Subject: Trump’s Hijacked US Birthday
Donald Trump stole America’s 250th birthday and threw it for himself.

He raised somewhere north of $100 million from corporate sponsors who need favors from his government, layered it on top of nearly $80 million in taxpayer dollars he siphoned out of the actual bipartisan birthday commission, handed the keys to his former campaign manager and his former campaign finance director, and threw himself a 16-day rally on the National Mall with a $24.96 pretzel, a $20 burger, a 110-foot Ferris wheel and a plywood arch that isn’t fairing too well...


The acts boycotted it. The states bailed on it. The Ferris wheel broke. The ice cream melted. Vanilla Ice — Vanilla Ice — got rained out, except, lol, it wasn’t really raining. Fox News pointed cameras at empty grass and told viewers there were “thousands of people.” Dean Cain stood next to six visible humans and screamed that anybody noticing this is “anti-American.”

Nobody showed up. And that’s the entire point of this post.

What America 250 Was Supposed to Be

Quick history lesson, because Trump and Truth Social and Fox News are going to lie about this for the next nine days straight.

In 2016, a bipartisan Congress — under a Republican House and a Republican Senate, mind you — passed the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission Act. The idea was simple. America turns 250 in 2026. That’s a big deal. Let’s plan a real birthday. Let’s do it together. Let’s start a decade out.

Congress created America 250, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) overseen by a bipartisan commission of about 30 lawmakers and respected nonpartisan leaders. Its honorary co-chairs were George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama. Its mission was to organize a year-long celebration of the country that would unite all 50 states, all 6 territories, every party, every faith. Pavilions. Block parties. A national service initiative called America Gives. The largest bipartisan congressional caucus in U.S. history — 350+ members — signed onto it.

It was as close to “this is for everybody” as Washington gets in 2026.

Then Trump won in November 2024.

How Trump Hijacked It

Watch this happen in slow motion. Twelve months. Three steps.

Step 1 — Failed takeover. Trump’s people spent most of 2025 trying to install loyalists onto the America 250 board. They got Kellyanne Conway and a couple of others on, but the bipartisan structure held. The CEO Trump wanted got fired. He couldn’t bend the existing nonpartisan organization to his will. So.

Step 2 — Build a shadow version. On January 29, 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating “Task Force 250.” Public-facing brand: Freedom 250. Chair: Donald J. Trump. Vice chair: JD Vance. He housed it as a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of the National Park Foundation — a congressionally chartered private nonprofit — because that structure has one magical feature: it doesn’t have to disclose its donors. The board of the National Park Foundation was then quietly stacked by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with two new members: Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s longtime personal fundraiser, and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager. The fundraiser and the campaign manager are now legally responsible for distributing federal funds to “America’s birthday.”

Step 3 — Steal the money. Congress allocated $150 million for the 250th inside last summer’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” That money was de facto presumed to go to America 250 — the bipartisan commission Congress had spent a decade building. Instead, the Trump-controlled Interior Department routed it through the National Park Foundation, which then funneled it straight to Freedom 250. As of April 29, 2026, per NOTUS’s reporting and federal grant tracking: Freedom 250 has received at least $79 million in federal funds. America 250 — the actual bipartisan commission Congress created — has received $25 million and is staring at a $100 million shortfall.

It’s not subtle. Trump took the money Congress set aside for a national bipartisan birthday, ran it through a nonprofit he controls, and stamped his face on it. Democratic Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who’s been on the America 250 commission since 2019, said the quiet part out loud: Freedom 250 serves “the president, his politics, his donors, and his vanity projects.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse called it “blurring accountability, weakening congressional intent, and undermining public trust.” Senator Adam Schiff is leading a probe. Democracy Forward is suing. Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project just released a 28-page report calling the whole thing a “grift, self-dealing, and enriching friends with taxpayer dollars.”

Who’s Paying. What They’re Paying For.

This is the part Trump’s people really don’t want you to read.

Freedom 250 sells access. Here are the published sponsorship tiers, as reported by the New York Times in February:

$500,000: “V.I.P. access, invitations and preferred seating at all Freedom 250 events”
$1 million: Invitation to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by President Trump, plus — these are their words — a “historic photo opportunity”
$2.5 million: A speaking role at the July 4 event in Washington
You read that right. Pay Trump’s nonprofit $2.5 million and they hand you the microphone on the National Mall on America’s 250th birthday. The Times reported that corporate sponsorship offers ran up to $10 million per corporation.

