Daily Kos84%
Trump fails miserably to throw America a birthday party 44%
By Andrew Mangan58%
6/28/2026, 11:00:00 PM
Keywords: America250, Donald Trump, Fourth Of July, Freedom250, Great American State Fair, July 4, Ufc
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Hasty Generalization, and Anchoring Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 22.3% saturation with 340 hits. Analysis detected 1,955 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,525 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47.1% and a BS Rank of 44% (12,322 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 56.30% of the article peer group.
Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.
In his second term, Donald Trump scored one of the biggest gimmes in presidential history: His term included America’s 250th birthday.
How easy it should have been to unite the nation—at least a little, at least briefly—under a common star-spangled banner.
Instead, he has failed to find popular support for the key events in his semiquincentennial project.
Only 51% of voters report being “extremely” or “very” excited for America’s 250th anniversary, according to a poll conducted for Fox News.
That’s about the same as the share of Americans who celebrated the Fourth of July last year, per YouGov data.
Excitement isn’t matching the occasion, and Trump is the most to blame.
He doesn’t know how to throw a party.
Take the UFC fight.
On June 14, on a stage on the White House’s South Lawn, men bloodied each other across seven bouts of mixed martial arts.
Trump watched the entire show, despite his penchant for sleeping through or dipping out early from other sporting events.
By and large, though, Americans didn’t care.
Only 26% told YouGov they were interested in watching the fight.
Meanwhile, 67% weren’t interested, including 53% who were “not at all interested.”
As much as they did care, a majority of Americans (51%) disapproved of the fight being held at all, another YouGov survey found.
Only 27% approved.
An average of 7 million Americans streamed the fight.
Though that may be a live-event record for Paramount+, it’s only about 18% of the live domestic viewership of Netflix’s 2024 boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul.
Such paltry numbers shouldn’t surprise anyone.
MMA, which the late Arizona Sen.
John McCain once derided as “human cockfighting,” is tied with wrestling for the least-popular sport in America, according to a 2025 YouGov poll.
The UFC itself has the second-worst favorability of any major U.S. sports organization, after the WWE.
And YouGov finds that only 38% of Americans know who the sport’s most well-known contemporary personality is (Anderson Silva).
Compare that with tennis, which isn’t much more popular in the U.S., and yet 81% of Americans know of Venus Williams.
Larry David, the famed TV writer and co-creator of “Seinfeld,” summed up many Americans’ take on the fight, telling Variety on Tuesday, “It was embarrassing.
I was embarrassed to be an American.”
And yet the fight may not have been Trump’s biggest misstep on the march toward July 4.
After all, at least “UFC Freedom 250” happened.
The same isn’t true for the planned concert from Freedom 250—which is the White House initiative working independently of the bipartisan America 250 effort.
Trump was forced to cancel that show after nearly all the acts dropped out.
But even if that concert had gone on as planned, it would have been a dud.
Roughly 60% of Americans hadn’t heard of three of the nine announced acts, per YouGov.
Only two—one-hit wonder Vanilla Ice and 1980s funk group Commodores—were known by at least two-thirds of Americans.
In August, the “Freedom 250 Grand Prix” is scheduled to take place on the streets of Washington, but its viewership may prove less impressive than that of the UFC fight.
May’s Indianapolis 500, IndyCar’s centerpiece race, was watched by an average of just 6.6 million viewers.
If the D.C. race manages to top that, it may be due to pure gawk factor alone.
Our nation’s capital, now the trashy site of car racing and cage fights.
Americans just aren’t hungry for what Trump is slinging.
The vast majority (71%) say small local events feel like a more authentic way to commemorate the occasion, while just 30% prefer large national events, according to a recent Elon University poll.
Every vibe is off.
His “Great American State Fair,” launched on Thursday, featured empty chairs in place of some state exhibits.
Instead of enjoyable schlock like the nation gobbled up in 1976, we’re faced with ephemera like the single ugliest shirt in human history, some dead ducks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and a proposed $250 bill with Trump’s mug on it.
