US POLITICS: Trump’s ‘Freedom 250’ vs US history — the battle for a nation’s soul

The US faces a pivotal moment in its 250-year journey toward a fairer political order, grappling with how to celebrate or deny its complex history.

The year 1976 delivered a palpable sense of national relief to many Americans. The country had survived its disastrous engagement in the Vietnam conflict (although calamity would continue to overwhelm Cambodia for years more). The World’s Fair in Philadelphia in 1876, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of US independence, had something of the same cathartic effect, coming a decade after a civil war that nearly broke the nation.

As for the 1976 celebration, the resignation in 1974 of Richard Nixon, a president who had been enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, meant the 1976 presidential election would pit two decent men — the incumbent, President Gerald Ford, and the former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter — against each other, in a sharp contrast to the former chief executive.

Those bicentennial celebrations of the country’s birth featured a raft of uplifting events, including the emotionally uplifting arrival of a vast international flotilla of sailing ships — “Operation Tall Ships” — in New York City’s harbour.

The near-universal acclaim for British broadcaster Alistair Cooke’s television series America: A Personal History of the United States, released in 1972, led to Cooke being invited to address a joint session of Congress in 1976 to speak about what it had all meant.

Cooke said that of all the things he had done over his career, he was most proud of that TV series. In 1976, serving in Africa as a US diplomat, we had access to the full series, and showed it to multiple audiences of friends, acquaintances and official contacts. Given what the US had recently been through, the series gave us hope for the future.

Sadly, this year, the semiquincentennial — or 250th — celebration of the creation of the country is now a battle — and a growing fiasco — over how it will be recognised, and what this commemoration is even celebrating.

As David Frum recently wrote in The Atlantic, “ ‘You talk too damn much, and it’s too damn much about you.’ That quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a good summary of the fiasco that Donald Trump has made of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman, after all. He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American