As he rode desperately from Charlestown one spring night in 1775, warning nearly every house of a British invasion, Paul Revere did not yell “The British are coming” indiscriminately on his path. Such a cry would have given him away in a region crawling with loyalists, and his mission depended on secrecy. Instead, Revere whispered a warningsotto voce, house by house, and more to the effect of “The Regulars are coming out,” referring to the mainstream British army.
By the time he had arrived in Lexington around midnight, entire towns both knew of the advance and sent dozens of their horsemen to warn others.
Another icon known for midnights made her call known Friday night, equallysotto voce. She brought tidings less of war and more of peace, love, andat least one rendition of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”
Taylor Swift, the second-most famous American, celebrated the most important moment of her life as the country was commemorating the most important one of its, the two seemingly in conversation precisely because they didn’t talk much. “Speak now,” the preacher said, but she is not the kind of girl to rudely barge in on an Independence Day occasion. Yet Swift’s closed-door gathering with all of America’s tightlipped boldfaced, along with AMC chief Adam Aron, couldn’t but mark a patriotic celebration — the country’s most durable cultural product declaring its independence, at least from two decades of singlehood and singing about wedding-day fantasies, as the clock turned to July 4. At midnight.
Amida coterieof pop icons and media hosts, fashion models and social influencers,Hollywood celebrities and Nashville singers, the Regulars were most definitely not coming out, unless you counted the people lined up and woo-ing down 31stStreet and across Seventh Avenue, behind barricades. But it was a kind of British-style gentry the MSG assembled made for just the same.
A certain irony has attended the labeling of theSwift-Kelce uniona “Royal Wedding,” as so many outlets did, on a day marking the freedom from such hegemonic madness. Yet watching the festivities from behind itstall keep-away tarps, one couldn’t help but feel like maybe the name carried some truth and we had indeed traded one form of monarchical submission for another: the fiat of kings for the rule of celebrity, the deference of the throne to the thrall of pop singers — the do-no-wrong authority of those blessed by birthright to the infallible aura made possible by charted singles. Where such bargains leave us remains up for debate.
As the drone shot of the New Yok skyline revealed itself at midnight, there she was, Lady Liberty, and there shewas, the other woman, the one on the bleachers, occupying the same frame as the Empire State Building, tonight lit up blue to honor the girl who loving was red on the night she wore white, Miss Americana’s glow as shiny as that made of copper. One if by land, two if by sea. And now, another signal, this time in purple from a beacon high above Madison Square Garden.
While such lights of independence shone, the first-most famous American was feeling left out. Seeing the allusion, via ampersand, to the one who nipped at his pride flashing above MSG, his social-media team engineered an overthrow with their own signal. “Trump Is Your President,”his version of the purple signsaid, attempting to reclaim a throne long marked for elimination.
Over the previous 24 hours, on X and on Instagram, the president enacted his own Swift-ness, reconstructing “America’s Eras” via images of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Neil Armstrong and the Miracle on Ice, all giving way to multiple pictures of Donald Trump, and video of Elvis, Iwo Jima, Mickey Mouse and Mary Lou Retton, also all giving way to pictures of Donald Trump. He even appropriated Swift’s Eras Tour handle,“It’s a long time coming.” The Regulars, again, were not.
The next night Trump would try to affix his place in the pantheon with a speech at the National Mall, serenading the crowds that had gatheredeven as Mother Nature kept trying to send them home. Thisfollowed a few weeks in which Trump’s vision of a 250thcelebration continued to be vanquished by those he sought to command, first byBret Michaelsand then later byalgae. After so many losses that he was getting tired of losing, Trump tried to stave off defeat like Major General Benjamin Lincoln at the Siege of Charleston, with about the same level of success.
He spoke grandly of American capabilities, joined by the crew of Artemis II and a flag flown by the Wright Brothers. “There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome. There is no place we cannot go. There is no goal we cannot reach. And there is nothing that Americans cannot do.”
He spoke grandly of American principles, joined by WWII veterans and oneof the first Black officers to head up a Special Forces team in Vietnam.“Our founders not only won our liberty, they secured it with the most righteous political document ever conceived…. After 250 years, unlike so many others in the world, in this country we have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal justice under the law.”But after he painted a blue sky he went back and turned it to rain. “Although I wasn’t treated that well,” he added, a kind of re-enactment in miniature of his Eras posts, the sweep of history inevitably giving way to Donald Trump.
Then he played some of his familiar hits —“you won’t have cheating on the elections anymore,” as he thumped for the Save America voter ID bill, and“Communism is a loser, and it always will be,” the record turning in the groove it can never escape like Stevie Nicks can never escape “Landslide.”We don’t know if she actually played that hitonstage with Taylor Swift, just as we don’t know why Donald Trump would play a song that would age so badly — will anyone on a future anniversary remember The Save America Act or why Donald Trump was talking about it? Yet the tunes emanated from the stage just the same.
Of course neither his speech nor, for that matter, Swift’s spectacle was designed for the future. They were meant for now, for theconceptof now-ness—for a belief that one instant matters, and it is the present, and one person matters in it, and it is the speaker. So go the themes of all of Swift’s songs and all of Trump’s diatribes, if one were to distill them to their atoms. And unlike the Founders, neither personality had, nor for that matter has really ever had, an eye on society as much as a gaze on themselves, not a sense for how they’ll be regarded in the future as much as a focus on how they are feeling right now. Have two famous people in America ever been as constantly attuned to their emotional temperature as Donald Trump and Taylor Swift? Have two people in America evergotten as famousforconstantly taking that temperature?
All of that made for a very incongruous Independence Day holiday, one normally intended for the broader people and a future lens— one designed to transcend the cult of personality holding the present hostage. The principles of the Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, after all, were about “provid[ing] new Guards for future security” with an attempt to“Absolve from all Allegiance to the British Crown,” or indeed any other.
Yet 250 years later, the nation built on that Declaration was dominated by two people, entirely differentiated in temperament, generation, outlook and, so there is no ambiguity, their ability to do policy harm, yet united in the belief of a spectacle that would serve them, that commanded worship of their crown—both admittedly of the people’s choosing yet giving the feeling, at various moments and to varying degrees, of an unwanted yoke.
Trump on this July 4 weekend was as public and pleading as Swift was demure and deflective. Yet the similarities felt hard to ignore, each one looking to command attention with a venue so prominent, a weekend meant for the Right of the People turned into the Might of One Person.The two figures mayloatheeach other, but they also have more in common than they’d like to admit, with amodus operandithat subdues with a belief in showmanship, with its centrality of personality over primacy of principle.
This extends to their followers too. MAGA and Swifties could not be more different, and yet in some ways can’t be told apart — bending to a leaderthat brings out in them the unshakable loyalist even in a country that prefers a patriot; that sees someone who can act or do no wrong even in a place that rejects infallibility; that suggests a monarch withdirect object the establishment of a tyranny over these States.
Both movements led to a weekend that deviated too often from principle and substance towardcelebrity and cultishness. It was not the America as the Founders intended. But it was the one, perhaps, that it inevitably deserved.