Three events this summer each tell a very different story about the United States. On June 14, President Donald Trump turns 80, while on July 4 the US will celebrate 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The third event is the FIFA World Cup which began on June 11 in Mexico City and culminates in the final in New Jersey on July 19. Separately, and together, the events suggest an uneasy summer ahead against the backdrop of political tension and geopolitical friction. Trump became the oldest man ever to be elected president when he defeated Kamala Harris in November 2024 and returned to the Oval Office two months later. Aged 78 and seven months, Trump was five months older than Joe Biden was when his administration began in January 2021 (Biden remains the oldest person to hold the presidency, a record that Trump will surpass in May 2028). Biden celebrated his 80th birthday in November 2022 in a low-key manner that contrasts with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House on Trump’s milestone birthday. Since 2020, Biden and Trump have redefined notions of “ageism” in American politics which had, for decades, been seen as a younger person’s game in the decades since Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush held the presidency between 1981 and 1993. Bill Clinton’s victory over Bush in the 1992 presidential election heralded a generational shift in politics yet his own generation of baby boomers remains in office a quarter-century later. It is a quirky statistic that Clinton, his successor, George W Bush, and Trump were all born within two months of each other, in June, July, and August 1946. Clinton, the youngest of the three, was the first to become president and Trump, the oldest, was the last to take office. The increase in the age of the president can thus in part be seen by tracking the ages of Clinton, Bush, and Trump in office. At 46, Clinton was the youngest man to win a presidential election since John F Kennedy and he left office aged just 54; both he, and George W Bush, who was 62 at the end of his presidency, have led long lives after the White House. Remarkably, Barack Obama is the only occupant of the Oval Office in the last 30 years who was not born in the 1940s, and the scene is set for another generational shift post-Trump. “America 250” is a moment of celebration for the nation which, perhaps symptomatic of the fractious political moment in which it occurs, has been riven by factionalism. An official Congressional bipartisan commission (America 250) is vying with a White House task force (Freedom 250) established by an executive order of Donald Trump, its chair. Each of them will be arranging events to honour and commemorate July 4 but in isolation of each other, and their coexistence is a reminder of the rifts that the US has occasionally faced in history. To get to its 250th anniversary, the US overcame a civil war in its ninth decade as a country as well as periods of internal friction, including violence and political assassinations, which were last seen at elevated levels in the 1960s, when Vietnam also roiled the nation. To say that the past decade has been turbulent is an understatement, even if this is true of world politics more generally and not necessarily specific to the US. Although the tensions in recent years do amount to significant differences between groups of Americans over how the country should be run, they have not yet threatened to spiral out of control. One wildcard, however, that was not present in earlier eras is the intense atomisation of the social media age that has split communities into echo chambers that barely interact with one another. This poses a significant challenge to political leaders around the world, not just in the US, and has been on display in the United Kingdom in recent weeks as protests against perceived injustice in the application of law and order have been fanned by online commentary. Such transnational flows of information and disinformation may worsen as artificial intelligence (AI) tools and deep fakes become more sophisticated, and as so many tech companies are headquartered in the US, it may be up to Congress and the White House to regulate them. Political polarisation may, however, make this task much harder in practice. Finally, the FIFA World Cup kicked off with Mexico defeating South Africa 2-0 in a game which saw the referee send three players off, leaving the tournament just one red card short of the total of four sendings off during the entirety of the 2022 edition in Qatar. The stormy start may be seen as emblematic of a World Cup that has been buffeted by political and geopolitical tensions as never before, and whose run-up was dominated by negative media headlines about the denial of entry to Iranian support staff and Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan. For someone so steeped in the performative world of television and entertainment, Trump will not want the World Cup to be overshadowed by news narratives which focus on issues such as empty seats in the stadiums or potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in host cities. More than any other occupant of the White House, Trump understands the importance of visual images, and the showman in him will desperately want the tournament to be a success. By the same token, suggestions that Trump might attend the opening US game in Los Angeles may have been motivated in part by concern that he might be booed by sections of the crowd, as he was when he attended a New York Knicks basketball game in New York on June 9. How the summer unfolds will therefore provide indications of the political temperature across the US as the potentially consequential midterm elections in November loom on the horizon. The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.
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