Congress chartered America250 nine years ago to mark 250 years of the bipartisan ideals set out in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Trump’s rival operation, Freedom 250, has different plans, including a cage fight on the South Lawn, an IndyCar race around the National Mall, a worship rally at the Capitol, and a gold coin with the president’s face.
What this story tracks
- Public money inside a private operation. The firm that ran the January 6, 2021, pre-insurrection rally is now the federal government’s highest-paid event-planning contractor. A federal museum agency that Trump first tried to abolish has been redirected to finance PragerU’s mobile museum trucks. Roughly $10 million in taxpayer dollars has been disbursed without public accounting.
- A partner liststacked with Project 2025 organizations, Christian nationalists, and Trump-aligned outfits. Hillsdale and Moms for Liberty served on the Project 2025 advisory board; the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the UFC, IndyCar, and a poetry society that promoted a Trump “inaugural poem” that echoes Klan-era mythology filled out the roster.
- A presidency focused on merch. A 24-karat gold coin with Trump’s face. Also in production: a $1 coin, a Trump-face embossed passport and national park pass, and Trump’s signature on future Federal Reserve notes, a first for a sitting president and a violation of an 1866 statute.
- A rededication to God on the Capitol steps. On May 17, 2026, the country will be rededicated to God in front of the Capitol, with Pete Hegseth, Mike Johnson, and Ben Carson on the main stage. Religious Liberty Commission chair Dan Patrick called the separation of church and state “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.”
- The speakers the White House quietly dropped. Worship leader Sean Feucht spent months promoting a May 16 lineup that included Mark Driscoll, the former megachurch pastor forced out over bullying, who called women “penis homes.” After press scrutiny, three anonymous White House sources toldBaptist News Global the May 16 event was “unaffiliated.”
On June 14, 2026, the South Lawn of the White House will host a UFC cage fight, the centerpiece of Trump’s Flag Day celebration of his own 80th birthday.
Two months later, IndyCars will race a 1.7-mile street-circuit loop around the National Mall at speeds of over 200 miles per hour, the first auto race ever held in front of the Smithsonian. A 250-foot triumphal arch inscribed “ONE NATION UNDER GOD,” topped with a gilded Lady Liberty and twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial, will rise across the Potomac on Columbia Island. On May 17, 2026, in front of the Capitol, the country will be rededicated to God.
None of these events were conceived of by the bipartisan federal commission Congress set up to plan America’s Semiquincentennial. Instead, the president and his allies built a parallel operation called Freedom 250 to celebrate Trump’s vision of America. Its CEO, Keith Krach, served briefly as a State Department undersecretary in Trump’s first term and made his name in Silicon Valley by running DocuSign. Mother Jones reported that Krach’s outfit “appears to have been created to dodge oversight that applies to America250,” the federal commission Congress originally chartered for the celebration.
The bipartisan commission, created by Congress in 2016, has built its yearlong commemoration around a student essay contest called America’s Field Trip, a nationwide service initiative called America Gives, an oral history project called Our American Story, a Smithsonian Folklife Festival that will run a full month on the Mall, and the National Archives’ July 4 reenactment of the Declaration’s signing.
Donors who give Trump’s Freedom 250 money are not subject to the disclosure rules that bind donors to the federal commission. About $10 million in taxpayer money has already moved from America250 to Freedom 250 anyway, with no public accounting. Public Citizen and a group of Senate Democrats have called for a congressional investigation. Freedom 250 calls itself “non-partisan.”
The New York Times obtained the prospectus that Krach’s team is showing donors. A $500,000 gift buys VIP seating at every event on the calendar, including the prayer rally. A $1 million gift buys a private reception with the president and what the document calls a “historic photo opportunity.” For $2.5 million, a donor receives a speaking slot at the July 4 Salute to America on the Ellipse, on a stage flanked by members of the executive branch.
Foreign governments are eligible to give, and Krach has been pitching them in person; in February 2026, he set up a “USA House” on the promenade at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where his onstage interlocutor, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, asked the audience what they could contribute.
