Jonathan Hines says with July 4 just weeks away, the time has come for ordinary citizens to reject this institutional hysteria

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

As America approaches July 4th, 2026, the nation stands on the precipice of its 250th anniversary. A milestone of this magnitude should serve as a cultural detente — a rare, sacred window for a fractured populace to look upon the grand experiment of 1776 and find common cause. Instead, the country is witnessing the latest, most destructive mutation of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Rather than uniting under the flag, institutional partisan forces and activist legal networks are attempting to turn the Semiquincentennial into a scorched-earth proxy war, proving they would rather vandalize the national celebration than allow Donald Trump to host it.

Jonathan Hines

The symptoms of this obsession are everywhere, mutating ordinary civic acts into battlegrounds. Consider the administration’s massive undertaking to clean up Washington D.C. The White House has deployed millions to repair over 20 historic fountains and refurbish dozens of neglected monuments along the National Mall. In any other era, restoring the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and cleaning the statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be universally praised as basic civic pride. Today, critics reflexively frame it as an authoritarian overreach or an exercise in partisan branding.

This hyper-fixation reached a fever pitch with the upcoming "UFC Freedom 250" event on the White House South Lawn. Scheduled for Flag Day, the event brings a raw, populist slice of modern American culture directly to the White House. Predictably, the response from the legacy establishment wasn't mere disagreement — it was an immediate retreat to the lawfare trenches. A cascade of law firms and activist groups filed injunctions to stop the octagon from being built, claiming technical violations of National Park Service rules.

While everyday Americans view a fight card beneath the lights of the White House as a unique, high-energy spectacle, certain elite treat it as a constitutional crisis. When Trump is booed or cheered at Madison Square Garden, the media instantly filters the event through a lens of existential political warfare. The underlying obsession is clear: if Trump is involved, the event itself must be delegitimized, no matter the cost to the cultural fabric.

This constant injection of activist judges and procedural proxy wars into our national milestones is a dangerous game. When a nation loses the ability to celebrate its own birth because it cannot stomach the man temporarily residing in the White House, the rot has moved from the political branches into the national psyche. The constant weaponization of courts to block celebrations, stall monument restorations, and micromanage the summer’s festivities behaves exactly like a psychological virus. It forces citizens to view their own heritage through a narrow, hyper-partisan prism. If everything is a proxy war, nothing is sacred. If every monument cleaning is a dog whistle and every public sporting event is an existential threat, the American people are being robbed of the very concept of shared history.

With July 4th just weeks away, the time has come for ordinary citizens to reject this institutional hysteria. We must separate the permanent majesty of the American experiment from the temporary occupant of the Oval Office. Finding common ground does not require uniform agreement on Donald Trump, the UFC, or modern populist aesthetics. It requires a collective agreement that the 250-year-old story of American liberty belongs to all of us, not just the factions trying to tear it down. If we allow partisan exhaustion to ruin this milestone, the damage to our national identity will last long after the current political calendar has turned. Let us reclaim our history, celebrate our survival, and leave the bitterness outside the gates and enjoy this Historical Celebration.

Jonathan Hines
Vancouver/Hazel Dell

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