Massimo Bergamini

America’s 250th birthday ended much as it began: fireworks, patriotic spectacle and renewed appeals to national greatness.

Standing before the National Mall, President Donald Trump invoked the Founding Fathers, military heroes and the language of American exceptionalism before returning to the themes that now define his political vocabulary — personal and political grievance, disputed elections and the story of an America under siege.

The irony was hard to miss.

For someone capable of introspection, the semiquincentennial might have offered something more valuable than another celebration:  an opportunity to take stock.

Not because national anniversaries are normally exercises in collective introspection — they rarely are — but because no country has invested more heavily in the idea that its national story carries universal meaning.

American exceptionalism has never been merely a claim about military power, economic strength or technological leadership. At its best, it expressed something far more ambitious: the belief that America was engaged in an ever-unfolding democratic project.

The Constitution itself points to that. Its preamble commits the nation to the ongoing task of forming “a more perfect Union.”

For nearly four centuries, from the Puritan settlers who imagined America as a “city upon a hill” to Ronald Reagan’s revival of that same image during the Cold War, exceptionalism functioned less as a declaration of arrival than as an obligation to become.

It has always been a remarkably productive idea.

It inspired many of the defining achievements of American democracy. It echoes through landmark Supreme Court decisions from Marbury v. Madison to Brown v. Board of Education. It animated congressional investigations, the publication of the Pentagon Papers and ultimately Watergate and the resignation of a sitting president.

American institutions repeatedly demonstrated a willingness — however imperfect — to expose their own failures to preserve the integrity of the constitutional ideal.

Beyond America’s borders, exceptionalism also helped shape the modern world. The Marshall Plan, the postwar international order, decades of relative geopolitical stability, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and international development efforts that improved the lives of hundreds of millions all reflected a conviction that American power carried responsibilities as well as privileges.

Yet the same idea has always carried a darker impulse.

Manifest Destiny, McCarthyism and military interventions justified in the name of freedom remind us that exceptionalism has also served as a moral licence — an argument that America’s unique role entitled it to behaviour it would never accept from others.

American history, then, is not a contest between exceptionalism and its critics. It is the story of two competing understandings of exceptionalism itself.

One sees America’s ideals as imposing humility, civic responsibility and a constant search for national self-improvement. The other sees those same ideals as proof that America has already arrived.

That tension has defined the American experiment for generations.

For much of its history, the first understanding remained dominant. America was not perfect. It was expected to perpetually strive toward a lofty, if unattainable goal.

That is why Abraham Lincoln could describe the nation as unfinished. Why Martin Luther King Jr. could call America to honour its own promissory note. Why John F. Kennedy challenged citizens not to ask what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country.

Exceptionalism was less an identity than a commitment to universal values.

That is what appears to be changing.

Donald Trump did not create America’s divisions. The Civil War, unresolved racial conflict, Vietnam, religious polarization, economic inequality and regional antagonisms long predate his arrival on the political stage.

His speeches at Mount Rushmore and on the National Mall illustrated the shift. The language of exceptionalism remains everywhere. But it no longer functions as a reminder of the distance between America’s ideals and its reality. Increasingly, it serves to reassure Americans that the journey is already complete.

Believing that the 2026 midterms — or even the 2028 presidential election — will simply reset America to the path imagined by Lincoln mistakes symptom for cause.

America’s fault lines are too deep.

But there is one important difference between this moment and previous American crises.

Earlier periods of conflict unfolded within a civic culture where Americans still largely accepted common institutions, common facts and a shared understanding of public truth. However fierce the disagreements, there remained enough common ground for the country to correct itself.

That shared civic space is now eroding.

When facts themselves become matters of partisan allegiance and reality fragments, democracy loses one of its most important corrective mechanisms.

It is no longer just the story of American exceptionalism that is weakening.

The conditions that once made that narrative the connective tissue of a fragmented nation are weakening as well.

The greatest achievement of American exceptionalism was never its ability to persuade Americans that they belonged to an exceptional nation. Its greatest achievement lay in persuading them that they had a continuing obligation to become one.

That ambition now appears increasingly uncertain.

America’s retreat from international leadership, growing inwardness and the replacement of civic obligation with identity affirmation all point toward a deeper historical rupture.

American exceptionalism was never at its zenith when it proclaimed certainty. It was at its best when it demanded that America continue the difficult journey toward becoming what it had always claimed to be.

The real turning point — for America and for the democratic world — is not Donald Trump’s presidency. It will come if America truly ceases to understand itself as an unfinished national project.