King George Threw the Birthday Party

This past Saturday, America turned 250 years old.

The Fourth of July marks the day that a small group of committed people, speaking for the masses, stood up to a tyrant – the day ordinary people took on a leader who believed their country existed for his personal benefit. Everything else we’ve come to associate with the holiday is a celebration of that single act of courage.

Which is why this administration’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday was such a complete failure. It was King George throwing the birthday party. That doesn’t work. Donald Trump embodies the problem the holiday exists to commemorate overcoming. To him, patriotism is a celebration of power. Our founders understood it to be a celebration of freedom. And the president’s deliberate perversion of our founding principles is the real story of this moment in America: selfishness and cynicism replacing idealism, one institution at a time.

We don’t have to accept this. And we shouldn’t. Like our founders before us, and like so many generations of great Americans after them, we must name corruption and abuse of power when we see them – and remain committed to one another, and the work of building a nation that truly serves us all.

Because, as he’s made clear for decades now, Trump’s corrupt self-interest has no bounds.

We saw this clearly with his most recent crypto scam. New analysis shows that nearly one million people who bought Donald Trump’s crypto coin lost money on it. That’s two out of every three buyers – and combined losses of up to $3.8 billion. Meanwhile, Trump’s own financial disclosure shows he walked away with a $636 million payout from the very same coin, because it was structured to pay him fees on every single trade, whether the price went up or down. In other words: guaranteed profit for him – at everyone else’s expense.

I’ve spent most of my career as an investor. That job is grounded in a simple fact: people are trusting you with their money. That trust is the entire foundation of the work.

Did Trump apologize to his most ardent supporters, those loyal enough to buy the coin he told them to? Of course not. Because this ridiculous gambit was never about them. It was just another opportunity for him to enrich himself. Trump’s a grifter – and once again, the people who trusted him most are the ones left holding the bag. I know a crook when I see one. I started an organization to impeach this man back in 2017, when most Democrats were still preaching norms and civility. Nothing about him has changed, but the scale of his corruption has.

We saw it perhaps most absurdly with his intervention in the World Cup – what should be the most positive international event in the world, a celebration of soccer and the people who love it.Here’s what happened: Last Wednesday, the American striker Folarin Balogun was shown a red card in our win over Bosnia, which under the rules meant an automatic one-game suspension. The way I see it as a lifelong soccer fan and former collegiate player, it should have been a yellow. But you don’t fix a bad call by having the most powerful man make one in return – which, of course, is exactly what Trump did.

FIFA, a deeply, historically corrupt organization, folded: For the first time in more than 60 years of World Cup play, a red card came with no suspension. Europe’s governing body said FIFA crossed a red line. Belgium’s federation called the decision incomprehensible. They’re right.

Let’s be clear: FIFA bent the rules because the president of the United States asked them to. That is textbook corruption. Ugly politics marring the Beautiful Game.

The US faced Belgium in the Round of 16, and Belgium’s coach spent the weekend telling the world that his team was defending soccer itself against Donald Trump. On Monday, they beat us 4-1, and it wasn’t close. Belgium’s official account posted two words: “Overturn this.”

With that well-deserved burn, our tournament ended. But our fight at home continues.

These three events – America’s 250th, Trump’s crypto scam, and the World Cup – effectively summarize the essence of this presidency. And they reveal the work left for us to do. They represent the way that selfishness and cynicism are threatening to replace hope and idealism in this country, because that’s all Donald Trump has to offer. Selfishness and cynicism are all he’s got. Idealism, the belief that we can build something together that’s bigger than any one of us, is simply not in him.

Every year, July 4th reminds us of our capacity to stand together in the face of oppression – it’s the story of a tyrant and what free people did about him. 250 years later, we have another tyrant to stand up to. We can stand up to him with our own idealism, with our own insistence that the principles our founders fought for – truth, liberty, and justice – are still the things we value today. Doing so is an essential and radical act of resistance against his selfishness and cynicism. And we can show – in how we live, work, vote, and treat one another – what it looks like to be a genuine patriot, a person willing to fight against tyranny and for the country and people he loves.

It worked 250 years ago. It will take time, but it will work again.