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.”Two hundred and fifty years ago we declared our independence from exactly this. From a man who conflated himself with the country. From a ruler who believed the government, the honor, the lives and sacrifice of generations were his personal property, to be used for his own personal glory and profit.When our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, they paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared.The signers wrote in the Declaration, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” and it was a simple statement of fact. The day they signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the ruler who controlled their lands and their homes.One the wealthiest of the signers was Thomas Nelson of Virginia, but a year after the signing the British had seized his home and lands. When he and George Washington attacked the British in Nelson’s hometown, he encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with cannons. The house was destroyed, and after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he’d taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost his property; he died in poverty at the age of 50.The wealthy Philadelphia merchant, Robert Morris, lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune; he died destitute. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia’s Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania’s George Clymer, New York’s Philip Livingston, Georgia’s Lyman Hall, and New Jersey’s Francis Hopkinson.The British destroyed New York’s Francis Lewis’ property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina’s four signers — Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Arthur Middleton — were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.New Jersey farmer John Hart’s wife died shortly after he signed the Declaration, and his thirteen children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.New Jersey State Supreme Court Justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.Altogether, nine of the men in that room died and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.They were all willing to fight and die for the idea of democracy in America. Every one of them.So on our 250th birthday — with draft-dodger “Corporal Bonespurs” and his lickspittle Republicans’ corruption and refutation of democracy so painfully obvious — it’s worth asking the question directly, the one this whole grotesque spectacle forces on us:Do the Redcoats (at least in philosophy) once again rule America?Does today’s America reflect the belief that all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as Hegseth purges our military of Black and female officers? As ICE terrorizes anybody whose skin isn’t white with their “Kavanaugh Stops”?