Today America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally.

Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself.

He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.

He staged a violent, brutal UFC cage fight on the White House lawn to satisfy his own bloodlust. He sent a fleet of eighteen-wheelers loaded with white supremacist PragerU’s cartoon versions of American history rolling across the country. And this weekend, on the same National Mall where Americans once gathered to mourn Lincoln and to hear Dr. King, he’s throwing what he actually called, in his own words, “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”