between husband and wife to explain what has become of the United States of America, but John and Abigail Adams weren’t writing about themselves.
They were writing about us.
John Adams wrote words to Abigail that every American should read on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it! If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.
It’s impossible to read those words without feeling their weight.
They aren’t sentimental. Instead, they are demanding.
Freedom was purchased dearly, Adams reminded us, and every generation must decide whether it deserves to keep it.
There’s another passage from John Adams that Americans know, even if many don’t recognize its author. It’s carved into the stone mantel of the State Dining Room in the White House:
I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
May none but honest and wise men.
The sentence now hangs in bitter judgment over an age that has abandoned both honesty and wisdom.
Donald Trump has transformed the White House from a symbol of republican dignity into a monument to vanity. He has turned the presidency into performance art. The office into a grievance.
The nation approaches its 250th birthday under a cloud of exhaustion.
Americans have become hypnotized by abnormality. We scroll past corruption. We shrug at indecency. We absorb each new outrage as if it were weather instead of warning.
Meanwhile, economists and central bankers caution that markets have become increasingly detached from economic reality as speculative enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence races ahead of fundamentals. Greed has always been able to disguise itself as genius — until the bill comes due.
The war with Iran hasn’t receded into history. Its consequences continue to spread across the Middle East. The smoke drifts farther each day.
Here at home, Americans have responded to Trump’s attempt to hijack the anniversary of independence with something approaching indifference — and, in many places, outright rejection.
It’s fitting.
The celebration belongs to Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Washington — not to a man who rejected his oath as casually as he rejected every restraint placed upon his power.
Dean Blundell perfectly captured the absurdity of the moment. He described Trump’s sprawling Freedom 250 spectacle as an empty MAGA disaster — a lavish performance that exposed not national confidence, but political emptiness.
That’s exactly what this moment feels like.
A magnificent anniversary has become microscopically small. Trumpified. Every trace of dignity stripped away. Every measure of grace replaced with vulgarity.
The great sewer king of Mar-a-Lago has reduced one of the greatest milestones in democratic history into another tawdry spectacle of self-promotion.
It’s impossible to imagine a smaller man standing before a larger inheritance.
The tragedy isn’t merely Trump’s. It’s ours.
The American spirit has been wounded. Not destroyed — not yet — but wounded.
Each day now feels interchangeable with the one before it. Morning follows night. Another scandal. Another outrage. Another lie. Another theft. Another surrender of standards once thought permanent.
Time itself has become suspended. We move relentlessly toward an ending whose shape remains hidden, but whose arrival feels inevitable.
There’s an uneasy sensation hanging over this year.
We’re nearly halfway through 2026, yet it’s difficult to believe that what has already happened will ultimately define it.
Instead, these months feel like a prologue. A long preamble. History gathering itself. Pressure building beneath the surface. Something deferred, but not indefinitely.
We’ve trained ourselves to underestimate the suffering that reckless politicians can unleash. We’ve muffled our ears to the rising language of extremism. Its factions quarrel with one another. Its slogans differ. Its uniforms change. Its enemies rotate, yet they’re joined by a common contempt for liberty itself.
All circles eventually meet.
The Adamses understood something we’ve forgotten: freedom isn’t inherited. It’s borrowed.
Each generation receives it temporarily before passing it forward — or losing it forever.
John Adams worried that posterity might squander what his generation had sacrificed to preserve. His fear now belongs to us.
The world is on fire.
The smoke is closer than we admit.
The founders have delivered their warning.
Whether posterity deserves their sacrifice remains an unanswered question.
Julia Letlow, a Trump bootlicker from Louisiana, won the MAGA primary and will be Louisiana’s next United States Senator.
Louisiana ranks 50th for economic well-being, 49th for environmental quality, 46th for education, and 44th for healthcare. It would rank 1st for murder rate, but that spot is held by MAGA serfdom Mississippi.
Go ahead and keep electing the people intent on destroying you.
If there is a Heaven and John Adams is there, he must be beyond repenting. He must be shaking his head in an agony of grief and anger over what has happened to his country at the hands of MAGGATS, billionaires, grifters, and religious fanatics.