Trump's 'great' fair limps to its conclusion
But the grift goes on.
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Happy Birthday, America! To celebrate your 250th, President Trump got you something amazing!
Sorry, no, you can’t return it for a refund. You left it out in the rain and then doused it with smoke from 80,000 fireworks. And anyway, you don’t have a receipt.
But the Great American State Fair on the National Mall was more than a national embarrassment. It was the endpoint of a MAGA-fication of the nation’s historic birthday, transforming it into a vehicle to glorify Trump and line his allies’ pockets. And according to a report by House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee, it may also be a crime.
Make it MAGA
In 2016, Congress passed the United States Semiquincentennial Commission Act, establishing a bipartisan organization called America250 to plan for the nation’s 250th birthday. Trump doesn’t really do bipartisan, but America250’s chair Rosie Rios, a former US Treasurer under Obama, bent over backward to work with the new president.
She hired a slate of Trump insiders to keep the peace, including former campaign manager Chris LaCivita, fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, and event producer Justin Caporale. And she didn’t blink when the White House installed a 25-year-old former Fox News producer named Ariel Abergel as executive director. America250’s nonprofit, chartered by Congress to raise money from outside donors, directed more than $30 million to fund Trump-focused events, including the 2025 parade to commemorate the Army’s 250th anniversary — which just so happened to coincide with the president’s 79th birthday.
But the commission balked at funding de facto MAGA rallies. On July 3, 2025, Trump used an America250 event in Iowa to denounce Democrats: “I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country, you want to know the truth.” And in September, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Abirgel was pushed out after using America250’s official X.com account to tweet “God bless Charlie Kirk.”
With the White House pressuring America250 to turn every event into a partisan carnival, it was clear that the fragile detente could not continue. In October, Trump’s advisers stood up Freedom 250, a Delaware LLC, later entered in DC, whose registered agent is Harvard Business Services, the vendor of choice for a constellation of other Trump-affiliated entities.
Freedom 250 was nested inside the National Park Foundation, the official charitable partner of the National Park Service. On November 11, 2025, the Service signed a cooperative agreement with the Foundation designating Freedom 250 the “primary public-private partner” for the entire 250th anniversary commemoration. Celebrations and fundraising which had previously been supervised by a bipartisan commission were now parked inside an entity supervised solely by Trump officials, specifically Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Freedom 250 quickly seized events and resources from America250, including the trademark for the Betsy Ross flag, which became its logo.
Before LaCivita decamped for the president’s project, House Democrats say he counseled America250 to ask for $150 million from Congress — $100 million for America250, and $50 million for the president’s priorities, which would be supplemented with $85 million raised by O’Rourke. But America250 was quickly relegated to projects outside DC and only received $25 million. Meanwhile, between December and April, Burgum’s agency transferred $68 million to the National Park Foundation, the group now housing Freedom 250.
In short order, LaCivita, O’Rourke, and Caporale had shifted their efforts to Freedom250. LaCivita told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer that this was because “America250 can’t get over the fact that Trump won…They want to apologize for America’s 250th. We don’t.”
Caporale, whose firm Event Strategies, Inc. planned Trump’s pre-insurrection rallies on January 6, scored a $100 million, open-ended contract. And O’Rourke’s team circulated a sponsorship brochure peddling various levels of access. For $500,000, donors get VIP admission and invites to a reception with Trump. Ten million buys a dedicated press release thanking the donor, “most prominent” logo placement, and a photo with the president.
The sponsor list is packed with companies who either rely on government contracts or require regulatory relief from federal agencies. Chevron, ExxonMobil, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, Palantir, and Scotts Miracle-Gro all pulled out their checkbooks.
Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle, got the green light for his Paramount-Skydance merger last year and is now circling Warner Bros., which owns CNN.
Scotts Miracle-Gro, which produces the glyphosate pesticide Roundup, sponsored both the Great American State Fair and Trump’s UFC fight, pledging $1 million to re-sod the South Lawn after the birthday brawl. In February, Trump signed an executive order designating glyphosate, which HHS Secretary Kennedy and his MAHA cohort call a dangerous carcinogen, as necessary to the nation’s food supply. The administration also backed Monsanto’s winning Supreme Court defense against glyphosate cancer claims.
As House Democrats put it: “The equation is simple. The President gets money for vanity projects. The companies get a private channel to seek favor while contracts, grants, enforcement actions, or other federal matters are pending. And taxpayers are left with a government that operates less like a public trust and more like a pay-to-play scheme.”