Known corporate sponsors include, per Freedom 250’s own website and reporting from CNN, NBC News, NYT, Politifact, and Robert Reich:

Deloitte. ExxonMobil. John Deere. Lockheed Martin. Mastercard. Northrop Grumman. Oracle. Palantir. United Health Group. United Airlines. Also: UFC (Dana White, a Trump ally, who got to host a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House on Trump’s birthday), Penske Corp. (Roger Penske, Trump ally, getting his own “Freedom 250 Grand Prix” IndyCar race on the streets of DC), SAP (the German software company facing a potential federal contracting ban, currently sponsoring Freedom 250 despite the org’s stated ban on foreign funding), and January AI, which got onto the Medicare App Library days after appearing on the Freedom 250 sponsor list.

Every one of those companies has active federal regulatory or contracting business before the Trump administration. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman want defense contracts. Palantir and Oracle want data contracts. ExxonMobil wants leases and emissions decisions. United Airlines is trying to engineer a megamerger. UFC’s Dana White wrote Trump on May 11 personally asking him to undo a 90% gambling-loss-deduction cap.

You give the president’s nonprofit $2.5 million. He gives you a microphone, a photo, a reception. Your CEO shakes his hand. Your regulator is in the next room. Republican White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who served under George W. Bush, told CNN this is “problematic.” Painter is a master of understatement. What it actually is, is a pay-to-play kiosk set up in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

And remember — because Freedom 250 was built inside the National Park Foundation, it does not have to publicly disclose who gave what. Foundation president Jeff Reinbold has told Congress flatly: any donor who requests anonymity stays anonymous. The CEO of Freedom 250, Keith Krach (a former Trump State Department official with a personal net worth around $441 million), flew to Davos in January to pitch the globalist elite for cash. Yes, that Davos. The same Davos MAGA pretends to hate.

Where The Money Is Actually Going

A joint Public Citizen / Revolving Door Project investigation tracked $126 million in federal contracts and grants awarded for the 250th anniversary since October 2025. Their finding: roughly 80% of it — about $103 million — has flowed to a politicized network of Trump insiders.

Some highlights:

$68.3 million routed through the National Park Foundation to Freedom 250 itself.
$10 million to “Freedom Trucks” — mobile museums built in partnership with PragerU and Hillsdale College that historians have caught using AI-generated fake historical figures repeating Ben Shapiro’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” catchphrase. Yes. Really.
$7.1 million to Event Strategies, the Trump-tied firm that organized — wait for it — the January 6, 2021 rally on the Ellipse. The same firm that staged the rally before the Capitol attack is now staging America’s 250th birthday party. You can’t make this up.
$5 million to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Doug Burgum’s home state of North Dakota, an institution whose board is chaired by the daughter of Trump megadonor and oil billionaire Harold Hamm.
An unknown chunk into the plywood “Triumph Arch” that is just a mock-up of Trump’s actual planned $100 million “Arc de Trump” — a 250-foot vanity arch he wants built across the Potomac from the National Mall, taller than the Lincoln Memorial, taller than the actual Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
And the architect of the routing? Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The board enforcers? Trump’s campaign manager and his fundraiser. The contractor short-list? The guys who staged January 6. This is not a celebration of America. It is a slush fund that goes directly to the Trump Crime family. Period. Stop.

The Fair, in All Its Empty Glory

Now the fun part. The part where it doesn’t work.

The Great American State Fair opened on the National Mall on Wednesday, June 25, with a Trump rally. NBC News, on the scene: total crowd “more than 1,000.” The Washington Post: the crowd “thinly covered an area about the length of the National Museum of American History — smaller than some summer outdoor movie screenings.” The Bulwark filmed people streaming for the exits while Trump was still speaking. The Daily Beast headline: “Empty State Fair Revealed Moments Before Trump Took Stage.”

Trump’s Truth Social post the next afternoon: “At least 45,000 people were there.




That is a 44,000-person hallucination. On the National Mall. In broad daylight. With wire-service photographers from Reuters, AP, AFP, Getty, and every major paper standing on risers documenting the actual crowd.


