Inside America’s Ugly Birthday Battle - The Atlantic

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>Years before Poison’s Bret Michaels, Young MC, and the Commodores dropped out of this summer’s concert series on the National Mall celebrating America’s 250th birthday, planners envisioned a Smithsonian-led blockbuster festival stretching from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol that would be open to all and free of partisanship. They wanted a party bigger than the Folklife Festival, an annual two-week summer exhibition, and much longer-lasting. This new “Festival of Festivals” would focus on the semiquincentennial, with four to six weeks of performances, workshops, and displays to “celebrate the nation’s successes,” “contemplate the consequences of our history,” and “commit to advancing our multicultural democracy,” according to a November 27, 2023, memo that I obtained.<br>But last summer, with little fanfare, President Trump took control of the event and renamed it. While campaigning, he had promised to work with all 50 state governors to put on his own “Great American State Fair” at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Last July, he traveled to Iowa to announce a change of plans: “a giant patriotic festival next summer on the National Mall featuring exhibits from all 50 states.” The announcement got little attention, because at the same event, Trump said this about congressional Democrats: “I hate them.” The Smithsonian quietly recast the Festival of Festivals as a series of events around the country.<br>So began Trump’s multipronged takeover of the historic celebrations, which will culminate on July 4—the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—amid growing disarray and conflict, according to documents I obtained and interviews with 10 people involved in the planning or oversight of the event, most of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.<br>They described frayed trust and growing conflict that has become so acrimonious that the Department of the Interior is refusing to honor a December agreement with America250, a bipartisan group authorized by Congress in 2016 to plan the nation’s festivities. A memorandum of agreement I obtained shows that the department pledged to transfer $50 million in congressional appropriations by February 1, but only $25 million has been delivered so far. “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended,” the Department of the Interior press office told me yesterday in an unsigned statement, when I asked why the America250 money had not been transferred. “This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”<br>Democratic and Republican lawmakers have expressed frustration at the breakdown, with one House committee opening its own investigations into the Trump administration’s handling of taxpayer funding for America’s birthday party. “This is straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life, when Henry Potter steals George Bailey’s money and tries to drive him to the brink,” one commissioner for America250 told me. “With less than a month away from this historic milestone, there is just no room for politics, and we remain hopeful that cooler heads will prevail.”<br>Trump’s team is similarly frustrated. The White House created its own rival group, Freedom 250, late last year to improve on the existing plans. Trump aides now accuse the bipartisan group of resisting the rightful role of the commander in chief to put his own mark on the celebrations. “America250 can’t get over the fact that Trump won,” Trump’s former co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita, who worked as a top contractor for America250 last year before switching to Freedom 250, told me. “They want to apologize for America’s 250th. We don’t.”<br>The discord broke into public view late last month when seven music acts bowed out of the Great American State Fair after they learned that Freedom 250, not the bipartisan planners, were organizing it. Trump angrily canceled the live-music series and pledged to make the event more explicitly political. Days later, he announced a June 24 rally on the National Mall to launch the state fair, an event he is now billing as a “Rally to end all Rallies,” featuring him as the centerpiece and no “singers with no talent.” He invited U.S. military bands; the country singer Lee Greenwood, whose “God Bless the U.S.A.” was Trump’s campaign walk-out song; and the opera tenor Christopher Macchio, who sang at Trump’s 2025 inauguration.<br>Some supporters of America250, which is backed by a bipartisan caucus of 421 federal lawmakers, view this event as further proof that Trump always planned to remake the national celebration in his image. They point to a draft Freedom 250 document, which details how organizers could encourage Americans to host their own events—town halls or...