In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has waved off the stalled Iran negotiations and the looming midterm elections with a shrug: “I don’t care,” he said during a Cabinet meeting last week. But there is one topic that has his full attention: America’s 250th birthday.
People close to the president say he’s fixated on the flurry of events descending on Washington for the semiquincentennial celebration. He’s throwing himself into construction and renovation projects around the capital, staging a UFC fight at the White House — his idea — and attempting to salvage a botched “Freedom 250” concert series by reimagining it as a political rally.
“It’s a good distraction from the war,” said a former White House official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The president is locked in right now on a lot of the enhancements to Washington, D.C. … and a lot of the pomp and circumstance.”
The conflict with Iran — to say the least — is untimely for celebration optics. As the U.S. military and Iran exchange fresh strikes in a war with no clear end in sight, crews are assembling a hulking UFC arena on the South Lawn of the White House.
A White House official attributed the contrast to bad timing, but they said Trump and the anniversary events are charging ahead.
“The plans and vision for UFC at the White House was in motion long before the Iran conflict started,” said the White House official, who was granted anonymity to speak about internal strategy. They said hosting a UFC fight — a sport Trump has avidly followed for years — was meant as a nonpartisan celebration intended to honor members of the armed forces.
Trump made a similar nonpartisan argument for the “Freedom 250” concert series, which a majority of the announced artists saw quite differently.
Shortly after a nine-act lineup was made public, several of the performers — including Martina McBride, the Commodores and Bret Michaels — withdrew from the event, saying they were not told the event was political in nature.
“I will not be performing at the Great American State Fair on June 25th,” McBride, a country music star, posted on X. “I was presented with an opportunity to perform at a nonpartisan event but that turned out to be misleading.”
As the defections mounted, Trump took to Truth Social to attack the musicians and to float scrapping the format entirely.
“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 wrote.
In an interview with the New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast, Trump brushed off the departures, saying the artists handed Freedom 250 “free publicity.”
“I don’t even want them,” he added.
The bungled concert rollout and Trump’s face-saving pivot drew fire even within his own camp, where some saw the proposed MAGA rally as a squandered opportunity.
“I’m actually pretty pissed at how badly they’ve bungled America 250,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. “First they tried to invite Milli Vanilli and a bunch of other absurdly washed up geriatric one hit wonders. Then when that didn’t work they decided to convert the event into a Trump rally where Trump will talk about himself for 90 minutes. This should have been a massive, raucous celebration of the country and its 250 year history. Now it will be a political rally identical to the ten million other ones we’ve already seen.”
America 250 vs. Freedom 250
Much of the confusion over how partisan the celebrations really are can be traced back to two separate organizations with confusingly similar names.
America 250 is the official, congressionally authorized commission, created in 2016 for the bipartisan national commemoration of the country’s founding. Its website advertises “America’s Block Party”: a cross-country celebration of the nation’s founding on July 3 and 4 that is more generally structured as the official bipartisan national commemoration.
Freedom 250 grew out of an executive order Trump signed upon returning to office. The order created a “Task Force 250” to mark the same anniversary — but chaired by Trump, with Vice President JD Vance as vice chairman. The group is far less forthcoming: It does not clearly list its donors or say who runs its day-to-day operations.
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Yet for all its opacity, Freedom 250 is behind some of the summer’s splashiest events — the ones Trump tends to promote himself. They include the “Patriot Games,” a national athletic competition with contestants from every state and territory, and the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall.
Even so, a Freedom 250 spokesperson said the White House fight, billed as “UFC Freedom 250,” is not affiliated with the organization and shares only its branding. The same goes, the spokesperson said, for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, an IndyCar race planned for the National Mall.
Where the money comes from
Both Freedom 250 and America 250 draw on a mix of private donations and taxpayer money, and neither has said clearly how much it has raised privately or how much it has received in public funds.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress steered $150 million to the Interior Department for “events, celebrations, and activities surrounding the observance and commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.” The law did not specify which entities the department had to fund. Some of that $150 million is expected to go to Freedom 250 and some to America 250, but how it will be divided is unclear. America 250 has only received $25 million so far, according to the office of Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat who co-founded the bipartisan Congressional America 250 Caucus.
“A250 was promised $100 million, but that promise was then scaled down to $50 million — of which only $25 million was received from the ‘One Big Beautiful’ Bill,’” Watson Coleman’s press secretary, James Marrow, told MS NOW. There is “little optimism that A250 will receive the second half of the promise thanks to the lack of transparency and the fact that funds are being used for F250 projects,” Marrow added.
The full federal tab for Freedom 250 remains unclear, but spending records show contracts and grants worth at least $23 million have gone toward its preparations and programs.
Among Freedom 250’s top contractors is Event Strategies, an event planning company with deep ties to Trump’s political efforts, including the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the riot of Trump supporters at the Capitol. According to federal records, it was hired this time for “Freedom 250 exterior design” and “Freedom 250 design and content support services.” Dozens of other vendors have been hired for a drone show, catering, landscaping, installations, staging and more.
A $5 million Interior grant went to a nonprofit, SAIL250 New York Inc., to organize a “large scale maritime celebration” that will “bring an international fleet of tall ships and naval vessels to New York Harbor for a July 4, 2026 parade.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars more have also gone to various military bands to perform at Freedom 250 events, federal records show.
A $68.3 million grant from the Interior went to the National Park Foundation — Freedom 250’s parent nonprofit — to “support significant events to commemorate the nation’s semiquincentennial,” though the award does not explicitly say it’s for Freedom 250.
Due to a lack of disclosure requirements for Freedom 250, very little is known about its private donations, including who has donated and how much has been raised. Its website, however, lists more than 60 “sponsors” and “partners,” including Deloitte, ExxonMobil, IndyCar, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, Palantir and UFC, along with Trump-aligned conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the America First Policy Institute.
It also lists dozens of federal agencies and public entities, including America 250 and the White House itself, as “founding government members.”
Akayla Gardner contributed reporting to this article.
Jake Traylor
Jake Traylor is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.
Soorin Kim
Soorin Kim is a White House producer with MS NOW.
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