Some of the public money has gone to a fleet of mobile museum trucks built by PragerU and Hillsdale College, both of which served on the Project 2025 advisory board. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agency that funds public libraries, increased its initial $10 million grant to $14.1 million for the project, this from an agency Trump tried to abolish by executive order eight months earlier. Children who climb into the retrofitted semis meet an AI-generated George Washington who tells them, “Our rights are a gift from God.” Wall text reads: “The foundational principles of America are rooted in the Western and Judeo-Christian traditions.” The Guardian described the slavery exhibit as presenting the institution “as a sort of wrinkle in America’s perfect design that was ironed out in time.” Each AI video closes on the White House and PragerU logos, side by side.
The firm that ran the January 6, 2021, pre-insurrection rally on the Ellipse is now the highest-paid event-planning contractor in the federal government and is producing Freedom 250 events. Event Strategies Inc., based in Virginia, is run by Tim Unes and Justin Caporale, both listed on the permit for the January 6, 2021, rally, respectively as stage manager and production manager.
The New York Times reported that Event Strategies has taken in $22 million in federal contracts under Trump’s second administration. Under Biden, the firm received nothing. Five contracts worth more than $13 million went to Event Strategies through carve-outs that excluded rival firms from bidding. The Navy paid the firm $12.6 million for events tied to its 250th birthday, in what the Times called “a departure from standard practice.” WIRED separately reported a GSA schedule running through 2045 that could be worth up to $100 million. Caporale, who is also Trump’s “Executive Producer for Major Events and Public Appearances” at the White House, has not left the firm.
Trump’s political committees have paid Event Strategies $67 million since the 2015 Trump Tower campaign launch.
By mid-April 2026, Freedom 250 had taken down the page listing its institutional partners. The Hill reported on April 15 that the operation relaunched its website that week without an equivalent partner index. The earlier list named Hillsdale, the Museum of the Bible, the National Religious Broadcasters, Moms for America, the America First Policy Institute, American Heritage Girls, PragerU, the Ashbrook Center, the Union League of Philadelphia, and Moms for Liberty.
Also gone from the new site was the corporate sponsor index, which had named ExxonMobil, Deloitte, Mastercard, and Palantir. On May 2, 2026, the corporate-accountability nonprofit Impactivize pressed Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach on how the company squared its DEI commitments with its sponsorship of a Christian-nationalist rededication. Mastercard did not respond.
The Cage Match
The cage match has been on the books since Trump announced it from the Iowa State Fairgrounds on July 3, 2025. The seven-fight card was unveiled during the UFC 326 broadcast on March 14, 2026. A 4,500-seat temporary arena will rise on the South Lawn at an estimated cost of $60 million; Trump bragged in April 2026 that he had “never had an event that has had more interest than the UFC fight we have right at the front door.”
The UFC is the dominant promoter of mixed martial arts, a combat sport that mixes boxing, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, and kickboxing inside a caged ring called the Octagon. Concussions are routine. So are broken noses and blood. Referees stop fights only when a competitor can no longer defend himself.
None of the Americans on the card was chosen blind. Bo Nickal has golfed with Trump regularly since 2023 and called himself and the president “cut from the same cloth” on Newsmax. Michael Chandler stumped for Trump in 2024 and framed Kamala Harris as anti-Christian.
“Suga” Sean O’Malley walked out at UFC 316 on June 7, 2025, to “God Bless the USA” while Trump watched from the front row. The bantamweight champion has built a five-million-follower Instagram brand on the manosphere circuit. At UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, in his staredown with Chinese fighter Song Yadong, O’Malley wore a surgical mask. Song called the gesture “totally racist.” O’Malley apologized at the pre-fight media day, after Chinese state media picked up the photos.
Gaethje flew to Chechnya to meet Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman Human Rights Watch has documented running anti-gay purges, torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings.
Crypto.com is the principal sponsor and put up a $1 million performance bonus, the largest in promotion history. Fighters will walk out from the Oval Office. The Octagon will sit on a South Lawn that ordinarily hosts state dinners and the Easter Egg Roll. For Karim Zidan, who covers the sport for The Guardian and the newsletter Sports Politika, the cage on the lawn is the logical endpoint of what he has documented as the UFC’s evolution since 2016 into “the sports arm of the MAGA regime.”
