What a time for America to celebrate its 250th birthday.
The country is deeply polarized, its politics as restive as ever. President Trump created his own organization, Freedom 250, to plan Fourth of July events centered on him and his view of American history. That put him at odds with America250, the organization created by Congress a decade ago to commemorate the anniversary.
Trump’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington does not include participation from all states, with several led by Democratic governors opting out because they were uneasy about the event’s partisanship. The president’s work on renovating the Reflecting Pool has resulted in algae, peeling paint and accusations of vandalism.
The politically charged environment has challenged elected leaders and historians. As Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University put it: “If you’re not with Trump, how do we celebrate this?”
“He wants to claim the Revolution as loyalty to him, and that’s just not how it’s supposed to work,” he said.
The political discourse has changed since 1976, when the country last celebrated a milestone birthday, Dr. Neem said. Now, those on the left condemn the paradoxes interwoven with America’s founding, like slavery, and those on the right reject criticism of the founding fathers or their system of government.
“People are fighting over who gets to claim the Revolution,” he said. “Before, everyone was claiming it as their own. Now, people are like, Do we want to claim it at all?”
Nicholas Guyatt, a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge, said Independence Day had “always been a moment where people can disagree about what the founding has been.”
He noted that so many major events — the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the rise of feminism — occurred between 1966, when Congress began to organize America’s 200th birthday celebrations, and 1976 that many celebrations ended up being local rather than national. Dr. Guyatt sees something similar happening this year.
Mayor Matt Tuerk, Democrat of Allentown, Pa., said that few residents have much time to reflect on patriotism or to think about events in Washington in their lives.
“This is a kitchen-table city,” he said. “They don’t think as much about the flag as they do about feeding their kids.”
Still, he said that when the city’s fireworks display goes off on Saturday, he expected Allentown’s diverse residents to be stirred and think about what it means to be an American.
“That includes Puerto Ricans, who might certainly think about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance,” he said. “It includes Dominicans, who had to earn their citizenship or their residency.”
Tuerk is the city’s first Latino mayor. His Cuban grandmother was fiercely proud of her American citizenship, which took her 30 years to earn, he said. She kept her naturalization letter and got married on the Fourth of July.
His approach to America’s 250th birthday has been to “draw people back in,” he said, to remind residents disconnected from civic life that “we had to fight for this.”
“You don’t get to just take a back seat to life in this era,” he said. “You have to play an active role, and that’s what our country means. If you’re going to be a citizen, citizenship is not just waiting for somebody else to do something for you.”
Shedding light on dark money
It has only taken until the second half of 2026 to finally get important details about who funded the 2024 election.
New tax filings reviewed by The New York Times pull back the curtain on $173 million that went to a liberal nonprofit group that supported Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. That nonprofit, called Future Forward USA Action, ran policy ads for the Democrats and donated hundreds of millions to a super PAC that explicitly backed the Biden and Harris campaigns.
Who funded the dark-money group? The filings from mid-2024 to mid-2025 show that a few other organs of the Democratic dark-money universe disbursed big money to the nonprofit. This being American politics in 2026, those organs don’t disclose their own donors.
But $86 million came to Future Forward from a new dark-money organization called the Brick by Brick Foundation. That was two-thirds of all the money Brick by Brick spent that year.
Another $49 million to Future Forward came from a third dark-money group, Our American Future Action, while $38 million came from Evidence for Impact, a fourth new dark-money organization. I wrote about those two organizations earlier this year.
This trend is only accelerating in this year’s midterms, where you’re increasingly at a dead end if you try to figure out who is behind the super PACs and nonprofits pumping millions of dollars into shaping American democracy.
— Theodore Schleifer
In Georgia, Democrats cultivate down-ballot candidates
Democratic gains in Georgia in recent years have been attributed to the party’s ability to harness demographic shifts as the state has grown.
But the party’s competitiveness after years of Republican control has also taken practical, ground-level work: finding and preparing viable candidates, registering and mobilizing voters and building up the political infrastructure that underpins a winning campaign.
The National Democratic Training Committee recently had a day of training focused on just that, as the party tries to expand on its recent victories.
Dozens of candidates for legislative seats crowded into an office building in Atlanta for sessions on recruiting, training and inspiring volunteers, crafting field strategy and using data to determine which precincts to focus on.
Darcy Castro, a communications consultant running for a State Senate seat in the Atlanta suburbs long held by a Republican, said she had worried about a high bar for entry as a candidate. “I thought you needed to be a constitutional law scholar or somebody with a very wealthy network or able to fund a campaign yourself,” she said.
Instead, she found that resources — like the training — helped close the gap for first-time candidates, when it came to the nuts and bolts of running a campaign.
Democratic officials in Georgia said the preparatory work was rooted in their confidence that enthusiasm over the headlining races this year could lift the party statewide. Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is running for governor, and Senator Jon Ossoff is seeking re-election.
But the effort was also an acknowledgment that Georgia Democrats have generally won by narrow margins. Having better-prepared candidates challenging Republican incumbents, and even running in places where Republicans have previously run unopposed, could create padding that might be instrumental in deciding close statewide races.
“There’s a multiplying effect,” said Charlie Bailey, chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia. “The fact that they are out campaigning, if that nets another 200 votes, that’s another 200 votes for Senator Ossoff or Keisha or for some of these other state races.”
— Rick Rojas
ONE LAST THING
Warning signs for both Platner and Collins
The two Senate hopefuls in Maine aren’t exactly sailing smoothly into November, my colleague Tim Balk reports.
Some of Graham Platner’s pitfalls, as revealed by recent polling by The New York Times and compiled by Tim: Voters lack confidence in his character, his experience and his ability to bring home the bacon.
And Senator Susan Collins should worry about voters’ perceptions of her closeness to Trump, her age and her appeal among women.
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
