Should AANHPIs give a Flying %&@# about America’s 250th Birthday?

By Eddie Wong. Posted June 15, 2026

“Meh” seems to be the response to the upcoming July 4, 2026 celebration of America’s 250^th birthday. Trump’s UFC Cage Match on the White House lawn on June 14 to celebrate his 8oth birthday and the nation’s founding was an added turn-off.  Nor have people forgotten Trump’s orders to purge critical views of American history from National Parks exhibits, e.g. National Park Service orders removal of woke comments at Bunker Hill Monument. People are not in a celebratory mood. According to the Ipsos America 250 poll taken between February 25 – March 4, 2026, 61% of the nearly 5,000 people polled are not satisfied with the way things are going in the country today.  The sour mood can be traced to high food and fuel costs exacerbated by Trump’s senseless tariff wars and disastrous war on Iran.  Only 37% of those polled in the New York Times/Siena poll of May 18 approve of Trump’s job performance, his lowest rating in his second term.  Less than 25% of those polled believe the $29 billion spent on the Iran War to date has been worth it. Perhaps most damaging for Trump and the GOP as the midterm elections approach is that 69% disapprove of Trump’s handling of the cost of living.

High gas prices in Sacramento, CA. Photo from abc10.com.

Asian Americans Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (AANHPI) like the general public are pissed at Trump. The Strength in Numbers/Verasight Poll of May 27, 2026 showed AANHPIs approval of Trump was at 23%.  The 2025 AAPI Policy Priorities Survey (March 2026) reported that AANHPIs believes the government spends excessively on military and defense (69%) and on immigration enforcement (72%). Furthermore, respondents said that too little is spent on healthcare (68%) and education (70%). These finding validate a longstanding trend of AANHPI support for the Democrats and place them on the moderate to liberal end of the political spectrum. But there’s still a disconnect between holding progressive views and levels of engagement on the part of AANHPIs in terms of political giving, joining campaigns, and turning out to vote.

AANHPIs fall on the opposite side of the Trump administration, which unabashedly seeks to promote White Supremacy and a return to the 1950s era of white, patriarchal rule.  In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Louisiana v. Callais redistricting case that allowed gerrymandering for political purposes, Florida has redrawn congressional districts to add four GOP leaning districts before the November midterm elections, and the Tennessee state legislature eliminated the sole Democratic congressional district in Memphis. Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi are deliberating on new district lines to increase chances for the GOP to hold the U.S. House in the November election. Are we going to rise to meet the challenge by donating to voter mobilization groups and going out to register and talk with voters?

There is a naked pursuit of white favoritism in the Trump administration. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired or demoted 36 senior military officials with Black and female officers constituting 60% of those dismissed, including Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr, the former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to head the U.S. Navy.  And what could be more obvious in demonstrating White Supremacy than the Trump administration’s granting of priority status for Afrikaners, the Dutch and French descendants of South African settlers, in the coveted 7,500 entry slots for refugees.  Meanwhile, the Trump administration has ordered foreign nationals with legal status in the U.S. to their home countries to apply for a green card/permanent residence status. AAPI Data reported that there are 1.5 million Asians on the waiting list for green cards. It is not clear how this new order will be enforced as it poses economic and personal hardships for migrants and political exiles. The U.S. Supreme Court’s long-awaited ruling on birthright citizenship, which places the plaintiff Wong Kim Ark back into the public debate, will also be closely watched.

As White Supremacy raises its ugly head, AANHPIs should be especially concerned, not only because we stand in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Native peoples, but because we know from direct experience the horrors of white manifest destiny:  the driving out and burning of Chinese communities in the late 1800s to 1900s; Alien Land Laws that deprived us of ownership of fields we tilled; the WWII forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans; American colonization of the Philippines and Pacific islands and denial of U.S. citizenship. Today, we are at peril as new anti-Asian law lands have been enacted in Texas and Florida. New proposals are being floated to revoke citizenship of naturalized citizens. We know that rising tensions between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China can quickly escalate into racial attacks on all AANHPIs.

Japanese American Citizens League leaders at Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

As July 4 approaches, we should be celebrating the radical ideals of the Declaration of Independence, i.e., “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Instead, we are seeing an onslaught of Executive Orders and proposals to turn back the clock to the pre-Civil Rights era.  There was certainly a measure of hypocrisy as signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves and dismissed the role of women in civic society, but the words themselves were seized by marginalized and enslaved people to hold the nation to its professed ideals.  Leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have reminded us of the gap between America’s ideals and its treatment of people of color: “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” (Aug. 28, 1963 MLK, Jr. Speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.) But those ideals point to a vision that is still valid and worthy of fulfillment.

