As America's 250th anniversary approaches, the president wants to control the country's future by bulldozing its past.
Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore at Mother Jones:
On a June afternoon in Washington, swarms of mosquitoes were feasting on thousands of Americans as they watched a military parade roll past the National Mall. It was the US Army’s 250th birthday, which also happened to be President Donald Trump’s 79th, and the MAGA-heavy crowd watched the procession trudge down Constitution Avenue, largely silent but for the squeaking of armored personnel carriers. Groups of soldiers marched by at seemingly random intervals, as if to foreshadow the actual military occupation Trump would unleash on the city two months later. It was overcast and muggy, and spectators had lined up for hours to get inside the security perimeter. Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year. When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation. So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-Cola, and General Mills.
The promise of all that cash and spectacle helped America250 lure a flock of political operatives with Trump ties. Chris LaCivita, who helped steer Trump’s 2024 campaign, joined as a strategic adviser. Campaign Nucleus, founded in 2021 by former Trump campaign honcho Brad Parscale, helped organize America250 events. So did Event Strategies, which staged Trump campaign gatherings in 2020 and 2024, as well as the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House that preceded the attack on the US Capitol. America250 said in January that it’s no longer working with these contractors but hasn’t disclosed how much they were paid. America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.
Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
The semiquincentennial is just one part of the commander in chief’s broader campaign to harness the mechanisms of the federal government to enforce his preferred version of the nation’s history and culture—a Trumpified presentation of America’s past and present. On the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, the administration even rolled out a taxpayer-funded webpage seeking to recast the day’s events as a patriotic effort to protest “the fraudulent election.” Three weeks later, Trump’s FBI seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and other election material from Georgia’s largest county. “TRUMP WON BIG,” the president declared the next morning. “Crooked Election!”
Since his inauguration last year, Trump has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center—reshaping its artistic programming, installing a MAGA-dominated board that claims to have renamed it in his honor, and then closing it for renovations. He’s railed against “OUT OF CONTROL” museums that he insists are too focused on “how bad Slavery was.” He has successfully pressured the Smithsonian Institution to review displays to ensure “unbiased content” and has extracted significant concessions over what top universities teach students. At his direction, the National Park Service has altered or removed scores of exhibits at parks and historic sites on topics including slavery, Native Americans, climate change, and even fossils. Trump acolytes are also leveraging federal dollars to stop local librarians and educators from sharing content they dislike. Under the pretense of stamping out “woke” ideas and promoting patriotism, the White House is attempting to mandate uncritical acceptance of its own take on the American story, one that celebrates the martial feats of mostly white men and an imagined religious and ideological conformity that minimizes the fights, tribulations, and dissenters who have defined the country. It’s an effort that flies in the face of American ideals—and reality.
[...] The project is a collaboration between a Trump administration committee called Task Force 250 and PragerU, a conservative nonprofit that makes right-leaning educational materials. The task force has also partnered with Hillsdale College—a conservative Christian school known for incubating plans to push US education rightward—to create another series of videos, dubbed “The Story of America.” In the first installment, Hillsdale President Larry Arnn alludes to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Trump’s use of the word “again,” Arnn asserts, shows the president’s interest in the country’s history. This, Arnn says, “places him somewhere near the politics of Abraham Lincoln.”
Task Force 250, created by Trump shortly after taking office in January 2025, has been a nerve center for the president’s whole-of-government effort to assert dominance over the country’s anniversary proceedings. It’s led by White House official Vince Haley, a Trump loyalist who in late 2020 played a key role in efforts to overturn the election using fake electors. But in the byzantine politics of semiquincentennial commemoration, Task Force 250 is far from alone. There’s Freedom 250, Trump’s newly unveiled public-private fundraising vehicle that has recently taken the lead in implementing his highest-profile and most extravagant projects. And there’s America250, a theoretically nonpartisan organization established by a 2016 statute. America250 is overseen by the US Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan group whose members are appointed by Congress and that furnishes America250 with staff, offices, and congressionally appropriated funds. The president has the power to choose the commission’s chairperson, who in turn can hire and fire staff—meaning that in practice, Trump has substantial authority over how America250 operates.
This authority has not gone unnoticed. MAGA acolytes like Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) have called on Trump to remove commission Chair Rosie Rios, a Democrat who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022. So far, Rios has survived in the role, partly by publicly courting Trump. Last year, she installed Ariel Abergel, a 25-year-old former Fox News producer and Melania Trump aide, as America250’s executive director. Rios has said she “welcomes” Trump’s interest in the celebration and has credited him with enabling the commission to accomplish more than it did under Biden. It might also help that Rios serves on the board of Ripple, a crypto company that gave $4.9 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. That donation, Rios has said, was unrelated to her work for America250.
[...]
