We’ve been careening toward tankification ever since. It’s really a shame he didn’t start his presidency with a visit to Indonesia, where they celebrate Independence Day with pole-climbing contests.

Trump is sort of the anti-George Washington, a president who thinks everything should be about him, including holidays. Last year, when he was asked the traditional Thanksgiving question about what he was most grateful for, the answer almost instantly turned to, um, himself. (“I’ve made a tremendous difference in the country. This country is so much stronger now than it was when I took office that you wouldn’t believe it.”)

Well, he did pardon the turkeys.

Maybe we should feel lucky that the special parade plans weren’t a lot worse. Imagine the possibilities. We could have Ivanka skipping along in front, tossing flowers to the common folk while Jared follows behind on a leash.

The president doesn’t think the whole affair is going to be very expensive — after all, the government already has a bunch of tanks and planes. “All we need is the fuel,” explained the man whose first term is going to run up a $5 trillion deficit.

We’ve had Independence Day celebrations at the White House since Jefferson’s time, and some have worked out better than others. In 1845, when James Polk was president, wayward fireworks killed two bystanders. Polk was not really a lucky guy. When he was a teenager, he was operated on for a urinary stone removal without anesthetics, and it’s possible the procedure left him impotent. I am telling you all this as a reminder that there’s a whole lot more to our national history than military hardware.

Exactly 50 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day. They had been huge rivals, but in retirement they started exchanging letters and became friends. It’s a lovely story, right? And I believe it’s true, even though it was a lot easier to manipulate political legends back in the days before the Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law on July 4, 1966.

We’ve had a lot of great moments and national heroes, but the best thing about the American story is how we’ve moved forward even through totally terrible administrations. This is a country that elected Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But it also survived Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Warren Harding.