The owner of Mama’s TOO! pizzeria on the Upper West Side personally wheeled more than a hundred boxes into Madison Square Garden late on Friday night. Inside, guests at the surprise wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce queued for slices of Angry Nonna – a pie topped with spicy soppressata, Calabrian chilli oil and hot honey – while a DJ invited revellers onto the stage to dance. The buffet, according to the BBC Radio 1 presenter Greg James, was not a sit-down affair; a thousand guests, many of them British, congregated in clusters, navigating multiple cake stations and an open bar. The scene, by multiple accounts, was less gala dinner than elevated block party, a deliberate informality that would later draw grumbles in the tabloids about millionaire guests standing in line.

That same weekend, a few kilometres south on the National Mall, another thousand-strong crowd – this one drenched by thunderstorms and wilting in record heat – toured a “Great American State Fair” erected at President Donald Trump’s behest. The fair, a rival to the officially sanctioned America 250 programme, featured military exhibits and conservative-themed attractions; nine Democratic-led states boycotted it. When Trump took the stage for a 37-minute address, he invoked the spectre of communism 81 times in a fortnight, telling the audience, “We don’t want communists in our country.” Attendees interviewed by Fox News described the speech as patriotic, not partisan. “It was what we needed to hear,” a visitor from Texas said.

Viewed from Moscow, the competing festivities looked like a nation “not only scorched by heat but split into irreconcilable camps,” as Novaya Gazeta put it, noting that the 1976 bicentennial had also unfolded under the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam. This time, the fracture was institutional: the bipartisan America 250 commission, created by Congress a decade earlier, found itself sidelined by Trump’s Freedom 250, a parallel body that fought for sponsors and airtime. CNN covered the Times Square ball drop for America 250; Fox News broadcast the opening of a presidential library in North Dakota for Freedom 250. The two organising committees, Time magazine reported, had no cooperation whatsoever.

Beyond the political theatre, the weekend’s cultural artefacts quickly became a global online bazaar. Justin Gignac, an artist known for selling New York City street trash, gathered cigarette butts, bottle caps and a discarded ovulation test from near the wedding venue and sold them as “NYC Pocket Garbage: Not Invited Edition” for $25 a box; the edition sold out. A separate eBay listing offered a bag of air purportedly captured at the wedding for $49,999.99. In Russia, Lenta.ru noted that Swift and Kelce faced online backlash for a wedding lottery that gave away Chanel bags and Cartier watches, with users asking why the prizes had not been donated to medical workers. Italian outlets, meanwhile, lingered on the menu: Il Fatto Quotidiano questioned the wisdom of a buffet at a multimillion-dollar event, while MillenniuM detailed the pizza order that likely cost around $3,000.

By Monday morning, the letters spelling “Trump” that had been affixed to the façade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – renamed by the president – were being dismantled under a court order, a quiet coda to a weekend of grand gestures. In the end, the most enduring image of America’s 250th birthday may not be the record 850,000-shell fireworks display that lulled the president to sleep, nor the enchanted gardens inside Madison Square Garden, but a small, sealed plastic bag of nothing, priced like a relic, waiting for a bidder who believed the air inside still held the music.