Politics

"You can do two things," Donald Trump told reporters as he stood beside the new retrofitted Air Force One on Wednesday. "You can low-key it, or you can show it." He always does the latter. The presidential plane is, as everyone knows, a $400 million present from Qatar. The famous light blue hull is gone. It is painted in Trump’s preferred color scheme – navy blue, red, gold stripes. The Air Force says it spent less than $400 million implementing "security upgrades." And the aircraft began active service this week and will be used by the President until the end of his second term at least. It’s hard to know if Americans really care about their Commander-in-Chief flying around in a jet given to him by a sheikh who didn’t need it.

Is the United States a capitalist country, where bosses exploit workers, or is it a great empire, where colonists exploit subject peoples? American socialists and social democrats were never quite able to decide. “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” Bernie Sanders told GQ magazine in 2019. Yet he would also say that: “When you're white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto. You don't know what it's like to be poor. You don't know what it's like to be hassled when you walk down the street.” In 2026 Sanders is an emeritus figure, and the “imperial” idea has won out.

As the United States marks 250 years since the country's unilateral declaration of independence, most of the 4th of July celebrations have focused on the rebels. But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson have hogged the limelight for too long. What about the American Loyalists, those who defied the intense social pressure and stayed loyal to the British Crown? Loyalists were often bad writers who simply lacked the flair of radicals such as Thomas Paine In popular imagination, the American Revolution was a contest between the Americans and the British. In reality, however, only about 40 percent to 45 percent of the colonial population joined the rebellion. Around a fifth stayed loyal. The rest backed neither side.