The president waved the green flag on an IndyCar race through Washington streets yesterday, cementing what may be the most surreal moment in American ceremonial politics since someone let Andrew Jackson bring his horse into the White House.
Trump’s claim that this race represents the nation’s most significant event since 1776 is not hyperbole. It is a complete inversion of how hyperbole works. Hyperbole at least gestures toward reality before exaggerating it. This statement simply erased 250 years of actual history—wars, constitutional amendments, moon landings, the internet—and replaced them with high-speed vehicles navigating around the Lincoln Memorial.
The ceremonial lap beforehand was the logical endgame of a summer drowning in bicentennial excess. We have reached peak American theater: a sitting president performing the ceremonial role of a Formula 1 grid girl, except the grid girl is the most powerful person on Earth and the grid is literally Washington DC.
What makes this absurd is not that a president attended a sporting event. It is that he needed to declare it historically significant while doing so. The race did not need presidential validation to exist. But the presidency apparently needs the race to feel important. This is not leadership. This is performance anxiety in a suit.
The irony is sharp: the founding documents were written to constrain executive power, and here we are watching that power deploy itself to make a car race feel like constitutional significance. The Founders would have found this either hilarious or terrifying. Probably both.