No soaring oratory or epic vision to mark the US turning 250. Just Trump being Trump

If that’s the way the US celebrates its birthday, you would not want to be at its funeral. The shining city on a hill is losing its lustre. The land that promised life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is struggling to deliver.

- David Smith

A milestone anniversary such as 250 years of independence calls for the epic vision of a John F Kennedy, the immaculate timing of a Ronald Reagan or the soaring oratory of a Barack Obama. What it got instead was an 80-year-old convicted criminal who seems hellbent on dividing the nation.

Donald Trump, speaking at the start of the Great American State Fair in Washington on Wednesday, did not meet the moment with poetry, a moonshot or a promise to bind the nation’s wounds. Instead he went small. Very small. The 45th and 47th president, standing behind protective glass on a stage near the Washington Monument as a half-moon hung in the sky, used the chance to discuss topics like transgender ‘mutilisation’, the new White House ballroom and rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

He also railed against the thugs who ‘gruesomely vandalised’ the nearby reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial. He is yet to produce evidence that such thugs exist. The man who promised to drain the swamp of Washington has created one all of his own.

But most dismal of all was the way in which the president, whose war in Iran has pushed consumer prices to a three-year high and his approval rating to new lows, turned a national celebration - and potential moment of unity - into just another Trump campaign rally.