Then the rest of the fair opened, and it somehow got worse:

Roughly a fifth of the states refused to send official delegations — including Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and (by Friday morning) Pennsylvania. Reason given by Oregon: cost, plus “growing concerns that the event in Washington D.C. is shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.” Participating states were required to pony up at least $100,000 of their own taxpayer money to set up a booth at Trump’s birthday party. A lot of governors looked at that number and said no.
Maine’s exhibit: one bare room with lobster facts on the wall.
Oregon’s exhibit: a sign that said “the Beaver State” and a single wooden chair.
Vermont’s exhibit: completely empty. One private citizen, Chobat, drove down from Vermont herself with three tanks of gas, hotel money out of her own pocket, and pamphlets from local maple syrup producers.
Alabama’s exhibit, per a Daily Beast reporter on the ground: one room. A bucket. Of peanuts. In the middle.
Kansas’s exhibit: a cardboard cutout of Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, that no one was posing with.
D.C.’s exhibit: a single plastic cherry blossom tree.
North Carolina’s exhibit: got busted on opening day for displaying an altered state flag containing a Confederate symbol. Had to be pulled.
Florida’s exhibit — surprisingly — featured “Famous Florida Men and Women” walls honoring Tom Petty and Jimmy Buffett, two famously anti-Trump musicians. The Florida exhibit, in a small act of cultural sabotage, is the closest thing to a win in the whole 16-day fair.
The “butter sculpture” — every state fair has one — was a portrait of Donald Trump. The mascot cow was named Melania.

That’s the actual cow’s actual name.

The Plywood Arch (or: This Is Spinal Tap)

Right in the middle of the fairgrounds, Freedom 250 erected a scale replica of Trump’s proposed Triumph Arch — the $100 million “Arc de Trump” he wants built near Arlington National Cemetery.

The replica is made of plywood with vinyl covering stretched over the wooden frame. By the end of opening day, attendees riding the Ferris wheel could already see — and reporters from the New York Times confirmed — that the vinyl had begun to wrinkle and separate from the frame.

Online critics immediately compared it to the undersized Stonehenge from This Is Spinal Tap. Which is, with no exaggeration, exactly what it looks like. Per The New Republic, the plywood arch was also “one of the only sources of shade on the National Mall” because the geniuses staging a 16-day outdoor fair in late June Washington heat did not budget. For. Shade.

Pause on that. Trump wants to spend $100 million of public and private money on a permanent version of a thing his own people couldn’t even build in temporary plywood without it visibly falling apart on day one. That’s the project. That’s the vision. That’s the legacy.

The Music: Vanilla Ice Gets Rained Out (Except It Wasn’t Raining)

Vanilla Ice’s Friday night set was supposed to be the actual entertainment highlight of the whole opening weekend. Two hours before showtime, Freedom 250 announced his performance was cancelled due to “inclement weather.” Per the NBC4 D.C. forecaster who covered the actual weather that night: “A few evening storms — not everybody sees rain tonight. It’s not like widespread thunderstorms moving through; we’re really not having any concern for severe weather.“




Translation: it wasn’t raining. The fair was empty. They pulled the plug on Vanilla Ice because nobody showed up to see Vanilla Ice on a Friday night in Washington in June. They cancelled Vanilla Ice for Vanilla Ice’s birthday party for America, because not even Vanilla Ice could fill seats for Freedom 250.

His own Instagram, calling it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” is still sitting there like a tombstone.

The replacement acts? A 14-year-old girl named Reagan Oliver from Arkansas, singing a “sweetly timid rendition of ‘Delta Dawn,’” per the Washingtonian reporter on the ground, while most fairgoers ignored her and “only a few clapped when she was done.” A jazz band performing to an audience of about ten people. Local artist Scott LoBaido painting an American flag live on stage while Fox News claimed there were “so many cool people” watching, even as the live shot showed empty grass. Independent reporter Julian Andreone from Drop Site posted a photo of himself standing alone in front of an empty stage: “Packed house!”

Local bands. Local artists. Kids from middle America who drove and flew in and put on suits and tuned their guitars to play the biggest gig of their lives on the National Mall in front of the Washington Monument on America’s 250th birthday — and nobody. Came. To. Watch.