Trump’s Grand Prix
The IndyCar race did not require a private partner. It exists because Trump declared it in an executive order. On January 30, 2026, without running it by the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, or the city of Washington, DC, Trump directed the Secretaries of the Interior and Transportation to design a racecourse on the National Mall within 14 days. The same order instructed every federal agency in the chain to “ensure that all permits, approvals, and other authorizations … are issued and granted as expeditiously as possible.” The 1.7-mile, seven-turn circuit to be held on August 22 and 23, 2026, was unveiled on March 9, 2026. Its frontstretch runs along Pennsylvania Avenue between the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol. The track loops past the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence is housed. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made the pitch that day: “Freedom doesn’t ring, it revs!”
Roger Penske, who owns the IndyCar series, has known Trump for years; Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019. The race will air live on Fox. The selection of a Mall street circuit, over the objections of historic-preservation advocates, was not subjected to environmental review. General admission is free. The Champions Club, an air-conditioned hospitality lounge overlooking Turns 4 and 5, sells for $5,000 per person across the two-day weekend. The official Freedom 250 store carries a full-size Freedom 250 race helmet at $250 and a 1:18-scale die-cast at $99.
The Cultural Calendar
The Freedom 250 calendar goes beyond the Mall. Kid Rock has been a regular at the Trump White House since 2017. He launched his “Freedom 250 Tour: The Road to Nashville” on May 1, 2026, in Dallas. The 10-date amphitheater run wraps June 20, 2026, in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, six days after the White House cage fight.
On April 27, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Kid Rock rode two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters out of Fort Belvoir to film a promotional video for the tour. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters the flight was a Freedom 250 “community relations event.” The same 101st Airborne unit had flown over a No Kings protest in Nashville earlier in the spring, then buzzed Kid Rock’s house in March 2026. When the Army grounded the pilots, Hegseth overruled the suspension on Truth Social: “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.” Kid Rock released the finished video on May 1, the night the tour opened. The video shows Hegseth, in uniform, announcing that 250 free tickets per show will go to active-duty military and veterans.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office asked publicly why taxpayers were “paying to fly Kid Rock around on $100 million helicopters,” and posted an AI image of Hegseth holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado and former Army Ranger, asked the same question. The “community relations event” designation is what makes the flight legal: it routes a Freedom 250 promotional shoot, paid for by taxpayers and flown on attack helicopters, into the Pentagon’s public-affairs budget.
The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is the policy shop founded in 2021 by Brooke Rollins, now Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Linda McMahon, now his Secretary of Education, and Larry Kudlow. AFPI does not disclose its donors, but the New York Times reported that Texas fracking billionaire Tim Dunn, the Scientologist donor Trish Duggan, DonorsTrust, the donor-advised fund that lets right-wing donors give anonymously, and Trump’s Save America PAC have all written checks. In September 2025, the Trump administration tapped AFPI to lead the federal America250 Civics Education Coalition.
AFPI hosted the Freedom 250 Rodeo and Concert at Cowtown Coliseum in Fort Worth on April 30, 2026. Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson emceed from the dirt floor in front of the bucking chutes. Anti-trans-athlete activist Riley Gaines opened the show. Jentezen Franklin, the Georgia megachurch pastor, gave the invocation. The concert’s sponsor was Patriot Mobile, which describes itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider” and donates a portion of every customer’s monthly bill to Turning Point USA, the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
The Inaugural Poem
One Freedom 250 partner doesn’t fit the rodeo crowd. The poetry partner, the Society of Classical Poets, joined the operation in March 2026 and is running a national poetry competition celebrating American ideals, with a $20 entry fee per submission.
Nine years earlier, the same Society published “Pibroch for the Domhnall,” a poem by Joseph Charles MacKenzie that the Society promoted as Trump’s inaugural poem. Several British outlets briefly took it at face value. The poem calls Barack Obama a “tyrant.” It tells “the Domhnall” to “guard our frontier, lest a murderous horde, for whom hell is the norm, should threaten our lives and our nation deform.” The closing instruction directs the inaugural crowd to chant in unison: “Come out for the Domhnall, the best of MacLeod!” UCLA literary scholar Michael Cohen tracked the imagery to Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman. Dixon was the writer who took the burning cross from Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake and made it a Klan symbol; D.W. Griffith adapted The Clansman into the virulently racist film, The Birth of a Nation. Cohen called the MacKenzie poem “a fantasy of white ethnic nationalism.”
