So what would Mark Twain—a man never at a loss for opinions—make of America on the 250th anniversary of its birth? He wouldn’t be surprised to be asked, or bashful about answering. As he once wrote in his notebook, “I am not an American. I am the American.” Arguably a bit vain, but essentially correct, since he encompassed much of the best (and occasionally the worst) of our national character.Twain was our shrewdest satirist of greed and corruption, and he would find plenty to be appalled about in today’s second Gilded Age. It was Twain who minted the term The Gilded Age—the title of his first novel, co-authored with his friend Charles Dudley Warner and published in 1873, when Twain was 37 years old—and he had scathing things to say about the wild carnival of greed that followed the Civil War, decrying the “incredible rottenness” and “moral ulcers” of an America in thrall to big business. He published a revised catechism for the rich: “What is the chief end of man? A. To get rich. In what way? A. Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” He castigated Jay Gould, the notorious Wall Street speculator, for fostering a greed-is-good mentality: “The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.” Today Twain would likely blanch at the billionaires congregating around President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And in the euphoric greed of Wall Street, he would spot many latter-day examples of Colonel Sellers, the money-mad humbug in The Gilded Age who sees millions in every flimsy enterprise.Twain’s critique had power because he was very much a product of the society he chastised. When he wasn’t satirizing plutocrats, he was trying very hard to become one. He amassed a sizable fortune from books and lecture royalties and from marrying a minor heiress, Livy Langdon, whose father had sold coal to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroads. The couple luxuriated in a 25-room mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, staffed by six servants.He hoped to get even richer as an inventor. Like us, Twain inhabited an age enamored of new technologies and dazzled by gadgetry. In 1886, while presiding over a Fourth of July celebration in Iowa, he praised “the progress of these last few years—of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and other great inventions,” saying, “There is more done in one year now than Methuselah ever saw in all his life.” Twain himself had one of the first private telephones in New England. He also dreamed up many gadgets of his own, such as a bed clamp that would prevent children from kicking off their blankets. More successfully, he marketed a scrapbook with adhesive paper, allowing users to dispense with glue pots.[Read: The not-at-all-funny life of Mark Twain]But he admitted that his speculative instincts made him “easy prey of the cheap adventurer.” The most notorious example was the smooth-tongued James Paige of Rochester, New York, the inventor of a newspaper-typesetting machine that promised to do the work of five or six men. It was a fiendishly ingenious machine with more than 18,000 parts and one glaring flaw: It didn’t work reliably. Still, Twain squandered his own fortune and Livy’s inheritance on developing Paige’s invention, even as the Mergenthaler Linotype became the industry standard, rendering Paige’s machine worthless. An embittered Twain growled afterward that if Paige were drowning, he would throw him an anvil. So dismal was the writer’s investing record that one newspaper joked that, to avoid a financial disaster, all you had to do was to learn that Mark Twain had gotten in on the ground floor.Twain embodied the eternal American ambivalence toward money: He had a visceral desire to amass it along with a puritanical distrust of its corrupting effect. So while he would be excited by smartphones, AI, and other digital wonders coming out of Silicon Valley today, he would simultaneously fear our glorification of tech moguls and the excessive political influence of the superrich. In particular, he would likely have criticized Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative and its dismantling of federal civil-service protections, since civil-service reform was one of Twain’s favorite political causes. During the 1876 presidential campaign, he mocked the spoils system that distributed government jobs as a reward for how much “party dirty work the candidate has done,” rather than their actual qualifications. He said that federal-government jobs should be distributed based on “worth and capacity,” noting that teachers at least had to know the alphabet and plumbers the inside of a pipe.Twain reserved his most mordant reflections on American politics for Congress, in his time the most potent—and corrupt—branch of government. “I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world,” he joked. Still more memorably, he wrote: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” He called Congress the only “distinctly native American criminal class” and urged Satan to establish a branch of hell in Washington, if he had not done so already. Today Twain would be startled by the passivity of a once-mighty Congress that has all but crumbled in the face of pressure from the White House.If Twain were resurrected today, we would beg him, on bended knee, for his opinion of Donald Trump. He was certainly no stranger to presidents with outsize egos and constant cravings for attention. When Twain lunched with Theodore Roosevelt, he was dismayed that the president dragged in his Rough Rider exploits in Cuba three or four times. Twain thought Roosevelt overrated and called him “the Tom Sawyer of the political world” because he was “always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination, the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience.” It is easy to imagine the sarcasms Twain could hurl at Trump’s ballroom, triumphal arch, gold-plated statues, and other vanity projects.[Tom Nichols: Trump is making the 250th small]Early in his career, Twain worried that his stridently expressed political views might alienate his readers. But instead of mellowing with age, he became more indignant at injustice. When the United States invaded the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, Twain naively imagined that the country would be liberated and turned into a republic. Instead, the Philippine independence movement was brutally suppressed. At a City Club dinner in New York in January 1901, Twain scandalized his audience by saying that American soldiers were fighting with “a disgraced musket under a polluted flag.” Today he might be just as furious in denouncing Trump’s imperial ambitions to control Greenland or annex Canada or exploit Venezuelan oil.Twain was enraged by the expression “Our country, right or wrong,” protesting: “We have thrown away the most valuable asset we have—the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong.” So he would decry today’s attacks on the press, and the widespread tendency to dismiss all journalists as politically motivated. He knew from the inside that the press was far from perfect; Samuel Clemens adopted the Mark Twain pen name when he started his career as a journalist in the Nevada Territory, inventing tall tales and trading insults with rival writers. Yet he also believed the press was a bulwark of liberty, especially in its satirical mode: “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” Twain would not be surprised by Trump’s sensitivity to the gibes of late-night comedians: “The devil’s aversion to holy water,” he wrote, “is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs.”For the same reason, Twain would have scant patience with the political correctness that reigns in much of the media world today. He felt that every subject was fair game for satire. In his first book, The Innocents Abroad, he accompanied American tourists to Europe and the Holy Land and heaped scorn on almost everything he saw. Once Twain latched on to a target, he would berate it mercilessly. Take his attitude toward France, which he mocked as “the adulterous nation”: “A Frenchman’s home is where another man’s wife is,” he gibed. Such stereotypes would never fly in today’s world, which may be why we don’t have a modern-day Mark Twain.If Twain could ask only one question about America at 250, however, he would probably want to know about the situation of African Americans. No other white author of the late 19th century engaged so fully with the Black community, whether in promoting the Fisk Jubilee Singers or paying expenses for a Black student at Yale Law School. (That law student, Warner T. McGuinn, became a distinguished attorney and the mentor of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.) Twain’s friend William Dean Howells said that “no man more perfectly sensed, and more entirely abhorred, slavery.” In fact, Twain might well have quarreled with the whole premise of celebrating America’s 250th birthday. He believed that 1865, not 1776, was the true date of liberty’s birth, “for there was slavery before.” He said sarcastically that the Declaration of Independence should have been rewritten, “All white men are created free and equal.”Twain died in 1910, long before the civil-rights movement and the end of Jim Crow in the South. If he could see America in 2026, he would be delighted by the dramatic improvement in the status of Black Americans, while regretting that we have still fallen so far short of America’s founding ideals in creating a multiracial society. So he might celebrate this special Fourth of July with a cheer and a wink—and perhaps the faintest trace of a snort.