The performers should be furious. The taxpayers who paid for the stage should be furious. The kid from Arkansas singing “Delta Dawn” to ten people on the National Mall is the actual moral injury here, and somebody is going to write a movie about her someday.

Fox News Says It’s Fine

Naturally, while every wire service in the country was photographing empty grass, Fox News rolled out the gaslighting brigade.


On The Big Weekend Show on Sunday, host Kevin Corke — standing in front of a lawn where viewers could plainly see “a couple hundred people” — declared: “I’m not kidding. I think there were thousands.” Co-host Joey “Johnny” Jones explained the math: “The North Carolina booth was counting 880 people an hour coming through their booth. So unless they have the same 880 people lined up going around, there are thousands of people here.”


A boutique exhibit got 880 visitors in an hour and somehow that translates to “thousands here right now.” Math is dead. Math is buried in the Reflecting Pool next to the algae.

On Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream did a pre-recorded walkaround with Ambassador Monica Crowley, U.S. Chief of Protocol — yes, the actual federal protocol officer who’s supposed to represent America to foreign dignitaries — as Crowley walked her past the FIFA Fan Zone, which the camera showed with mostly vacant tables, while Crowley said with a straight face: “We get thousands of people coming out to the National Mall, watching each and every match on that giant screen.“

And then, Sunday night, Superman himself — Dean Cain, the Lois & Clark guy, now apparently an ICE recruit — posted a photo of the Mall taken from the top of the Ferris wheel. The photo showed a vast empty lawn with scattered tents and maybe a few dozen visible humans. Cain captioned it as proof of “thousands of people.” When Adam Kinzinger replied “Hahahaha dude this is not the picture to show. All 6 people,” Cain responded: “Any negative reactions to this post expose the haters as anti-American. Seek help.”


If you have eyes and you noticed: you’re anti-American. If you took a photograph: you’re anti-American. If you can count: you’re anti-American. The official MAGA position on America’s 250th birthday is now that empirical observation is treason.

LOLZ.

What Should Have Been

Two hundred and fifty years ago this summer, fifty-six men signed their names to a document that began with twenty-eight words about the equality and dignity of every human being. Most of them did not live up to those words. The country they created was incomplete, and the work of completing it has been the work of every generation since.

Lexington. Concord. Yorktown. Seneca Falls. Gettysburg. Appomattox. The suffragists in white. The kids at Belleau Wood. The Greatest Generation at Normandy. The Freedom Riders. Selma. The hands of strangers pulling people out of the towers on a clear blue morning in September. The nurses who walked into COVID wards in March of 2020 without enough PPE because the country needed them to.

That is what 250 years of America is. That is who this celebration was supposed to be for.

What you got instead: a closed-loop corporate sponsorship racket selling photo ops with the President for $1 million a head, run by his campaign manager, his fundraiser, and his campaign finance director. A taxpayer-funded slush fund routed through a Park Service nonprofit because Park Service nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors. A 16-day fair on the National Mall where Alabama is a bucket of peanuts and Maine is lobster facts on a wall and Vermont is just one woman who drove from home because her own state wouldn’t pay. A $24.96 stuffed pretzel. A Confederate flag that had to be pulled by Friday. A 14-year-old girl singing “Delta Dawn” to ten people who weren’t listening.

A plywood arch. To honor a fake arch. To celebrate a country.

And the President of the United States, behind bulletproof glass, performing his own birthday party for a Mall of empty grass while the few people who did show up walked out in the middle of his speech.

Nobody showed up. That’s the headline. That’s the whole headline.

Across every poll, every wire-service photograph, every drone shot, every local journalist’s eyewitness account, every refusal letter from a sitting Democratic governor, every dropped musical act, every protest organized by Next250 and We The People 250 — the message from the country is the same:

We see you. We are not coming. GFY.

It will be okay. The country is not him. It has never been him. The country is the people who showed up across 250 years and did the work — and the country will still be here, and still be ours, on the other side of this miserable bulletproof-glass spectacle, when it’s a footnote in a chapter about how the republic almost got jerked off in an Uncle Sam costume at its own birthday party, and then didn’t.

Happy 250th, America. You deserved better, and you’ll get it when this prick is over. Judging by the crowds at his Freedom 250 money laundering grift, that might be sooner than later.

https://deanblundell.substack....