It’s the great American humiliation: Donald Trump wanted to put on an ambitious demonstration of America’s success over the past 250 years, but all he could do was put up some cheesy cardboard cutouts and hire some third-rate musicians (many of whom bailed out when they learned how they were being used), and now nobody is showing up. It was all a grift, where he undermined a sincere bipartisan effort to celebrate American history, and instead he substituted this phony demonstration and sucked $126 million out of the budget.

Donald Trump and his allies have seized control of the bipartisan 250th anniversary celebration and substituted it with a Trumpified series of events, at the public’s expense. Our analysis of federal contracts and corporate sponsorship deals related to the 250th anniversary reveals that:

• The Trump administration has awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants for the 250th anniversary celebrations to a network of politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies.
• The recipients include entities controlled or influenced by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, as well as Chris LaCivita (Trump’s former campaign manager) and Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s former presidential campaign finance director.
• These grants represent the vast majority (about 80%) of the nearly $126 million in federal contracts awarded since October 2025 to fund this summer’s 250th-anniversary celebrations, which have devolved into a celebration of Trump himself.
• Private funding has also flooded the anniversary celebration, often from corporations with regulatory issues before the Trump administration. As of June 11, 20 corporate sponsors are funding the Trump administration’s preferred anniversary organization, Freedom 250, compared with the 62 sponsoring the original, bipartisan celebration, dubbed America 250 (12 companies sponsor both).

For example, take a closer look at Trump’s Arch, sitting in the middle of an empty grassy field. It looks cheap. It’s badly assembled. It’s fate after this affair is to be chopped up and burned in a landfill (foreshadowing the fate of our country.)

I’m confident that Trump initiated this abomination with the goal of being “classy”…but he has such poor taste and lacks focus and is so incompetent at the execution that all we get is this embarrassing shitshow to join the reflecting pool debacle, the defeat in an Iran war that shouldn’t have happened, and all the corruption surrounding this presidency.