In October of 1971, amid the ruins of Persepolis, the Shah of Iran threw himself a party but called it a tribute to his nation.
The official story was that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was honoring twenty-five centuries of Persian civilization, the empire of Cyrus the Great. The truth was in the desert in air-conditioned tents dressed by French decorators, at tables laid with food flown in from Maxim’s of Paris, before a guest list of kings and presidents assembled to watch one man anoint himself the heir of antiquity. He stood at the tomb of Cyrus and told the dead emperor to sleep easy, for he, the Shah, was awake. The tab ran well past a hundred million dollars. Beyond the tents, his people went without. Eight years later, they ran him out of the country.
I have been thinking about that party, because in a little over a month, this country is going to throw one of its own.
July 4, 2026, is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A real milestone. A profound one. Two and a half centuries of a fragile, extraordinary experiment in self-government. But, what will Donald Trump celebrate: the country or himself? Is the semiquincentennial his “American Shah” moment?
The evidence is already apparent.
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