From the start, America has been a journey, not a destination.
The journey has been a literal one, from Paul Revere’s ride to the Underground Railroad to the Oregon Trail. A country founded as 13 colonies clustered along the Atlantic Coast has become a cross-continent behemoth of 50 states and 342 million people.
The journey has been metaphorical, too. A nation where the right to vote had been generally limited to property-owning White men has now watched a Black man elected as president, a woman sworn in as speaker of the House, and eight justices who were not White men confirmed for the Supreme Court.
Through it all, the debates over what defines the United States have been fierce and sometimes violent. What rights? Whose rights? Who decides?
The founders themselves were at times divided as they drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a bold step in the middle of the Revolutionary War that helped forge a new nation. In the next century, the confrontation over slavery was a fundamental issue behind a brutal Civil War that threatened to cleave it. During the 20th century, World War II was a force for national unity, the Vietnam War for bitter division.
Yet here we stand, ready to celebrate our 250th birthday in 2026, our semiquincentennial.
The American experiment in democracy
We are both the world’s oldest democracy and a still-evolving experiment in self-government.
Consider this: Just 45 people have served as president of the United States, from a reluctant George Washington to the persistent Donald Trump. (The count of White House administrations now stands at 47 because Trump and Grover Cleveland were elected to two non-consecutive terms.)
Five U.S. presidents, (from L to R) George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, pose for pictures in front of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley on Nov. 4, 1991.
To my astonishment, during my career as a journalist, I have interviewed 10 of them, seven while they were in the White House and three after they had moved out − from the 37th, Richard Nixon, through his nine successors. For those doing the math, that’s more than 1 in 5 of all those who have ever been elected to lead our nation.
In their politics, they ranged from conservative icon Ronald Reagan to Democratic groundbreaker Barack Obama to populist Trump. Their presidencies were shaped by their times ‒ George H.W. Bush by the close of the Cold War, Joe Biden by a once-in-a-century pandemic ‒ and they also shaped their times.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his family arrive on stage for his election night victory rally at Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008 in Chicago. Americans emphatically elected Obama as their first Black president in a transformational election.
Some suffered scandals, too.
I had dinner with Nixon at his home in Saddle River, New Jersey, in 1984 as he was working to rebuild his reputation in the aftermath of Watergate. I interviewed Bill Clinton aboard Air Force One in 1999, four months after he had survived a Senate impeachment vote in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. His optimism was soaring about striking a historic deal with congressional Republicans to overhaul Medicare.
For both of them and among presidents in general, an American brand of resilience is a characteristic they shared. In the end, Nixon’s legacy would be defined by Watergate, and Clinton never managed to negotiate that landmark legislation before he left office.
But presidents persist and sometimes triumph because they tend to believe that, if they had just a little more time and could reach just a few more people, they could turn things their way.
Clinton would have been delighted to serve a third term, if only the Constitution and the electorate had allowed it, and Trump seems to feel the same way. Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and the elder Bush battled unsuccessfully to have a second term.
But some presidents have shared a certain exhaustion at the end of their tenures, ready to turn over a heavy baton. In an Oval Office interview with George W. Bush as he was preparing to leave office in 2009 − after dealing with the 9/11 attacks early in his first term and the financial meltdown late in his second − it was clear he was ready to turn over the weight of the nation to his successor.
Visitors to the U.S. Capitol Rotunda take in the sights near the painting depicting the moment on June 28, 1776, when the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was presented to the Second Continental Congress on Oct 17, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Charting a course for our diverse, turbulent nation has never been an easy task − and it is a journey that never ends.
What do presidents have in common?
There are other traits that their trips to the White House have in common. For one thing, you don’t win the office unless you’re smart and stubborn and ambitious − and, most likely, willing to do whatever it takes to get there. Once in the White House, nearly all expressed grievances that their press coverage was too negative, their best efforts never adequately acknowledged.
But all of them had some sort of vision of where the American journey should now lead, albeit visions that were strikingly different and sometimes in conflict.
Voters share that, too. In covering a dozen presidential campaigns, from 1980 to 2024, I have been struck by how much Americans of all political stripes revere the Constitution and love their country.
But what country? Whose version of the Constitution?
The Constitution of the United States
In the past three elections, all of them angry, voters have been split almost down the middle over what the Constitution means, and they aren’t inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to those who see things differently. On issues of race and gender, of immigration and crime, of the rule of law and the balance of powers, it can feel as though a new civil war is brewing.
Not for the first time.
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. waves to supporters Aug. 28, 1963 on the Mall in Washington D.C. during the “March on Washington”, where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which mobilized supporters of desegregation and prompted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King said the march was “the greatest demonstration of freedom in the history of the United States.”
Franklin Roosevelt’s record-breaking flurry of executive orders when he took office during the Depression and his later efforts to stack the Supreme Court brought howls of protests from Republicans; they pushed ratification of a constitutional amendment to make sure no future president could serve more than two terms. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s brought a wave of violence against its organizers and advocates; it reshaped the geography of American politics. The debate over Vietnam divided the rising baby boomer generation from their parents and fueled a cultural upheaval.
Frank Folino carries an American flag during the annual Oregon Track Club Butte to Butte on July 4, 2025, in Eugene, Ore.
That’s not to minimize our current conflicts. It’s just to make this point: Now and before, our democracy has been most energized by the fear that it might be endangered.
Happy birthday, America. Safe travels.
Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: America’s 250th birthday is about to be everywhere. Read this first.