“A HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT”
The poem was 2017. The stage being built for May 17 is 2026. The date matches the day the Second Continental Congress set aside in 1776 as a national day of “humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” On February 19, 2026, Sean Feucht, the Christian-nationalist worship leader and Charlie Kirk understudy, posted a HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT to Facebook. The caps are his. He and his Roots of Revival tour, he wrote, were “officially partnering with America250, Freedom 250, and the White House Faith Office,” kicking off May 17 on the Mall. “The President, Vice President, and faith leaders from around the world will be there. You don’t want to miss this historic moment.”
Two months later, three anonymous White House sources told Baptist News Global that Mark Driscoll, another speaker Feucht had been promoting for May 16, was “spreading a rumor” when he said he’d been invited to preach the main session. The former pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill megachurch, a Christian nationalist of the Reformed school, was forced out of Mars Hill in 2014 after an internal investigation found him guilty of bullying and abuse of power; the 14,000-member church dissolved within months. He is the pastor who dismissed women as mere “penis homes” in a 2001 forum post, writing that “God created a woman to be your wife” because his penis “needed a home.” Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Driscoll has reinvented himself as a MAGA pastor and taken a mentor role at Turning Point USA.
When Driscoll’s team said he’d actually been booked for May 16, the White House said no May 16 event existed either. The May 16 gathering, the sources said, was an “unaffiliated” Roots of Revival tour stop. The administration’s own paperwork says otherwise. The White House had named the parent ministry of that tour, Let Us Worship, six months earlier as a founding partner of its America Prays initiative.
Inside the Faith Office
The office Feucht keeps invoking is a year old. Trump created it by executive order in February 2025, reporting to him through the Domestic Policy Council. Its senior adviser is Paula White-Cain, the prosperity-gospel Christian nationalist televangelist whom the Senate Finance Committee investigated in 2007 over her former megachurch’s alleged payments to family members, its private jet, and a down payment for a Trump Tower apartment. At the White House Easter lunch on April 1, 2026, she compared the president favorably to Jesus Christ. Operational work at the Faith Office is run by Jennifer Korn, a Republican coalition operative. Feucht has called himself “an extension of literally the Faith Office inside of the White House.” Nobody at the Faith Office has corrected him.
On March 6, 2026, California donor Steve Bray filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the $250,000 he had given to Feucht’s 2023 tour had instead bought Feucht real estate. Nine former Feucht ministry leaders went public with allegations of donation diversion, credit-card misuse, inflated vendor prices, and Feucht charging his own ministry rent to use his own Montana cabin. MinistryWatch, the Christian charity watchdog, gave Sean Feucht Ministries an F for transparency and a donor confidence score of 19 out of 100. Its formal recommendation: stop giving. The Associated Press counted ten properties Feucht personally owned across California, Montana, and Pennsylvania. The White House kept him on the May 16 program anyway.
Driscoll was on the same trajectory. A clip surfaced from an October 2025 sermon in which he told his Scottsdale congregation he receives graphic visions during services of congregants being raped and children molested. On April 12, 2026, Driscoll emailed supporters that he’d been invited to preach the main session of Rededicate 250 and called it the biggest honor of his ministry. The White House told Baptist News Global within the week that it had never invited him.
Feucht announced a revised May 16 lineup: Mark Driscoll, Eric Metaxas, Tennessee Christian-nationalist pastor Greg Locke (known for burning Harry Potter novels), and worship leader Laura Hackett Park, an “intercessory missionary” at the International House of Prayer, Kansas City (IHOPKC) since 2003. The ministry is one of the New Apostolic Reformation’s flagship institutions. IHOPKC cut ties with founder Mike Bickle in December 2023, after 17 women, including four who were teenagers at the time, came forward with sexual-abuse allegations spanning decades.
