As the United States marks 250 years since independence, the bitter civil war at the heart of the American Revolution continues to echo in the age of Donald Trump.America's creation story reads like a Hollywood script.Patriotic colonists rise up against the tyranny of George III "But the sheer numbers of white settlers and the growing power of the US military after 1790 makes that an uphill battle."That push for territorial expansion eventually found its rationale in the theory of "Manifest destiny" — a quasi-religious belief that white Americans had a destiny to conquer and rule the entire North American continent.As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of their Declaration of Independence, how many will appreciate that the lofty and inspirational aims and entitlements enunciated in the Declaration of Independence weren't minted in the United States?Instead, they were a reflection and consolidation of European and British Enlightenment thought.America's "founding fathers" took great delight in declaring "All men are created equal" even as many of them, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, continued to personally enslave black people.But any hope of historical reflection rather than jingoism this Fourth of July faced a significant challenge in Donald Trump and his MAGA administration."He has done his best, along with many others in his administration, to eliminate any sense of complexity about anything in American history," Harvard's Maya Jasanoff says.She bemoans the funding cuts made to many American cultural institutions which had planned an enlightened way to commemorate the occasion