The Left’s War on Patriotism Reaches America’s 250th Celebration

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Those of us who have been around a while remember what American life was like fifty years ago.

It was 1976, a presidential election year, and almost everything was partisan. But not everything:

In 1976, the country was wrapped up in Bicentennial fever: Red, white and blue were everywhere, in advertisements and clothing and bicycles and decorations. Radio and television commercials were written with 18th century colonial themes. Actors in character as Founding Fathers pitched everything from fast food to furniture. The kinds of companies that produced collectible promotional items had patriotic themes on drinking glasses, bookmarks, and decorative dinner plates.

And there was nothing partisan about it.

Republicans and Democrats alike were caught up in the Bicentennial celebrations. Even hard-fought primaries in both parties that year didn’t diminish the joy that practically every American felt in celebrating the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Fifty years have passed, and how things have changed.

This July, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. Our population today is half again as big as it was then; we are a wealthier nation today by most measures. There’s no reason in the world why we shouldn’t be even more excited about this year’s anniversary than we were then.

But where do we see the issue mentioned? Do we see the presence of our nation’s semiquincentennial anywhere in the popular culture today? (Perhaps “semiquincentennial” doesn’t trip as easily off the tongue as “bicentennial” did, but that can’t be the whole reason).

If anything, the nation is less patriotic than ever, because the Democratic party – and the modern Left in general – have decreed that the very concept of patriotism is verboten, so they will not participate in much of a patriotic bent anymore. That leaves just half the country to pick up the slack.

The fault can’t be with the federal government; almost as soon as he was reelected, President Trump announced that he would make sure the federal government and the federal city did their utmost to celebrate our nation’s 250th this year with all the flag-waving excitement it deserves.

Among the early announcements on this vein was declaring that Washington, DC would host a national music festival around Independence Day, 2026, running from June 25 through July 10, much like the state and county fairs held across the country every summer.

Acts started to get booked, and a preliminary list of performers was announced by the end of May, 2026.

Within days of that announcement, acts on the list started dropping out. Country star Martina McBride, Poison rocker Bret Michaels, soul group The Commodores, and hip hop singer Young MC, among others, publicly announced their refusal to honor their agreements to perform, leaving the organizers just three weeks to find replacement acts for their slots.

They gave various excuses, either saying they had accepted the booking by mistake, their agents had messed up, or they were misled about the nature of the event and were upset that it would be political.

Since it’s virtually impossible that they could have accepted such a booking by mistake – this is the biggest opportunity some of these performers have had in years – one must assume it’s the latter: they don’t want to perform at an event that has a political aspect to it.

The first thing one notices about the list of acts – both the ones who are staying on and the ones who have announced their intent to break their contracts – is its diversity. Clearly, the organizers were trying to put together a selection of musicians that “looks like America” (to use the typical Democrat term). Lots of genres were to be represented: urban and rural, black and white, current and dated, mainstream and niche.

If the organizers were really being “political,” during a Republican administration, would they have booked a card full of Democrat acts?

Rather, this looks more and more like an example of the old saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

When the Trump Administration books Republican acts, they show up without controversy; when they try to be magnanimous and bipartisan, offering a good gig to Democrat acts, they just get their outreached hand bitten off.

The mainstream media is trying to spin this story in favor of the “nonpolitical” argument, but their case doesn’t hold water.

Is there a political aspect of any government-sponsored public event? Sure. The mayor, governor, or in this case president, in office at the time of the event, will usually have the opportunity to make a speech or two.

Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, for example, started a tradition of a country music festival downtown during his term; neither the Republican nor Democrat singers and bands they hired ever objected to the fact that a Democrat mayor might get a bit of free publicity from his association with the event. And the audiences didn’t mind either; it just goes with the territory.
Many state fairs have both a Republican Day and a Democrat Day, at which each party chooses a different day of the seven-to-ten-day fair to gather their volunteers, showcase their candidates, and enjoy a bit of real Americana before going back to knocking on doors (at the Illinois State Fair this year, for example, Democrat Day is August 19, and Republican Day is August 20).
Most of these performers have been performing at state fairs throughout their careers. They all know how this works. As the saying goes, “this isn’t their first rodeo.”

So one must wonder: just how organic is this series of announcements, really?

Why did these performers wait until the organizers started to release their names to make public announcements of their non-participation? Surely, having been booked for this event months and months before, they couldn’t have all decided simultaneously to make excuses to drop out.

If I were an investigative journalist with sources in the music industry, I might be able to report my suspicion with certainty, but I am not. I’m just an op/ed writer with a theory. I look at evidence, I see if it adds up, and I ask whether it makes sense. I just don’t have sources to confirm my theory.

But we can all look at the evidence. Multiple performers across multiple genres announced that they are dropping out of a major booking – taking a financial hit that some of them can afford but some likely cannot – with a public excuse that doesn’t hold water.

Gentle Reader, what kind of pressure do you think has been applied to these performers? Was it a gentle recommendation or a firm order, made to the singers, their bands, or their agents? Are there other bookings being held hostage to their agreement to drop out of this one?

Don’t think this doesn’t happen. A century of American music history confirms that promoters, musician’s unions, politicians and organized crime have used such tactics to control who performs where and when. Not all the time, but when they want to. It’s corrupt, malicious, and usually illegal, but it’s tried and true. And there’s no reason to believe it still doesn’t happen today.

How much would it embarrass the Trump administration if one performer dropped out? How about two? How about three or four, or more, across multiple genres? How much might that hurt the President’s opinion ratings in the polls?

And how much does the Left need to hurt the Trump brand, and the Republican brand, and the MAGA movement, in this critical election year, just a few months before the midterms?

If there’s anything we know of the modern American Left, from its sponsorship of urban takeovers, Medicare/Medicaid and welfare fraud, to its control of the education system, sports leagues and the pop culture, it is that there is no low to which the Left will not stoop, to inject division into every arena they can.

The summer of 2026 should be a bipartisan celebration of our nation’s 250th anniversary. The Trump administration is doing its best to facilitate broad-based patriotism in that spirit.

And the clearly organized sabotaging of the Great American State Fair is most likely just another broadside that the Left has fired at yet another well-intended effort at unity in America.

Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo