Trump’s America is in a state of cold civil war. But on the nation’s 250th birthday, that’s entirely fitting

July 3, 2026 — 9:30am

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America, when it comes to celebrating landmark national birthdays, has made a habit of being locked in internal conflict.

Its bicentennial took place in 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon affirmed defeat in a war fought in the jungles and paddy fields of Vietnam that had torn apart the nation. Washington DC was also shell-shocked from the Watergate crisis, which forced Richard Nixon, through his own criminality, to become the only president ever to resign from office.

On the eve of the country’s 200th anniversary, Gerald Ford, who was something of a makeshift president, confessed in his annual address to Congress “the state of the nation is not good,” an unusually pessimistic, albeit accurate, assessment.

The mood music for America’s centenary in 1876 was more dissonant still. The Civil War, a conflict in which at least 750,000 Americans were slain, had ended little more than a decade hitherto. In the states of the defeated Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan was in the midst of its wave of terror against newly freed slaves.

That year witnessed a disputed presidential election, which was only resolved when the eventual winner, the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to withdraw federal troops from the south, a retreat which paved the way for the racial apartheid of the Jim Crow era, which lasted until the middle of the 1960s.

The 50th anniversary, marked in 1826, was more unifying, partly because of a cosmic fluke which saw the deaths on July 4 both of John Adams, the country’s second president, and his nemesis and successor,........

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