AANHPIs, the majority of whom are foreign born, know all too well the inhumanity of authoritarian regimes. There is a commonality between the white settlers in the 13 colonies and AANHPIs, i.e., resistance to tyranny.  The Declaration of Independence listed 27 grievances against the British crown, citing items such as King George III and the British Parliament’s arbitrary overturning of colonial legislative bodies, the imposition of a standing army to enforce onerous taxes, and the quartering of British troops in private homes without the owner’s permission. In 2026, we are drawing up our own list of high crimes against wannabe tyrant Trump. In a rebuke against Trump’s order to remove language that “casts America in a negative light” on exhibits at national parks and monuments, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley issued a preliminary injunction on June 12, 2026 demanding that the National Park Service restore material changed since May 20,2025 within three weeks. In her ruling, Judge Kelley voiced a vision for the pluralistic America embraced by the majority of people: “From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park,” the judge wrote, “the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Banners commemorating 10 Japanese American incarceration centers during WWII. Photo by evansoutdooraventures.com at the Manzanar Visitor Center.

On June 15, Trump announced plans to turn the July 4 National Mall celebration of our nation’s founding into “the most spectacular Trump rally.” His ego knows no bounds. Let us use July 4 to share AANHPI stories about our resilience, resistance and renewal.  Once pushed to the margins, we are now moving inexorably to the mainstream. Together, we are the majority, and our voices will ring out inspired by Carlos Bulosan’s poem “I Want the Wide American Earth.”

Before the brave, before the proud builders and workers,

I say I want the wide American earth,

Its beautiful rivers and long valleys and fertile plains,

Its numberless hamlets and expanding towns and towering cities,

Its limitless frontiers, its probing intelligence,

For all the free.

Free men everywhere in my land—

This wide American earth—do not wander homeless,

And are not alone; friendship is our bread, love our air;

And we call each other comrade, each growing with the other,

Each a neighbor to the other, boundless in freedom.

I say I want the wide American earth….

I say to you defenders of  freedom, builders of peace,

I say to you democratic brothers, comrades of love:

Their judges lynch us, their police hunt us;

Their armies and navies and airmen terrorize us;

Their thugs and stoolies and murderers kill us;

They take away bread from our children;

They ravage our women;

They deny life to our elders.

But I say we have the truth

On our side, we have the future with us;

We are millions everywhere,

on seas and oceans and lands;

In air;

On water and all over this very earth.

We are millions working together.

We are building, creating, molding life.

We are shaping the shining structures of love.

We are everywhere, we are everywhere.

We are there when they sentence us to prison for telling the truth;

We are there when they conscript us to fight their wars;

We are there when they throw us in concentration camps;

We are there when they come at dawn with their guns.

We are there, we are there,

and we say to them:

“You cannot frighten us with your bombs and deaths;

You cannot drive us away from our land with your hate and disease;

You cannot starve us with your war programs and high prices;

You cannot command us with your nothing,

Because you are nothing but nothing;

You cannot put us all in your padded jails;

You cannot snatch the dawn of life from us!”

And we say to them:

“Remember, remember,

We shall no longer wear rags, eat stale bread, live in darkness;

We shall no longer kneel on our knees to your false gods;

We shall no longer beg you for a share of life.

Remember, remember,

O remember in the deepest midnight of your fear,

We shall emulate the wonder of our women,

The ringing laughter of our children,

The strength and manhood of our men

With a true and honest and powerful love!”

And we say to them:

“We are the creators of a flowering race!”

I say I want the wide American earth.

I say to you too, sharer of my delights and thoughts,

I say this deathless truth,

And more—

For look, watch, listen:

With a stroke of my hand I open the dawn of a new world,

Lift up the beautiful horizon of a new life;

All for you, comrade and my love.

See:

The magnificent towers of our future is afire with truth,

And growing with the fuel of the heart of my heart,

and unfolding and unfolding, and flowering and flowering

In the bright new sun of our world;

All for you, comrade and my wife.

And see:

I cry, I weep with joy,

And my tears are the tears of my people….

Before the brave, before the proud builders and workers,

I say I want the wide American earth

For all the free,

I want the wide American earth for my people,

I want my beautiful land.

I want it with my rippling strength and tenderness

Of love and light and truth

For all the free—

-30-

Author’s Bio:  Eddie Wong is a longtime political activist and writer/filmmaker/photographer in the Asian American Movement.  He served as editor/publisher of East Wind ezine from 2018 to 2024.

Featured Photo:

Mural of Wong Kim Ark in San Francisco Chinatown by Norman “Vogue” Chuck and Twin Walls Mural Company muralists Elaine Chu and Marina Perez-Wong Photo from Chinese for Affirmative Action newsletter.