By admin 
The Trump administration says it plans to shut down Freedom 250, the quasi-private organization it used to take over the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations. But that doesn’t mean the president’s efforts to hijack the nation’s semiquincentennial have ended.
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Trump is continuing to weaponize the anniversary as he combats what he claims are overly woke institutions. He’s still using the 250th to justify self-aggrandizing construction projects he is pushing in Washington. And, at least for the time being, the Freedom 250 fundraising apparatus remains in place, drawing scrutiny from congressional Democrats who are planning to ramp up their investigations into the Trump administration if they win control of Congress in November.
Freedom 250 is a limited liability company set up within the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit overseen by the Interior Department that raises private money for national parks. That complex arrangement makes the group’s operations, and its spending of federal money, opaque. According to USA Spending, a government website, Freedom 250 is funded via a grant to the National Park Foundation, to the tune of $86 million so far, that won’t expire until the end of 2028.
In addition, Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee noted in a July that Event Strategies, Inc, or ESI—a private company with close ties to Trump’s campaign operations—still has a contract to organize festivities worth up to $100 million. According to the General Services Administration, that contract runs through 2030. This “could allow ESI to continue to host events and build projects in the name of the President’s self-aggrandizement until 2030,” Democrats wrote in their report. Event Strategies did not respond to inquiries.
Officials at Freedom 250 and the National Park Foundation say the Democrats needn’t worry. They expect Freedom 250 to dissolve in coming months. “Our intent to wind the Freedom 250 LLC down, and that wind down has begun,” said Josh deBerge, a spokesperson for the foundation.
Lawmakers have also questioned whether GOP operatives have used anniversary events to gather personal data from attendees to build email lists to benefit Republicans in the midterm elections. This month, House Democrats the Government Accountability Office to investigate how a Freedom 250 vendor called Campaign Nucleus—a firm owned by former Trump campaign official Brad Parscale—is using the phone numbers, email addresses, and ZIP codes it gathered from people who attended the events.
“President Trump and his allies are in a position to use information on American voters, harvested with taxpayer money and government resources, in an attempt to tip the scales in the upcoming midterm elections,” the Democrats wrote.
Campaign Nucleus did not respond to an request for comment.
Whatever happens with Freedom 250, Trump’s obsession with politicizing the country’s 250th birthday won’t dissipate anytime soon. Nor will Democrats’ interest in investigating what has transpired. Since last summer, Trump has staged a series of events nominally celebrating the anniversary that were funded, for the most part, with money Congress set aside for that purpose. But the festivities—a military parade; an IndyCar race around the National Mall; the “Patriot Games”; a massive fireworks display that actually occurred early on July 5 after extended remarks by the president; the ill-fated Great American State Fair; and the UFC fight at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday—were light on commemoration of the country’s history and heavy on the kind of spectacle the president enjoys. There were, for instance, dozens of flyovers.
Democrats are also looking into Freedom 250’s fundraising. “Freedom 250 appears to be yet another slush fund for wealthy corporations and insiders to buy influence with the White House,” four Senate Democrats recently in a letter to the head of the National Park Foundation. In August, Rep. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Maxine Dexter, the top Democrat on the panel’s investigative subcommittee, to nearly two dozen Freedom 250 sponsors and partners—many of which are federal contractors or otherwise have interests that could be impacted by administration policy—to ask if their donations were linked to promises of improper influence.
Freedom 250 spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez has denied that the group has engaged in improper fundraising, calling the claims “a partisan smear from politicians” eager to “manufacture division.”
Even if Freedom 250 ultimately disappears, its leadership is not going away. Last year, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum appointed former Trump campaign co-manager Chris Lacivita and fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, two of Freedom 250’s leaders, to National Park Foundation’s board. They can retain those posts even after Freedom 250 dissolves.
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Freedom 250 claims to be nonpartisan, but it leaders remain key figures in GOP electoral efforts. O’Rourke is fundraiser for MAGA Inc, Trump’s political action committee that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates this fall. LaCivita continues to advise Trump and GOP candidates. Alvarez is a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee. All three were in Dallas this month, helping run the “midterm convention” Trump held to boost Republicans in November.
Earlier this month, Trump used a Truth Social post to demand that the Smithsonian Institution install multiple statues of George Washington at its National Museum of American History, including a 30-foot “colossus.” Trump’s stated reason: “the Museum has failed to give George Washington and our other Founding Fathers the celebration they deserve” during “our Nation’s 250th Anniversary Year.”
The American History Museum already contains a George Washington statue, along with other artifacts and information related to the first president. It’s located in Washington, DC, less than half a mile from the Washington Monument. Two more Washington statues seem superfluous. Trump’s actual motivation, beyond his evident infatuation with statues, may be reigniting culture wars with a new attack on wokeness. “Instead of a Center for Restorative History,” he wrote, “America’s National History Museum should have a Center for American Heroes.”
Trump has similarly attributed his effort to renovate the Kennedy Center to the anniversary. The administration’s recent shutdown of the center, and the president’s threat to raze it if he remains barred from putting his name on it, follows a past claim by Trump that he would close the center “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country.”
The logic of such statements is hard to follow, but the president’s eagerness to invoke the country’s birthday to justify his whims is clear enough.
Other initiatives that Trump has attributed to semiquincentennial are proceeding. Excavation work on the 250-foot arch the president wants to erect in front of Arlington National Cemetery is expected to start any day. Trump recently revised his vision for that project. In an apparent bid to create a national security rationale, he announced that it would become a “top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”
The White House is also still pushing to build a “National Garden of American Heroes,” consisting of 250 statues of US luminaries, on a portion of the National Mall near the Jefferson Memorial. The administration recently installed a pair of gazebos, or aywans, donated by government of Uzbekastan there that the Uzbek ambassador has said will be part of the statue garden. The administration badly missed its goal of completing the project by July 4 of this year. But despite a lawsuit and questions about the plan’s legality, it is still pushing to complete the statue garden during Trump’s presidency.
O’Rourke is also a raising money for the National Garden of American Heroes Foundation, a recently formed group gathering private donations to help finance the statue garden, along with a luxury golf course nearby.
Congressional Democrats say that’s part of a pattern. Natural Resources Democrats argue that Freedom 250 acted as “blueprint” for other administration efforts to combine public and private funding in slush funds that advance Trump’s pet projects even as they claim freedom from congressional oversight. Lawmakers have also faulted the administration’s use of another nonprofit controlled by the Interior Department, the Trust for the National Mall, as vehicle for funding Trump’s ballroom project.
As Trump continues to use organizations similar to Freedom 250, Democrats say they will keep investigating. In that sense, long after the parties end, the fight over the country’s birthday will go on.
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