There will be July 4 festivities in all 50 states, including the first-ever non–New Year’s ball drop in Times Square. The president has touted a “Great American State Fair” across the country and on the Mall, where anniversary events now have priority over all other potential gatherings—including any protests. The highest-profile initiatives will be unmistakably Trumpian. Those include the massive triumphal arch the president hopes to build, as well as the White House UFC extravaganza that will, according to Trump, feature the “greatest champion fighters in the world.” Trump claimed last week that his administration is planning to construct a stadium that will hold 100,000 attendees for the fight. And he signed an order that calls for an IndyCar race, dubbed the “Freedom 250 Grand Prix,” through the streets of Washington. “It’s going to be very, very important,” Trump said.
There’s also the “Patriot Games,” a nationally televised Freedom 250 competition for high school athletes—one girl and one boy from each state—that the White House says will be overseen by RFK Jr. The Hunger Games echoes are hard to miss, though the competitors presumably won’t be battling to the death, and, in any case, Trump has assured Americans that “there will be no men playing in women’s sports.” And of course, he’s promised even more religion: “We will host a major prayer event on the National Mall to rededicate our country as one nation under God. We’re not changing that—there are a lot of people who would like to see it; it will never happen.” [...]
Americans have always fought over the meaning of our history. In 1835, Democrats loyal to the late Thomas Jefferson objected to the placement of a statue of his rival Alexander Hamilton outside the New York Stock Exchange. During the 20th century, segregationists erected hundreds of monuments to Confederate soldiers—often in opposition to the civil rights movement. In 1995, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was forced to resign amid an outcry over a planned exhibition that some lawmakers and veterans’ groups complained was too critical of the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
Since his first term, Trump has reveled in such battles—but not because he cares about the details of the country’s past. This is a guy whose record includes installing a bogus historical marker commemorating a made-up Civil War battle at his Virginia golf course. The presentation of American history matters to Trump because it offers a medium through which he can wage the all-encompassing cultural, political, and legal battles animating his administration. For Trump, “the enemies that matter are in the present: us, history professors, journalists, and any others who represent ‘wokeness,’” says Johann Neem, a historian at Western Washington University. In Neem’s view, Trump is weaponizing the backlash against genuine excesses in progressive scholarship as part of a “larger project to shut down independent sources of knowledge and authority.” Even as the administration purports to celebrate the American Revolution, it is waging “a cultural counterrevolution that has authorized them to feel comfortable violating the political principles of that revolution.”
Trump is especially into statues. His infamous statement that some attendees at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were “very fine people” occurred as he defended their opposition to the removal of a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
[...] “This country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE,” Trump posted on Truth Social last summer, opening yet another front in his all-encompassing campaign to reshape the American narrative. “We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.” The president said he was dispatching “my attorneys” to the Smithsonian Institution—the country’s flagship network of museums devoted to history, art, and science, as well as the National Zoo—to clamp down on overly negative depictions of the United States. Among other issues, he said, museums focus too much on the evils of slavery. Instead, Trump explained, they should emphasize “Success,” “Brightness,” and the “Future.” The 21 Smithsonian facilities, which are federally funded and free to the public, draw more than 15 million visitors per year—a massive cultural footprint that Trump was eager to control. In March 2025, he issued an executive order aimed at purging federal museums of “improper ideology” ahead of the 250th anniversary. In August, Trump lawyer Lindsey Halligan and other White House officials wrote to the Smithsonian, emphasizing the need to “celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
The letter came after the Smithsonian’s board of regents had already agreed to review exhibits to “make any needed changes to ensure unbiased content,” including “personnel changes.” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch insisted the institution maintains independent authority over “our programming and content,” but he also noted that the ongoing review was designed “to ensure our programming is nonpartisan.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from a display, while leaving content related to other impeached presidents. The institution claimed it did so because the material “did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline and overall presentation” and “blocked the view of the objects inside its case.” Following criticism, it reinstalled revised language about Trump. But months later, a different Smithsonian museum, the National Portrait Gallery, removed its own description of Trump’s impeachments. Citing the same executive order that Trump used to target the Smithsonian, the Interior Department has told the National Park Service not to disseminate information that “inappropriately disparages Americans” or says anything about nature beyond celebrating the “beauty, abundance and grandeur of the American landscape.” To comply, Park Service officials have altered or removed signs and exhibits at sites around the country. The ongoing changes, which likely total in the hundreds, include exhibits about slavery yanked from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, climate change signs disappeared from Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and placards discussing geology and fossil formation removed from Big Bend National Park in Texas. Trump has also seized control of other institutions tasked with shaping the nation’s cultural and historical memory, ousting the leaders of the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Keith Sonderling, the new head of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, said he intended to “revitalize” that agency—which supports local institutions—“and restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.” Sonderling has pressured librarians to implement the president’s various anti-DEI orders, while also quizzing them about how they were planning to celebrate the 250th anniversary.
Solid article from Mother Jones on the Trump Regime’s historical revisionism of American history as the nation approaches its 250th birthday.
