America celebrated its sestercentennial on Saturday, when millions of latent cardiac events shaped like spinning tops gathered around backyard cement ponds to roast ground cow flesh, swig cheap domestic beer and OD on Lay’s and mayonnaise-based “salads.” You know, “just as the Founders intended.”

To be fair to modern Americans, Saturday’s festivities will be more wholesome from an ethical perspective (if probably not from a nutritional one) than the celebrations their forefathers might’ve hosted. At least, in 2026, Tamika won’t get the cat-o’-nine-tails if she breaks a plate. And the only way her husband Jamal will come away with severe burns is if he mishandles a Roman candle. (We’ve come so far these past 250 years.)

Meanwhile, half a world away from so much Oscar Mayer merrymaking, war-weary Iranians came out in droves for a long-delayed mass funeral honoring Ali Khamenei. His flag-draped casket was on display at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Mosalla mosque complex. His coffin was accompanied by the caskets of four family members killed in the US-assisted Israeli airstrike that leveled the Supreme Leader’s compound on February 28.

Khamenei’s amamah sat atop his casket, which was elevated above the others. Directly below Khamenei’s coffin was that of his infant grandchild Zahra Golpayegani, who died with her grandfather and mother on the first day of the war. Beside her tiny death box: A framed picture of the 14-month-old.

Of course, Khamenei’s at least as much to blame for the fate that ultimately befell his family as Israel. I realize that’s a controversial claim, but I’d argue that faithfully carrying the Revolutionary mantle wasn’t mutually exclusive with countenancing the compresence of sundry anathemas.

To be sure, Khamenei was savvy in that respect. Just not savvy enough in the end. It’s an extraordinarily delicate balancing act which entails insisting publicly and loudly on the existential nature of a zero-sum struggle while not pushing the envelope so far as to end up actually fighting a conventional war you know you can’t win.

Khamenei never pushed the envelope that far. Yahya Sinwar did. Hence my contention that the inter-sectarian alliance with Hamas was ultimately a mistake. What can you say? Hindsight’s 20/20.

Moreover, it seems unlikely that Ruhollah Khomeini would’ve been unequivocally enamored with the theocracy’s metamorphosis under his hand-picked successor.

On a generous interpretation, Khamenei presided over a symbiotic relationship between the clergy and the Guards. A less generous description might characterize Iran in the last decade of Khamenei’s rule as a kleptocratic mafia state where the IRGC operated more like the Gambinos than the Praetorian Guard. The IRGC was supposed to safeguard the Revolution, not become it.

When viewed through the lens of intra-government power concentration, Khamenei’s Iran, on the eve of his assassination, didn’t really align with Khomeini’s hierarchical vision for a theocratic republic. Khomeini would be fine with the autocracy. The de facto military junta, probably not so much.

That said, Khomeini the ideologue would almost certainly recognize Khamenei’s Iran as “close enough,” so to speak, on most vectors, particularly those pertaining to “principle.” I’m not sure you could say the same thing for Donald Trump vis-à-vis America’s founders and the principles they espoused for their Revolution.

But — and this brings us full circle — Trump could quite plausibly argue that while he may be America’s first avowedly illiberal president, he’s certainly not the country’s first undeclaredly undemocratic leader. “George Washington,” after all, “was a slave owner.”