Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday this year and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.

A celebration intended to honour the founding of the US is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: His movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.

Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: This is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.

And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.

The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, DC, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.

On that August day 101 summers ago, somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue 22 abreast and 14 rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.

Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: Not black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organised labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played Onward, Christian Soldiers and America.

A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can.

Within 48 hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation.

Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.

Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologise for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250″.

Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about 72 hours. The 250th anniversary of American........

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