America’s 250th birthday celebration is replacing history with toxic myth

By Judith Levine

This year’s events will be a mélange of Trumpian egotism, Maga populism and Christian nationalism, Wed 10 Jun 2026 07.00 EDT

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.

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 administration established 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”.

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.

Continue/Read Original Article: America’s 250th birthday celebration is replacing history with toxic myth | Judith Levine | The Guardian