The administration’s sketchily funded Freedom 250 project, which will oversee the celebration of America’s semiquincentennial, is a pageant of right-wing extremism.
A Freedom 250 insignia, alongside other tchotchkes signifying Trump clan dominance, at the US delegation headquarters during last month’s World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland
(Theresa Münch/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Over the past year, Donald Trump has been fixated with remaking much of the country’s key institutions in his own image. He has renamed the Kennedy Center after himself, put his own likeness on the National Parks pass, and threatened federal funding for Penn Station and Dulles Airport in order to obtain naming rights for them so they, too, can become extensions of the Trump brand. This is all to say nothing of his concerted efforts to hijack universities, media companies, and assorted businesses to serve the MAGA agenda.
Yet even this rolling offensive doesn’t seem to satisfy the president’s insatiable ego. Trump is now embarking on a crusade to MAGAfy the American past, via a hostile takeover of the federal government’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For a decade, the federal entity in charge of organizing the anniversary has been the US Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan organization commissioned by Congress. In 2019, the government launched America250.org as the official nonprofit partner of the Commission, to help plan events, competitions, and other programs for the semiquincentennial. But the Trump White House has sidelined America250 in the run-up to the anniversary celebration; instead, it’s set up a new organization called Freedom 250, to plaster MAGA-sanctioned messaging throughout the festivities.
Freedom 250 is a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation (NPF), itself a nonprofit that Congress set up to promote the activities of the National Parks Service. But on Trump’s watch, the NPF is turning into yet another institution peddling MAGA talking points for mass consumption.
Normally, the NPF backs improvements on park lands, such as habitat restoration and trail renovation. But Trump has remade the NPF into a de facto PR operation for the White House’s political projects.
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This makeover has mostly been the handiwork of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who serves as ex-officio director of the NPF board. Burgum swiftly set about stacking the board with Trump loyalists, including top Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 campaign co-manager. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, NPF isn’t required under federal tax law to disclose its donors and is even empowered to grant donors anonymity. Donations to the foundation are also tax-deductible—an added bonus for anyone seeking access to Trump’s fundraising ecosystem.
If that sounds like a recipe for grift dressed up as a charitable donation, that’s because it is. The New York Times recently unearthed documents showing that Freedom 250 is a clearing house for donor perks. A cool $1 million gift offers photo opportunities with the president; $2.5 million can land you a speaking slot at the marquee July 4 celebration in Washington. And because of the NPF’s opaque standing as a 501(c)3, the public may never know who its well-heeled benefactors are.
There’s also a wave of federal funding sluicing into the NPF’s coffers. The Trump administration has redirected a $10 million grant initially earmarked for America250.org to the NPF. Another $5 million grant was shuffled out of the National Park Service and to the National Park Foundation to fund “A250 events.”
But these events are more than just vessels for influxes of cash—they’re promoting a right-wing bid to whitewash the history of the country, and promote the dogmatic worldview of Christian nationalism.
The administration will begin promoting Freedom 250 initiatives with a caravan of “Freedom Trucks” traversing the country. The trucks are mobile museums featuring AI-generated images and videos depicting significant American historical figures. They’re also outfitted with MAGA-sanctioned broadsides about the American past produced in partnership with PragerU and Hillsdale College.
The Michigan-based Hillsdale is a major redoubt of Christian nationalist scholarship that’s been promoting a “1776 Curriculum” for public schools that misrepresents the basic character of the American founding and the country’s subsequent history. The for-profit PragerU is a right-wing propaganda outlet that likewise traffics in fundamental fabrications about the nation’s history while crusading against anti-racism, which it dubs “as anti-Americanism.” While the Freedom Trucks’ full exhibits haven’t been publicly released, Hillsdale and Prager’s extensive track records leave little doubt about the broader historical narrative on offer.
Nor is there much doubt about the brief of another Freedom 250-affiliated program, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. At first glance, the program’s mission seems fairly mundane; its stated aims are to “renew patriotism,” “strengthen civic knowledge,” and “advance a shared understanding of America’s founding principles.”
But on closer examination, the coalition’s model of civics education hews once more to a vision of the country as the creation of true-believing Protestant evangelicals, untroubled by serious social upheavals or racial conflict except when those are introduced by faithless liberals. The coalition’s initial press release features a testimonial from a Turning Point USA official pledging that the group is “more resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students flourishing across our nation.” American public schools aren’t designed for such cultural missionizing, since they are charged with educating students of any (or no) faith background. This mandate also contravenes the fundamental protections of the First Amendment, which bars the establishment of a state religion.
Such actual principles of American civics also play no role in the handiwork of another Freedom 250 and Civic Education Coalition partner, Moms for Liberty, a far-right group that helped spearhead the moral panic against critical race theory and continues agitating against any measure to include LGBTQ students and issues in American schools—up to and including via functional book bans.
Another group affiliated with Freedom 250 is America Prays, which is also featured on a subpage on the White House’s own government site. The America Prays website features a portrait of President Trump—an unlikely avatar of Christian values—as well as the group’s solemn pledge to “return [the country] to its spiritual foundations” and “rededicate ourselves to one nation under God.”
America Prays lists an organization called WallBuilders as a partner—a Texas-based group founded by Christian nationalist David Barton, promoting the core misleading narrative of the movement: that the nation’s founders were evangelicals who envisioned the country as a uniquely Christian nation. Barton has also reportedly captained the Trump administration’s ideological crusade to weed out secular and putatively liberal content from museums and exhibitions administered by the Smithsonian Institution.
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America Prays has also joined forces with Flashpoint, a podcast promoting the militant gospel of the New Apostolic Reformation—the evangelical movement at the vanguard of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. One might regard the promoters of a failed coup seeking to overturn the results of a free and fair election as dubious apostles in the cause of civic education or the preservation of basic American freedoms. But in the agitprop reveries of the second Trump White House, right-wing vigilanteism is a feature, not a bug. One Flashpoint host, Gene Bailey, has repeatedly had Trump appear as a guest. He has also avowed, “We do have an agenda, and that is I am a Christo-fascist, Christian nationalist.” As the watchdog group Media Matters has chronicled, Bailey has also featured guests prophesying “natural disasters in response to Trump’s criminal indictments, suggested that Trump is ‘anointed’ and that God will kill his opponents, and fram[ed] political developments in the context of a ‘demonic spin cycle.’”
Also on board as a Freedom 250 sponsor is the evangelical film production company Angel Studios. Angel was the distributor of the controversial QAnon-adjacent 2023 film The Sound of Freedom. The movie presented a fictionalized account of the career of anti-sex-trafficking activist Time Ballard, and starred Jim Caviezel, who called QAnon “a good thing,” while echoing QAnon language and conspiracies. Ballard was later removed from his organization, Operation Underground Railroad, following allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment against female staff.
These extremist figures and organizations might seem to be an awkward fit with the corporate backers of Freedom 250—a rapidly expanding roster of major companies who, like the private individual donors behind the project, are keen to leverage any and all available platforms to curry favor with the Trump White House. As Judd Legum’s Substack newsletter Popular Information reports, corporations like ExxonMobil, Deloitte, and Mastercard are already lavishing millions in donations on the project, with many more sure to follow suit. The roll call of big-ticket corporate sponsors for Freedom 250 echoes the earlier musterings of big-money donors for Trump’s second inauguration and his $400 million White House ballroom project. Those, too, are federal initiatives that wed MAGA ideology to Trumpian vanity, without Freedom 250’s breathtaking mission of revamping all of American history. But with this summer’s baldly ideological celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the forces behind the Trumpist putsch are aligning behind George Orwell’s famous dictum from 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
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