Beside the beer-pong table on the roof terrace of a Maga party on 5 July, a finance bro asked me for a cigarette and a light, and then said that Britain should become a fascist country. He had a skittish, rat-like energy. I demurred and wondered aloud whether he had read much PG Wodehouse. He thought the national reluctance to don black shorts lay in the uncomfortable fact that Britain was simply not “cool enough”. The irony curdled in the tobacco smoke. He then added with an eerie grin, “Aristotle was right when he spoke about natural slaves.”
You could find such charm at one of the many parties held in Washington to celebrate Independence Day. These festivities in the capital are now essential to the Maga project in a similar way that mass rallies once defined Donald Trump’s campaign. In his speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, which he gave on the same day as the party 173 years ago, Frederick Douglass caustically said that, “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy licence; your national greatness, swelling vanity… your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”
Downstairs, there were only earnest shouts of “USA!” and “Trump! Trump! Trump!”. The Maga youth lolled backwards on the grand piano as the hip hop artist Soulja Boy rapped about “super soaking hoes” to the receptive crowd. Their aesthetic – the women wore italicised eyebrows, blonde locks and severe heels; the men had brash watches and slicked-back hair – will be familiar to anyone who grew up in Essex or, like me, Cheshire.
Aspiring fascists aside, the room was filled with right-wing influencers, White House staffers and young Republicans, most there for the dancing and hard seltzers, not politicking. Maga’s youth culture, a decade in the making, now flourishes independent of actual events. It’s a social scene, a place to be seen, as much as a political movement. For once, culture lies downstream of politics.
Many attendees were proud of the administration’s record. “Let’s see whether we win the midterms next year,” one White House official said to me, but advised that the “big, beautiful bill might be the biggest achievement of the term”.
Across Washington the night before, Donald Trump hosted a party on the White House’s south lawn to celebrate the passage of that “big, beautiful bill”. The law cuts healthcare, clean energy and food stamps in order to lower taxes on the rich. At the party, Trump gurned with delight on the balcony as two B-2 bomber formations flew overhead. I’m told he wanted more planes, more extravagance, but his aides had to remind him there aren’t countless B-2 bombers on home soil. Alongside the usual riffs on his historic popularity and victory in November, Trump predicted the country was “only going to get hotter”. What did he mean? Was Trump confessing a latent belief in global warming?
No, this was a warning that his power grab will continue apace. In the last week alone, the military took direct responsibility for another 250 miles of the border with Mexico. Trump has declared a national emergency, so anything goes: soldiers doubling as civilian law enforcement is becoming the norm. Then there were the TikTok documents, in which the White House told Big Tech not to worry about being prosecuted for working with the media platform because the president could decide when the ban passed by Congress applied – and when it did not.
But the worst, or perhaps most king-like, behaviour is Trump’s assumption that he alone can bestow and rescind citizenship. In doing so, he is equating himself with the state. His enemies, such as the socialist New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, are threatened with statelessness. Trump has even mused about deporting his old pal Elon Musk, who in turn has promised to establish a new America Party. Mass deportation now applies in the political sphere. The principle is the same: if you don’t like someone, kick them out. A nation of immigrants has become a nation of potential deportees.
This all ticks along while glasses of free Champagne are raised to toast American greatness. And the biggest party is yet to come. The Wall Street Journal reports that one of the ways Trump’s aides coaxed him out of office in 2021 was by pointing out that America’s 250th anniversary was in 2026. “You could come back for that,” one told him.
For Trump, the celebrations will be a defining moment for his legacy. Fox News producers and his rally organisers have been enlisted to prepare the programme. The president has ordered the construction of a “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring life-size statues.
Frivolity has always masked the enormity of Trump’s revolution. Ditto his genuine gift for making an audience laugh. Such spectacle allows the Maga elites to ensconce themselves in revelry and delight. The point is to provide a meaning, an identity, isolated from the realities which the administration is bringing about. To say it’s a distraction is to miss the point. The point is not to distract; it’s that the festivities restore an optimism about America’s future, if only for those not imprisoned or suppressed or stripped of their healthcare. For the deporters, not the deportees.
[See also: Britain has always loved nepo babies]
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This article appears in the 09 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Harbinger