Not least because I was 12 years old, the Bicentennial festivities felt very different from this year's 250th birthday celebrations for the United States. This being America, commercialization was inevitable — everything was red, white and blue and was official whatever of the shindig. Overall, though, 1976 was a nonpartisan affair despite being an election year following a major scandal.

No one seemed to think it should be otherwise.

Aside from the flood of Bicentennial quarters that began turning up in our change, my main interaction with the event was a junior high school field trip to Cincinnati to visit the Freedom Train, which carried notable historical artifacts but not the blockbusters I was hoping for. The Louisiana Purchase is no Declaration of Independence!

Decline was baked into the event. The train barely made it to my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, whose passenger rail lines were shutting down and beginning to rust away alongside the factories that used to employ my neighbors.

America was not in awesome condition. The Vietnam War had ended a year earlier with the humiliating fiasco of the withdrawal from Saigon. Gas rationing and the OPEC crisis were fresh memories, and inflation stubborn enough to call for "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now) buttons. The president, Gerald Ford, hadn't even been elected; the Michigan congressman had emerged, like Peter Sellers in "Being There," from the wreckage of Watergate. In short succession we had witnessed the ouster of the vice president, then the president, and then Ford's pardon of his disgraced predecessor, which confirmed dark suspicions that the fix is always in and the big fish never get caught. He was presiding over an impressive run of getting nothing through the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

And crazy women kept trying to kill him.

But it wasn't all sour. The war was over. Criticism of the president cast him as a well-meaning, bumbling goof who couldn't chew gum without tumbling down a flight of stairs. Though unfair, it was good-natured by today's standards.

Most importantly, the constitutional system had worked, albeit belatedly. Republican leaders had finally abandoned Richard Nixon, putting country above party. Nixon himself had respected political tradition enough to resign rather than subject us to protracted impeachment proceedings. Jimmy Carter, the affable, grinning Georgian who was crafting a new moderate Southern governor strategy for the post-liberal Democrats, was nailing down the nomination and exuding an irresistible optimism.

The main event was the arrival of tall ships from around the world (talk about inclusive!), with one even from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, in New York Harbor, followed, naturally, by a nationally televised fireworks display for the ages.

The tonal contrast with the Semiquincentennial celebration centered around July 4, 2026, couldn't be more stark.

It's a sense that the American empire is not just beyond mere decline but rather that it is actually circling the drain, a broad-based lack of expectation that this country will ever again strive to build great things. Our exceedingly partisan president, who makes clear every day in his online and verbal communications that he does not consider half of the population of the United States to be loyal Americans, is determined to impose his personal mark on the event in a way that would never have crossed the minds of Ford or even the imperious Nixon: a triumphal arch in Washington, a $250 bill and commemorative coin both bearing his face, Trump passports, and a political rally to open his "Freedom 250" fair dedicated to the ideology of his branch of the Republican Party.

As in 1976, there will be fun — for a certain kind of American, the downscale kind Donald Trump considers to be his supporters: a UFC cage match on the White House lawn in conjunction with Trump's 80th birthday on June 14, plus a NASCAR-style race through the nation's capital and around its monuments. It's fun for the whole family, if your family is white, male, old and lives in a red county in a red state.

Fifty years ago, the emphasis was unity. "Each of us, of every color, of every creed, are part of our country and must be willing to build not only a new and better nation but new and greater understanding and unity among our people," Ford urged.

This year's theme is exclusion, beginning with the Washington Mall national prayer rally led by Trump on May 17 — taxpayer-funded — emphasizing to everyone who is not an evangelical or at least a Protestant Christian that separation of church and state is dead and that we are "One Nation Under God" — Trump's version of God, who approves of emoluments, wars of choice, and not attending church.

For a showman who obsessed over the attendance at his first inauguration in comparison with that of his predecessor, it's curious that Trump has chosen to throw a party to which at least half the country isn't invited.

Sixty-five percent of Republicans plan to celebrate. Only 37% of Democrats do.

Though it's impossible to quantify buzz or excitement, I doubt even the most avid MAGA supporter will argue that we as a people — even if you only include Republicans — are excited about what ought to be a momentous occasion, marking a quarter of a millennium as a new and different kind of nation-state. Far more people are talking about the FIFA World Cup, even if it's to complain about how ridiculously expensive and poorly planned it will be.

If anyone compares, Ford will beat Trump on the headcount.

This will be a tacky affair, one that reflects and further divides an already bitterly polarized electorate. Strip mall meets used car lot at the corner of "Idiocracy," except that the movie's wrestler-porn star prez cared about actual problems affecting people.

For both the president and for us, however, it will be difficult to match the low bar set by the first Centennial in 1876.

The main event for the 100th was an exhibition centered in Philadelphia that showcased American industry and innovation, like the first telephone and the importation of bananas, to which no one could object. It pointed the way to the future with a speech by Susan B. Anthony in favor of women's suffrage. In a country of 46 million people, there were 10 million visitors, making it a huge success.

Sadly, that triumph was quickly forgotten in the catastrophic 1876 presidential election that found Democrat Samuel Tilden defeating Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Northerners refused to accept the results, tainted as they were by extreme fraud in several states, because the Democratic Party had been seen as the party of the South during the recently concluded Civil War. So Congress passed the Compromise of 1877, which reassigned electoral college votes to Hayes, making him president. Tilden stepped aside in exchange for ending Reconstruction in two remaining states, leading to the brutalization of Southern Blacks after the withdrawal of Union occupation troops.

If Trump gets his way, the midterm elections will similarly be such a disgrace that the hot mess he is making of the Semiquincentennial will soon be forgotten as well.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

Photo credit: Andrew Ruiz at Unsplash