Bait and switch
The minority members of the House Natural Resources Committee titled their report “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday.” It makes some pretty serious allegations about wrongdoing by officials inside Freedom 250.
Committee Democrats have received confidential disclosures that America250 donors were affirmatively misled by fundraisers, including the President’s lead fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke. According to sources interviewed by Committee Democrats, donors who intended to donate to America250 were instead given wire instructions with Freedom 250’s banking information — including its routing number and account number — so that contributions would instead flow to Freedom 250. A gift solicited in the name of the nation’s nonpartisan birthday commission could thus be redirected without the donor’s knowledge, by an entity created to serve the President’s priorities. If true, such actions could constitute violations of several laws, ranging from potential wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal law to charitable solicitation violations under the laws of the District of Columbia, where Freedom 250 is registered and operates as an LLC.
“I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed,” Ranking Member Jared Huffman told the Washington Post. “But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”
Per the report, administration officials also told some corporate donors that they lacked a “green light” to contribute to America250. Trump allies then solicited America250’s own sponsors directly, asking them to redirect their money to Freedom 250. Several executives reportedly couldn’t tell the two organizations apart.
Freedom 250 spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez called the allegations “unequivocally false” and dismissed the entire report as “a partisan smear from politicians who would rather manufacture division than celebrate America’s 250th birthday.” But House Democrats aren’t the only ones claiming to have been hoodwinked.
After performers were announced for the Great American State Fair on May 25, almost every headliner dropped out once they learned Freedom 250, not the bipartisan commission, was actually running the show.
“I was presented with an opportunity to perform at a nonpartisan event but that turned out to be misleading,” Martine McBride said on Instagram.
“I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT,” Young MC posted. “The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event.”
Trump sneered at the “highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” who “aren’t happy,” vowing to replace them with “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP.”
“We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” he raged, effectively conceding that this entire exercise is for Trump’s supporters only.
Always be grifting
Having commandeered the programming, Trump’s minions at Freedom 250 churned out homogenous palaver, sanitizing America’s history with the help of rightwing Christian propaganda outlets like PragerU and Hillsdale College.
They seized America250’s grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to launch “Freedom Trucks” to travel the country “sharing the story of our nation’s founding,” dispatching an AI George Washington to pronounce that “our rights are a gift from God” — something the first president never said. They correctly quoted Thomas Jefferson calling slavery a “cruel war against human nature itself,” but omitted to mention some fairly important context. Ditto for the claim that Native Americans’ “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent.” Perhaps most bizarrely, they claim that the boxer Muhammed Ali disavowed Islam at the end of his life.
“The White House set out to refashion the semiquincentennial into a mouthpiece for those who want to break down the firewall between church and state and enshrine their preferred kind of Christianity as the de facto national religion,” the House report states. “Their agenda fuses Christian, white supremacist identity with history revisionism, insisting that the nation’s founding, its laws, and our fundamental rights are rooted in the Christian Bible, rather than the revolutionary principle of self-government.”
The fare on the National Mall was more of the same, if even more “low effort.” NOTUS reports that states rushed to assemble booths, for which they were charged both a rental fee and a “furnishing” fee, payable to vendor owned by Joe Popolo, a major Republican donor and Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands. Aside from Fourth of July weekend, crowds were sparse and the performances poorly attended.
But lest we be tempted to rate this effort a failure, let us judge it on its own terms. As a birthday party for the nation, it’s clearly subpar. But as proof of concept, it’s a rousing success.
Trump was able to snatch congressionally allocated funds, commingle them with cash from corporations seeking favor from his administration, enrich his buddies, and throw himself two spectacular birthday parties. He tried something like this before with the bunker ballroom, which was supposed to be built with donations alone, and thus exempt from congressional review. Now he’s figured out how to exploit existing government nonprofits as a clearinghouse for cash, letting corporate donors buy their way into his good graces while the public is left guessing who paid for what — and what they got in return.
For America’s birthday, it got a crummy town fair with a lone ferris wheel and a leaky, styrofoam model of the giant arch the Dear Leader intends to build as a monument to himself. The only day the fair remotely lived up to the hype was July 4, and that was … uneven. After the fairground was un-evacuated, the cacophonous fireworks display finally got underway after midnight. Just in time for the bloated dictator, exhausted from constant grifting, to nod off again.
That’s it for today
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Nothing says more about state fairs than untrampled green grass … and gleeful grift.
When the Smithsonian Institution is finally emancipated, it can install an exhibit about how yet another wonderful American tradition--that of our state fairs--was debased, and how it is being restored. Because it will be restored.