For one night, in the heart of deep-blue Washington, D.C., a fenced-off section of the National Mall became an oasis for members of the MAGA base. They had believed in President Trump from the beginning and carried him triumphantly back to power in 2024, and now they came to the grand opening of America’s 250th-birthday celebration in red-white-and-blue headbands, draped in flags, and sporting dangly blue AMERICA earrings. Doubts about anything related to Trump—his abysmal approval ratings, inflation accelerated by the war he started in Iran, his clashes with Republican senators earlier in the day—were, for an evening, drowned out by the roar of fighter jets overhead.
Last night’s festivities were meant to kick off two weeks in which Americans could come together and commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. But a string of artists had pulled out of events in Washington amid concerns that the celebrations would become the Trump show. And indeed, the evening felt like a Trump rally, with a montage of hits that his most die-hard fans know and love, including Trump’s favorite tenor singing “Ave Maria.” The president declared that America is “the hottest country anywhere in the world” and rattled off a list of ways in which his administration continues to “Make America Great Again.” “The best is yet to come!”
The crowd agreed. At this moment, attendees told me, when so much seems uncertain, the most logical thing for them to do is to put their faith in the president.
[Read: Thank you for your attention to this birthday]
Karen and Paul Depperschmidt are living the retirement they always dreamed about—road-tripping around America, visiting national parks. They live full-time in Wilmington, North Carolina, and they made the six-and-a-half-hour trip up to D.C. for the Great American State Fair—and the rally especially. The trip came with an added bonus—the chance to share RV parks with international visitors here for the World Cup. They met a family from Brazil and three Scottish tourists who were en route from Boston to Florida. “The nicest guys, they are having the best time,” Karen told me. “They love this country.”
The Trump rallies they’d previously attended—Karen’s been to two, Paul to three—had been a blast, they said. “Everybody’s so nice.” And, as lifelong conservatives originally from Texas, they wanted to show support for a president who they believe is keeping his word. “A lot of people don’t like it, but he is doing exactly what he said he was going to do,” Paul said.
When I asked them about the cost of gas—a particular concern for those living the camper-van lifestyle—it didn’t seem to matter: Prices at the pump are coming down, they said, which they knew would happen. More important, they told me, Trump was trying to eliminate the nuclear threat from Iran. When Paul finds himself questioning Trump’s decision making, he reminds himself to back up; the president has information that isn’t available to the public. “I think he’s earned our trust,” Paul told me. “I trust he’s going to do the right thing, and he hasn’t let us down yet.” The couple said they appreciate the breadth of the administration’s ambitions globally: across the Middle East and in China, Venezuela, and Cuba. In each place, Paul told me, he sees a president who’s “not ashamed to use the power that we have economically to benefit us and, in the long run, benefit the world.”
Rally attendees who didn’t want to stand shoulder to shoulder or who didn’t snag a chair close to the stage settled in on picnic blankets or broken-down cardboard boxes on the sidelines to take in nearly two hours of entertainment—including the U.S. Army’s rock band riling up the crowd with “Sweet Caroline,” Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the U.S.A.,” and Alexis Wilkins, a country singer who is FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, performing the national anthem. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told the crowd that the night’s musical acts were “way better than those libtards that canceled on us,” to raucous cheers.
As I wove my way through the crowd before the show began, while many rally-goers were still making their way through security, it seemed that journalists and evangelists spreading the gospel were competing for families’ attention. More than once, eyeing attendees to see if they’d be willing to chat with me, I realized they were already speaking with a reporter. Multiple conversations were interrupted by someone hoping to share that Jesus loves us.
Suzanne Jones and Joey Ervin flew to Washington from Chattanooga, Tennessee, yesterday morning to celebrate their son’s birthday. They managed to squeeze in visits to both the National Air and Space Museum and the Washington Monument before arriving at the night’s festivities. Their son, Alex, was particularly excited to see the president do “the dance”—pumping his arms to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”
Jones told me that one of her biggest concerns going into the 2024 elections had been border security. She said she feels safer today than she did under President Biden, and she noted that the “disastrous” four years under him felt all too recent. “Having a president, somebody that’s protecting my country, that can’t even have a speech—that’s rough. It makes me feel, you know, insecure,” Ervin told me of Biden. He said that while he wasn’t necessarily a fan of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, “I’d prefer to do that than what we did when we withdrew out of Afghanistan—10 times out of 10.”
Not everything, the couple concedes, is perfect. They bought their house before interest rates dropped and prices skyrocketed in 2020, and said they wouldn’t move now, because the market is difficult and doesn’t seem to be getting better. “My view of the economy is once stuff goes up, it’s not coming back down—I don’t care who’s in charge.” Gas prices, Ervin said, were high long before the Iran war. “We were in L.A. in 2024 and the gas prices were $7. That was before any of the Iran stuff started.”
[Read: Trump in defeat]
Washington—where the president has called up the National Guard, put his mark on local parks, and turned the city’s monumental core into a construction zone—is a bastion of opposition to Trump. But not everyone in D.C. is critical of the president. Jessica Greenfield and her husband, a D.C. police officer, moved to the city from Virginia in 2024. She said she’s seen a “huge difference” in crime over the past year—the streets are clean, and there are fewer carjackings and robberies. She credits, in part, Trump’s decision to deploy the guard. “I haven’t heard of crime in our neighborhood in a really long time,” Greenfield said.
The 2024 election marked Greenfield’s first time voting for Trump—a decision that put a strain on her relationship with some friends and family members. “It’s gotten tough with some of my more liberal friends, where they’ll really try to debate with me about it,” she told me. “I’m not really into that.” Greenfield said she reasons that “if I can have a nice street and walk my daughter and feel safe, that’s what’s important to me.”
Even those in the crowd who weren’t ardent Trump fans told me they appreciated that America’s birthday was being headlined by a showman. And they felt lucky to be at the party. “Is President Trump my favorite person in the world?” Ervin said. “No. But he is a good president; he does a good job. So we’re here to see him and put it on the bucket list: We saw the president.”
