‘What Exactly Are We Celebrating?’: MS NOW Guest Struggles With America’s 250th Birthday as Country ‘Destroyed’

Regular MS NOW Guest Eddie Glaude whined he has “great trepidation” about celebrating America’s 250th birthday because the country is being “destroyed” by President Donald Trump and White racism.

Glaude — a historian at Princeton University — joined Morning Joe on Tuesday to talk about the nation’s upcoming birthday bash. But he wasn’t in a celebratory mood.

“I’ve been struggling with, what are we actually celebrating?” Glaude asked.

He then rattled off several issues he has with Trump recently, including the Supreme Court ruling on Monday that he said gave the president “outsized executive power.” That was just another Trump-related issue the USA doesn’t need right now, according to Glaude.

He continued:

I’m worried about what that means for American democracy. I’m thinking about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the redrawing of districts in the South. I’m thinking about the court’s decision around TPS and immigration policies that harken back to the 1920s. I’m thinking about Donald Trump kind of, you know, in so many ways, blending his own kind of cult of personality with the celebration of the nation and wondering, what exactly are we celebrating?

Is it a storybook version of America? This idea that, you know, we are a beacon of freedom and that our perfection was secured in our salvation? Or are we looking at the way in which our ideals don’t match up to our practices, our current practices. And so I’m really going into July 4th, grappling with whether or not the ugly ghost of our country have us by the nape of the neck, Mika.

“That’s the question,” co-host Mika Brzezinski said. “When you look at the difficulties of the past and the things that we have overcome as a country, do you still have hope at a moment like this?

Glaude said he wasn’t optimistic — and suggested racism is tearing apart the home of the Red, White, and Blue.

“I don’t know,” Glaude said. “How can I put this — the country that made my life possible is being destroyed right in front of me. That there are those who believe I should just play a minor bit part, that Black and Brown folk, that the diversity of the nation, isn’t really its strength, it’s its Achilles’ heel.”

“Right, right,”  Brzezinski said as Glaude went on.

“There are those who are imagining the country as just simply a White republic,” Glaude added, “and they are in many ways, Mika, trying in every way, shape, form or fashion to make it so.”

Brzezinski let out a groan of disapproval as Glaude lamented the state of the union.

America’s 250th birthday has been a fairly popular topic on cable news of late. But like Glaude, not everyone is excited about celebrating it.

MS NOW’s Ali Velshi said last month he felt a “deep unease” about celebrating the Fourth of July because of the country’s “unresolved racial politics.”And CNN’s Victor Blackwell on Saturday told Americans it is important to remember a “slur” against Native Americans in the Declaration of Independence while they party next week.

Glaude’s pessimistic view won’t come as a total shock to his big fans, though. He admitted in his new book America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries that “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.”

Watch above.

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