On the weekend America turned 250, two spectacles competed for the nation’s soul and only one of them felt like a celebration.
The first was the surprise wedding of Taylor Swift and NFL star Travis Kelce: a multicultural, festive, star-studded event. It was marked by smooth logistical execution, massive yet tasteful staging, and lush gardens that transformed Madison Square Garden into a magical, mystical romantic world, where a crowd embraced love and national kindness across societal divides.
The extravagant event was estimated by event management experts to have cost $50 million of Swift’s own money, as many of the nation’s greatest musicians, actors, and business leaders eagerly rearranged their holiday plans to celebrate the new couple.
The other spectacle was that of President Donald Trump’s co-opting of the nation’s 250th celebration with roughly $70 million of taxpayer funds for rain-drenched, self-aggrandizing rants over the July 4th weekend before a humiliatingly small crowd with thousands of empty seats, cancelled celebrity appearances, sweltering heat, collapsing stages.
Trump blamed vandals for destroying the algae-infested Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a $16 million failed cleanup by a crony. He taunted World Cup officials. And far from Trump’s damp show, cheering crowds of American soldiers paid tribute to the non-partisan, heroic four-star general Christopher Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army in Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Gen. Donahue was forced to step aside by the Trump Administration.
There are no public figures more devoted to projecting sweeping, carefully cultivated mystiques than Swift and Trump. These two masters of image management provided colliding—utopian versus dystopian—scenes at contrasting Fourth of July weekend mega events.
Swift, Trump, and mastery of mystique
Swift’s Madison Square Garden wedding flawlessly bested Trump’s presumptive seizure of America’s 250th birthday in the showdown of fantasy and spectacle. Of course, Swift’s paid the bill for her wedding personally, while the American taxpayer paid for Trump’s self-indulgent celebration. The Swift-Kelce wedding diverted global media attention. The loss of the spotlight was particularly frustrating to Trump as he tried to imprint his image on the 250th anniversary of our nation by inserting it on specially issued coins, passports, and monuments, and by making self-referential, boastful speeches.
Having known and studied President Trump for 30 years, I am certain that the only thing he hates losing more than money is a loss of pride and attention. Trump’s profound displeasure with Swift’s superior stagecraft was betrayed by his mocking her marriage in Truth Social posts predicting it would not last and trolling the enthusiastic, star-studded wedding.
It is not surprising. Last year, Swift’s husband took to using the nickname, “TayTay” as an expression of his love for her. Years earlier, Trump too earned a nickname: “The Donald.” The moniker was assigned to Trump by Kurt Andersen and Grayden Carter’s Spy Magazine in 1988 as a sardonic stab at his attention grasping drive. The Swift-Kelce wedding was a strange distraction for him on the same night that he was attempting to fuse his likeness alongside the historic 60-foot carvings of national legends George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore.
Trump cares a lot about two things: money and attention. He has faced allegations for his unethical, and potentially illegal accumulation of over $2 billion in his first year back in the White House, through possible stock manipulation, the use of insider information, and possible gross violations of the emoluments clause. That sum of money, for him, is simply a yardstick for the prominence of his image and his desire for admiration.
As I explain in my new book Trump’s Ten Commandments, Trump’s lifestyle is unaffected by this windfall of wealth. His goal is to use money as a metric for acceptance—the ambition of a non-Manhattanite, an outer-borough heir of a fortune, to prove himself worthy of admiration. Sadly, for him, Paul McCartney, who performed at the Swift-Kelce wedding, sang in his great 1964 hit Can't Buy Me Love, that money cannot buy love. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a historic low, with only 17 to 24 % support across dozens of current national polls.
By contrast, Swift, also worth over $2 billion, is one of the most admired Americans nationally, with soaring popularity and critical rankings across the globe. She is regularly cited as one of the most influential figures in popular culture of the 21st century. While Trump is notoriously ungenerous, Swift and Kelce donate generously, even their wedding was celebrated through a gift of $26 million to 20 charities supporting food banks, children's hospitals, educational programs, and animal welfare causes around the nation.
America, leadership, and the question of character
Beyond such material generosity lies a generosity of character. Trump’s brutal divisiveness, at a moment calling for national unity and bipartisan spirit, is a deliberate strategy to survive in office through a divide-and-conquer strategy. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, an explosive new book by The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reveals that Trump views himself as a “great man of history,” whose power transcends that of conquerors like “Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.”
By contrast, leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, and George Washington achieved greatness by pursuing morally righteous causes of liberation. Those flames of common moral purpose could not be extinguished by the loss of any single individual. Washington calibrated triumph in his defense of our new nation, refusing the presidency without an election, then served two terms as President before relinquishing command without delusions of grandeur and without ever imposing his name on anything.
This dystopian voice emanating from the White House is not lost on the American people: only 33% of Americans are proud of their country on its 250th birthday—a historic low in Gallup polling—while a new global Pew Research survey shows that 76% of adults have no confidence in America’s president in his handling of world affairs.
Happily, Trump’s dystopian spectacle in Washington did not define the day. Enthusiastic, patriotic Fourth of July celebrations erupted around the nation—including at Philadelphia, cradle of America’s independence, where the massive “One Philly: Unity Concert for America” lasted until 3 a.m. Sunday morning, and at the Los Angeles festival of 50,000 revelers in the LA Coliseum, six blocks of revelry so luminous it was visible from space.
Swift and Trump are both entertainers, multibillionaires, and unrelenting self-promotion machines. Yet one stands for an honest, self-made success through competence, talent, and the joyous embrace of all that American society can be. The other stands for inherited wealth, anger, divisiveness, corruption, and brutal coercion.
Swift reminded the nation of the gift of choice we all have. Trump’s chosen campaign song was the Rolling Stones’ lament: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Swift’s 2022 crossover hit “Anti-Hero” addresses the exhausting nature of being an admired public figure and a flawed person. Perhaps for this season, we would do well to recall the haunting Harlan County miners’ protest song of 1931, repeated like a refrain: “Which side are you on?”
