America 250

The Federal Government Botched the Bicentennial Too

There's a lesson laying there: Make it local, embrace the commercial, and ignore the president.

Matt Welch | 6.1.2026 8:23 AM

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(Illustration: Rocky (1976)/MGM/Midjourney)

There is a growing bipartisan consensus that the state of our semiquincentennial is FUBAR.

"I'm actually pretty pissed at how badly they've bungled America 250," tweeted conservative culture warrior Matt Walsh (no relation) on Saturday, in reaction to President Donald Trump's proposal to replace an increasingly musicianless Great American State Fair concert series on the National Mall with "the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!)."

Democrats, as is their recent wont, posted sick memes and mocked the available talent. "Trump's 250th celebration," harrumphed #NeverTrumper David Frum, "is a fiasco."

There is a natural tendency in these fallen times to harken back to the rosier-colored memories of the 1976 bicentennial celebration. The Tall Ships! The Queen (this one, not that one) in Boston! Schoolhouse Rock! I was there, in Toughskins, and it was awesome.

"On the one hand, it's truly sad that we will never be able to celebrate America's 250th the way we did the Bicentennial in 1976," National Review's Jeffrey Blehar lamented Friday. "I love this country every bit as much as I did when I was born in 1980. But this was the most foreseeable outcome imaginable."

Those of us born in 1968 or before can testify to a couple other salient facts about '76 that may yet help us salvage or at least contextualize whatever it is that we're all doing in 2026. Beginning with: The bicentennial was not greeted as an artistic or planning success in real time. Far from it.

The Tall Ships revue, majestic as it eventually was, launched with a widely mocked crash. The great cities of the Revolution—Boston, Philadelphia, New York—were in apocalyptic disarray. Much of the day-to-day bicentennial experience came not as soberly shared reflections on our creedal heritage, but rather the latchkey-kid consumption of cornball car commercials.

"The feeling persists that, amidst all the clamor and energy, a great opportunity was somehow lost," averred the New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer at the end of that celebratory year. "We seem not to have been quite equal to the occasion."

President Lyndon Johnson's original idea back in 1966 was to........

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