JUNE 14 IS A SPECIAL DAY. It was officially designated in 1949 as Flag Day—not one of the federal holidays for which anybody gets time off from work, but an honored day to remember the adoption by the Second Continental Congress of the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the United States on June 14, 1777.
But Donald Trump has chosen another event from two years earlier as the anniversary on which he is pinning his enormous military parade on the streets of Washington, D.C.: the creation of the U.S. Army by that same Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775. This would make June 14, 2025 an occasion to celebrate what Trump regards as the indissoluble link between the nation, its capacity for violence, and himself, the indispensable avatar of “patriotism” and redeemer of American Greatness.
There are several problems here, but let’s start with an easy one: To be historically accurate, the 250th Army birthday that Trump claims to commemorate is a fake. At best, you can say it fudges the historical record.
Back in June 1775, during the very earliest days of what we now know as the American Revolution, the Second Continental Congress—a more or less self-appointed rogue legislature—met in Philadelphia. On June 14, it voted to raise six companies of rifle-armed troops in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, which were to march to join the Massachusetts forces then clashing with the British. This was the creation of a revolutionary army appropriately called the Continental Army. Its mission was to defend the thirteen American colonies entering into rebellion against the British Crown. It was not an army of the United States, because the United States did not exist, even theoretically: Independence wouldn’t be declared for another year.
The next day, June 15, the Congress selected George Washington “to command all the continental forces raised or to be raised for the defense of American liberty.” When the Virginian formally accepted the appointment the next day, June 16, the population of the Continental Army was one: Washington, the newly minted general, was its only soldier.
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Eventually, after roughly eight years of brutal warfare, the Continental Army succeeded in its mission. Washington resigned his commission in December 1783, and the last units mustered out on June 20, 1784.
This army, created 250 years ago, was a predecessor of the U.S. Army.
And it wasn’t the only one: Even as the Continental Army was being dissolved, the Congress, meeting under the Articles of Confederation, created a small new army to patrol the frontier. This, too, could be a considered a predecessor of the U.S. Army.
But before there could be a U.S. Army, there needed to be a United States with a national government. One could argue that the United States existed ever since 1776—and indeed, fireworks will attest to the nation’s 250th birthday next year, on July 4, 2026. But the existence of the United States was, at best, tenuous during the Revolution and the years of the Confederation period of the 1780s.
The United States government itself came into being in stages—with the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the convening of the first Congress in March 1789, and then the inauguration of the first president, Washington, on April 30, 1789. Even then, with a commander-in-chief finally in place, there was no U.S. Army. Congress did not get around to creating a Department of War until the summer of 1789. Finally, as their last act of business before adjourning for the year, on September 29, 1789 the House and Senate passed a bill creating the U.S. Army—starting by officially absorbing under the new constitutional structure the existing forces created by the Confederation Congress.
So the idea that June 14, 1775 rather than September 29, 1789 marks the birth of the U.S. Army is a choice—a matter of preference and tradition rather than clear-cut fact. The truth is, U.S. history—like all history—is complicated. There is no straight line linking the nation’s origins in tax resistance and revolution to the system we now take for granted. But Trump—who has issued executive orders seeking to seize control of the teaching and commemoration of U.S. history in support of the conviction that America is the greatest nation in history—will hardly allow such complications to interfere with his grandiose MAGA myth-making.
It is worth noting that while June 14, 1975, was the bicentennial of the Continental Army’s founding, there was no military parade on the streets of the capital that year. But then-President Ford was no Donald Trump. This year Mr. “I Alone Can Fix It” occupies the White House.
And June 14 is Trump’s own birthday, and thus a perfect occasion for him to perform his power—a power laced with the rhetoric of violence—on the national and global stage, linking his very person with the symbolism of the Army and the state itself. As Irene Gammel notes in the Conversation:
Trump’s parade is a show of force. Its sheer scale—bands, vehicles, helicopters—performs strength and legitimacy, marking who belongs and who does not. But the birthday celebration also turns attention back to the man himself, reminding us that authoritarianism is not only about intimidation but also about the persona of the autocrat.
Like pretty much everything these days, what was once an ordinary occurrence has now become an extraordinary occasion for Trump to further exercise his power, and thus for those who care about constitutional democracy to take note, and to voice their opposition.
IN RESPONSE TO TRUMP’S birthday plans, a coalition of opposition groups including Indivisible, 50501, the AFT, and Black Voters Matter will be holding nationwide rallies on June 14—the “No Kings Nationwide Day of Defiance.” That such demonstrations, on behalf of such elementary democratic sentiments, are currently necessary is a sign of how low American politics has sunk during the Trump era.
