Presidential historian Jon Meacham said President Donald Trump has effectively hijacked America’s 250th anniversary by making the country’s birthday all about himself. Asked on Sunday’s “The Weekend” whether Trump’s behavior had any precedent, Meacham told Laura Barrón-López, “Not for a president, but for a monarch, absolutely.”

On Friday, Trump is set to deliver a speech at Mount Rushmore for an event that will feature military bands, flyovers and a fireworks display. It will be hosted by Freedom 250, the same group behind other events marketed as celebrations of the country’s independence, including Trump’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall and the controversial UFC fight that took place on the White House South Lawn earlier this month. 

“The reason the first week of July is the occasion on which we commemorate the nation’s beginning is because of a very specific document,” Meacham explained, referring to the Declaration of Independence. 

The historian called the document a “mission statement,” adding that most of it functioned as “a list of grievances” against the British monarch, King George III, who was “acting unilaterally” and “outside his constitutional bounds.”

Ahead of July 4, Meacham advised every American to reread the country’s founding document, which he said was “really important” in this particular political moment, as Trump’s actions appear closer to that of a king than a democratically elected president. 

“We’re not messing around anymore,” he said. “This isn’t fourth grade civics, right? This is an advanced, complicated test of our civic understanding of who we truly have to be.”

The “central rhetorical task of a president in a moment like this is to talk about us and not him,” Meachem told MS NOW, adding that he believes the story of America is “not about one person, by definition; it is about all of us.”

“The Constitution begins with the words ‘We the people,’ and the ‘we’ is the most critical,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer said. He warned that Trump isn’t uniting Americans but dividing them. 

“Trump is the manifestation of a deeper moral problem in the country, and our moral problem is that too many people have chosen division,” he explained. “The MAGA warriors, they find joy in the fight. They find that having not a rival or an opponent, but an enemy, to be this elevating drama that invests every moment with importance.” Meacham said that under Trump, “too many of us have fallen prey to that kind of thinking.” 

He told MS NOW that for “democracy to work on a moral level,” it “requires the most counterintuitive of things: it requires us to give as well as to take.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more fun to take than to give,” he continued. “And I fear the great cultural legacy of President Trump will be that giving is for suckers, as he might put it, and taking is for winners, and that’s precisely the opposite of what the country has to be.”

You can watch Meacham’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.

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