Musicians who dropped out of the Great American State Fair said they were tricked.
“I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT,” wrote the rapper Young MC on Facebook of the first major celebration of the US’s 250th birthday. “The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event. And despite the claims by the organizers that the event is nonpartisan, SPIN magazine describes it as ‘Trump-backed.’” The country singer Martina McBride said that the organizers’ description of the event as nonpartisan “turned out to be misleading”.
After many of the acts withdrew, rather than perpetuate the charade of neutrality, the humiliated president decided to replace them all with what he called “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World”: Donald J. Trump.
That makes sense, because the fair’s sponsor is not America250, the nonpartisan body set up by Congress a decade ago to oversee the commemoration of the semiquincentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is an organization called Freedom 250, which is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of Maga
Even had the organizers been more honest, the artists could easily have been confused. Since his first term, Trump has been horning in on the 2026 events, funding his pet projects through opaque and complex structures that confound donors, participants, Congress, the press and everyone else about who is paying for what.
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The situation is not just another example of Trump’s impunity in using the US treasury as his personal piggy bank. It is emblematic of the ways in which the president is conflating the celebration of the nation’s founding with a celebration of himself – l’état c’est moi. It replaces substance with spectacle and history with myth. The heroes of the myth are a clutch of white men under the guiding hand of a Christian God. The villains are anyone who dares insert an inconvenient historical truth.
In 2016, Congress created the bipartisan US semiquincentennial commission to plan and coordinate activities, materials and financing of the 2026 commemoration. The commission’s first report, released at the end of 2019, outlined “a monumental initiative” that would engage all 350 million Americans and “recognize and include the ‘many’ Americans in our ‘one’ nation”.
The commission’s themes were anodyne – educate, engage, unite – but the Trump administration was more than ordinarily watchful for “wokeness”. African American historians marked 2019 as the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ship on US shores. In a special issue of the New York Times magazine that would become the bestselling 1619 Project, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones posited that 1619, not 1776, was the true birth of the nation, establishing slavery and anti-Black racism as pillars of its existence forevermore. Then came 2020, the police murder of George Floyd, and an eruption of Black Lives Matter protests nationwide.
That Fourth of July at Mount Rushmore, Trump denounced BLM as “angry mobs” and decried a “leftwing cultural revolution … designed to overthrow the American Revolution [and] destroy [the US’s] very civilization”. In response to “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children”, he vowed to “set … history’s records straight”.
As a counterweight to the 1619 Project, the administrationestablished its own, competing 1776 Commission, which released a report two days before Biden’s inauguration and 12 days after the failed insurrection at the Capitol. The report rehearsed the same themes as the 4 July speech and recommended teaching “enlightened patriotism”, and a history centered on the Great White Men and scant on the lives of enslaved or Indigenous people or women. The 1776 commission report was so wide of the truth and the education it proposed so biased that the American Historical Association called it an attempt at “government indoctrination of American students”.
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Biden disbanded the 1776 commission and revoked the report on his first day in office. But its distorted spirit of 1776 has risen again.
Freedom 250 is thin on substance. But it is fat on income. With the interior department, in which it is nestled, having quietly instructed staff to use Freedom 250 as the “primary branding” on America 250 events, Freedom 250 has eclipsed the bipartisan semiquincentennial and siphoned off public funding and private donations.
According to Notus, as of April, America250 had received only $25m of its $100m appropriation; it’s tallied a $100m “funding shortfall” and a slimmer take in private donations than expected. Meanwhile, the park foundation “and by proxy Freedom 250” has been granted nearly $80m in federal funds for the semiquincentennial, 10 times its total going back to 2009. And this doesn’t count more than $100m the feds have squandered on Trump’s Washington “beautification”, $5m of which recently went to gilding four horse statues. Freedom 250 also offers incentives to donors that would be illegal from a government agency, such as a private reception hosted by Trump for $1m or a speaking slot at a Washington 4 July event for $2.5m.
Where is the money going? To a mélange of Trumpian egotism, Maga populism and Christian nationalism.
The first big production was a North Korean-style military parade on the army’s 250th – and Trump’s 79th – birthday, 14 June 2025. To bankroll the $3m extravaganza, America250 turned to companies including Oracle, Coinbase, and Palantir, most already big donors with much to gain from a grateful president. Some of the cost was borne by the army, meaning the taxpayer.
The next was a 3 July rally at the Iowa state fairgrounds headlined by Trump. “I cannot stand them,” the president declared, of the Democrats, “because I really believe they hate our country.”
Agencies decimated by the “department of government efficiency” saw their dwindling funds diverted to Trump’s party. The National Endowment for the Humanities canceled $100m in grants using a chatbot to search terms redolent of diversity, equity and inclusion, such as “LGBTQ” or “tribal” (a federal judge ruled the cancellations unconstitutional). NEH money was redirected to Trump’s proposed 250-statue National Garden of American Heroes, in Washington, designed “to reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.”
Another lawsuit saved the Institute for Museum and Library Services from sudden death. But the agency had already pivoted to the administration’s priorities. Grant applicants were informed that semiquincentennial-related projects should “teach citizens about what makes our country the greatest in the world”. A $14m grant went to the Freedom Trucks, six “mobile museums” showcasing a glorious story of America in which slavery is an unpleasant glitch and treaties with Indigenous Americans are not broken.
The biggest repository of America’s material heritage, the Smithsonian Institution, is also being brought to heel. The administration has ordered its museums and libraries to submit details of all exhibitions related to the semiquincentennial, in preparation for “content corrections … replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions”.
Freedom 250 is not a national project. It is a commercial white Christian nationalist project. Its partners’ list is packed with Christian and conservative organizations, including National Religious Broadcasters, Pray, WallBuilders, and the school library book-banning group Moms for Liberty. Absent from the scores of sponsors and partners of Freedom 250 is any organization whose name implies a racial, ethnic, or gender identity.
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This May, Freedom 250 sponsored “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving”, which interspersed preachers – of 19 faith leaders advertised, 18 were Christians, most evangelicals – with Republican political leaders. House speaker Mike Johnson prayed to “remember that [God’s] mighty hand has been upon our nation since the very beginning”. Trump was golfing, but he sent a video in which he read from 2 Chronicles 7:14, which appears to be the same video he’d used for another prayer event. The websites of both Freedom 250 and the White House highlight a series of videos called “The Story of America,” produced by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College and introduced by its president, Larry Arnn, who chaired the 1776 Commission. The exhibition and curricular material of the “Freedom Trucks” are created by PragerU, a pro-capitalist Christian educational media company.
America is not one story; its meanings are ever in contest. The protean nature of history is what Maga’s semiquincentennial is trying most strenuously to suppress. Perhaps the image that best depicts its singular message is “Prayer at Valley Forge”, a painting of George Washington kneeling in the snow beside his horse, contributed to the 1976 bicentennial by the late Utah-based conservative Christian artist Arnold Friberg.
The picture is emblazoned on the backs of the Freedom Trucks. It circulates in the social media of several federal agencies and is sold on America 250’s website as a print and a historical comic book. It is an appealingly folk-artsy painting of an inspiring event.
But it has a couple of flaws: Washington was a vehement defender of church-state separation. And there is no evidence that this incident ever happened.