Trump has made clear that he plans to turn the entire year leading up to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence into a celebration of “American Greatness.” Back in May 2023, he released a campaign video promising what Politico described as “a blowout, 12-month-long ‘Salute to America 250’ celebration [including] a ‘Great American State Fair,’ featuring pavilions from all 50 states, nationwide high school sporting contests, and the building of Trump’s ‘National Garden of American Heroes’ with statues of important figures in American history.” And in his second week back in office, Trump issued two executive orders centered on the anniversary. The first, “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday,” announced the intention “to provide a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion.” The second, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” mandated the termination of “radical, anti-American ideologies,” the promotion of policies designed to “instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand,” and the reestablishment of a “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission and Promoting Patriotic Education.” (More on that in a moment.)
Trump has also hung a copy of the Declaration in the Oval Office, beyond light-protective glass and light-blocking curtains. He has reveled in showing people this Declaration-as-decoration. “Do you think Joe Biden would do this? I don’t think so,” he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in March. “Do you think he knows what it is?” Not that it’s clear Trump has any clue what the Declaration is. When Terry Moran of ABC News asked him in April “What does it mean to you?” Trump’s response was a classic:
Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration—it’s a declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot and it’s something very special to—to our country.
Despite his professions of love for the Declaration, Trump acts every day more and more like an absolute monarch—and does so without the slightest awareness of the contradiction between his autocratic imperiousness and the values outlined in Declaration, whose purpose was to advance a republican vision of a government without a king or royal family. No less troubling, his followers embrace it all, celebrating the origins of the republic and the symbolism of the Declaration while pledging allegiance to a single man who so obviously knows nothing about the Declaration or the Constitution and who recently stated that he “does not know” whether or not he is even legally required to abide by the Constitution. It is hard to understand such extreme partisanship and such credulous suspension of disbelief in tyranny.
It is as if they have chosen to forget the basic historical truths outlined in this account:
The facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history.
The United States is unusual. It is a republic; that is to say, its government was designed to be directed by the will of the people rather than the wishes of a single individual or a narrow class of elites. As the eighteen charges leveled against King George in the Declaration of Independence make clear, our founders considered the British government of the time to be oppressive and unjust. They had no wish to replace the arbitrary government of one tyrant with that of another.
The bedrock upon which the American political system is built is the rule of law. The vast difference between tyranny and the rule of law is a central theme of political thinkers back to classical antiquity. The idea that the law is superior to rulers is the cornerstone of English constitutional thought as it developed over the centuries. The concept was transferred to the American colonies. At the infancy of our Republic, the threat was a despotic king who violated the people’s rights and overthrew the colonists’ longstanding tradition of self- government. After decades of struggle, the colonists succeeded in establishing a more perfect Union founded not upon the capricious whims of a tyrant, but republican laws and institutions founded upon self-evident and eternal truths.
It is the sacred duty of every generation of American patriots to defend this priceless inheritance. . . . The principles of equality and consent mean that all are equal before the law. No one is above the law, and no one is privileged to ignore the law, just as no one is outside the law in terms of its protection.
In his Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln warned of two results of a growing disregard for the rule of law: mob rule and tyrannical rule [which both] violate the rule of law. When crimes go unpunished or when good men do nothing, the lawless in spirit will become lawless in practice, leading to violence and demagoguery.”
The above passage is taken from “The 1776 Report” that was hurriedly issued by a right-wing Trump-appointed panel in the final hours of his first term.
And yet the luminaries of Hillsdale College, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation who write so glowingly about the Declaration and the Constitution and the cause of “republican liberty” and quote from Jefferson and the Federalists and Lincoln continue to stand by a man who is brazenly contemptuous of the rule of law and utterly lacking in civic virtue, and who has already tried once to overthrow a democratic election because he didn’t win.
AS WE ANTICIPATE TRUMP’S Kim Jong-un–style celebration of this year’s Flag Day, it is worth keeping this flag-centered image clearly in view:
This is MAGA patriotism in action—the merging of the U.S. flag with the Confederate battle flag and the Trump flag, and the conflation of patriotism with racist reaction, violence, and Trump himself, the megalomaniac who has declared that “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
The Trumpian June 14, 2025 parade and celebration will be the successor to that angry insurrection of January 6, 2021—a celebration of “patriotism” that is deeply anti-democratic, and of a man who is the most authoritarian president in American history.
If you want to see true patriotism this June 14, turn away from Trump’s propagandistic spectacle and look instead to those responding across the country with a loud, proud chant of “No Kings!” And recall this observation, from the first of the Federalist Papers: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing Demagogues, and ending Tyrants.”
Jeffrey C. Isaac is completing a book entitled Defending Democracy’s Declaration. Scheduled to appear in spring 2026, the book challenges the ways that the MAGA movement is poised to weaponize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The book traces the history of contestation over the Declaration, and explains why and how its rhetoric and symbolism is an indispensable resource for defenders of liberal democracy today. The James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, he writes regularly on current affairs at his blog, Democracy in Dark Times.