Though the creation of that currently illegal banknote would require an act of Congress, the president’s top lackeys are pushing for it.
Of course, Americans hate the idea: Only 16% favor creating the Trump-emblazoned bill, while 70% oppose it, per a recent YouGov/Economist poll.
But the $250 bill, as with the events, signifies the core problem: Not only are his marquee events unpopular, they are less a celebration of America than a celebration of himself.
After all, in lieu of a big concert this past Wednesday, Trump hosted a Trump rally.
It’s no wonder only 37% of Americans told Elon University that America’s 250th anniversary is likely to “bring people together.”
More than anyone in recent history, Trump has degraded America’s view of itself.
Between 2001 and 2016, the share of Americans who said they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American didn’t dip below 81%, according to Gallup.
But from 2017 to 2020—spanning Trump’s first term—each year set a new low, slipping to 63% in the last full year of that term.
After Trump left the White House, American pride rebounded slightly, hovering in the mid to high 60s.
But last year, in the first year of his second term, it plunged to yet another new low: 58%.
While 65% of baby boomers see being American as key to their identity, 58% of both millennials and Gen Zers don’t think about that piece of their identity much, a recent Ipsos poll finds.
Maybe younger Americans’ sense of national identity will strengthen as they age, but it just as easily may not—especially if these greenest members of our workforce struggle to attain the “American dream.”
Only 34% of Americans see that dream as currently attainable, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
A majority (51%) say that dream was once true but is no longer.
And the less that people approve of how Trump is handling his job as president, the less they are interested in celebrating the big 250.
A new Marquette University Law School poll finds that while 88% of Americans who “strongly approve” of Trump are interested in the occasion, that is shared by only 39% of those who “strongly disapprove” of him.
The country is divided and hurting, and the unpopular guy who helped to divide it and hurt it is throwing a big party headlined by events most of the nation has little interest in.
Woo-hoo?
### **Any updates?
**
* It’s not just America—the world at large hates Trump.
A median of 76% of residents across 36 countries, from the United Kingdom and France to Japan and Mexico, express “no confidence” in Trump’s leadership, according to a Pew Research Center study.
Under Trump’s leadership, the median view of the U.S. is 57% unfavorable to 37% favorable.
Hey, that’s slightly better than some polls are showing for Trump’s approval rating, so it’s reassuring to see Americans dislike Trump more than the world dislikes America right now.
* Hating data centers is bipartisan, a new poll from Data for Progress reaffirms.
Sixty-three percent of likely voters, including 67% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans, support implementing a one-year moratorium on building new data centers to support artificial intelligence.
That’s just how much Americans loathe AI.
### **Vibe check**
At 250 years old, the U.S. is still a young nation.
What will it be like to live here during the tercentennial (300)?
Or the quadricentennial (400)?
Oddly, Americans expect none of those future milestones to eclipse the quality of life in 1976.
According to a new YouGov poll, 56% rate 1976 as having either an “excellent” or “good” quality of life—higher than for any of the other 10 years in the survey.
Only 6% say it was “bad” or “terrible.”
This data hints at the appeal of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
Most Americans weren’t alive in 1976, and for many of those who were, that year is far back enough for nostalgia to blur out its troubles.
The average unemployment rate in 1976 was 7.7%, far higher than 4.3% last month.
The real median household income was over $13,000 lower, in inflation-adjusted dollars, compared with 2024, the most recent year of data.
Life expectancy in 1976 was 7.4 years worse for men and 4.6 years worse for women than in 2024.
The violent crime rate is lower now, and the rate of property crime has been more than halved.
Plus, the 1970s were a heyday for America’s serial killers.
Looking toward the nation’s future, YouGov finds that increasing shares of Americans think that the U.S. as a nation will collapse in some way.
While only 12% “don’t expect people to be living in what is now the U.S.” in 2176, that increases to 25% for 2776.
How much longer do you think the U.S. will make it?
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100%flagged-word coverageLarry David
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