The Sanitized Program
The official program omits Feucht’s name. Religion News Service received the May 17 speaker list on April 22, 2026. Organizers titled the three sessions “The Miracles That Made Us,” “The Miracles Still in Our Midst,” and “A New Birth of Faith and Freedom.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Pete Hegseth, Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley, and Religious Liberty Commission Vice Chair Ben Carson are slated for the main stage, with Marco Rubio and Cardinal Timothy Dolan phoning it in by video. Bishop Robert Barron will preach the homily; the opening prayer goes to Father Mike Schmitz, the priest behind the “Bible in a Year” podcast. Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus on The Chosen, shows up in person.
The only non-Christian on the program is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel. Trump appointed Soloveichik to the Religious Liberty Commission in May 2025 as its only non-Christian founding member, alongside Paula White-Cain, Ben Carson, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Bishop Robert Barron, and Franklin Graham.
At the commission’s inaugural hearing in June 2025, Soloveichik made his case for the project the commission is now executing: “Religious freedom does not seek a secular civic space, it welcomes faith into society in all its multi-faceted forms. We bring our faith with us into society. For it is faith that fuels, inspires, and guides our engagement with the civic realm.” At the commission’s final hearing on April 13, 2026, chair Dan Patrick called the separation of church and state “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.” RNS counted no Muslim, Indigenous, mainline Protestant, or historically Black voices on the May 17 lineup. Feucht, Driscoll, Metaxas, Locke, Wallnau, and Barton, all named six months earlier on the America Prays release, will appear instead on Feucht’s May 16 Mall stage the night before, which the administration now calls “unaffiliated.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), the Christian-nationalist denomination founded by Moscow, Idaho, pastor Doug Wilson. Wilson argues that the 19th Amendment was a mistake, that only Christians should hold office, and that the United States should be governed by biblical law. CNN reported that Hegseth attended the opening service of a new CREC congregation three blocks from the Capitol, in a building owned by the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Mark Meadows shop that houses much of the Project 2025 operational infrastructure. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has said Hegseth “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.” On May 17, the Defense Secretary will take the rededication stage.
Presidential Merch
The same celebration mints coins. On March 19, 2026, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts voted without objection to put the president’s face on a 24-karat commemorative gold coin. All seven voting members were Trump appointees. Trump had fired the previous commissioners in October 2025. Among the loyalists he replaced them with: Chamberlain Harris, his 26-year-old executive assistant, who told the meeting the coin should be made as large as possible. The president, she said, prefers bigness. The design reproduces an Oval Office photograph of Trump at his desk, facing the viewer with both fists pressed down, taken by his chief White House photographer, Daniel Torok. The same photograph hangs in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. A bald eagle covers the reverse. U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach said in a statement: “There is no profile more emblematic for the front of such coins than that of our serving President, Donald J. Trump.”
The Treasury is also preparing a $1 commemorative coin: Trump on one side, the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt photograph on the other. The State Department released its own contribution: a commemorative passport with Trump’s face set against the Declaration of Independence, billed as the “default passport out of the Washington Passport office when available.” Future Federal Reserve notes will carry Trump’s signature alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s, a first for a sitting president. The new America the Beautiful park pass swaps nature for Trump’s face next to George Washington’s; when visitors started covering him with stickers, the Park Service announced that altered passes were invalid. The Thayer Amendment of 1866 prohibits putting a living president on U.S. currency. The administration is leaning on a 2020 statute that authorizes “designs emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial” as cover.
The arch cleared its first federal hurdle on April 16, 2026, when the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved the design concept at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. All seven commissioners are Trump appointees. CFA secretary Thomas Luebke told the panel that of roughly 1,000 public comments received, 100 percent opposed the project. The Public Citizen Litigation Group is representing three Vietnam veterans and a historian who sued in federal court to block construction, arguing that the arch requires congressional approval and would obstruct the sightline between Arlington and the Lincoln Memorial preserved for over a century to symbolize national reunification after the Civil War. Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the administration to give the court 14 days’ notice before breaking ground.
The Declaration of Independence lists 27 grievances against George III. One condemns standing armies kept in peacetime without legislative consent: that is the Pentagon flying Apache attack helicopters out of Fort Belvoir for a Kid Rock promotional video and calling it community relations.
The country is 250 years out from declaring itself free of a king. When a CBS reporter asked Trump who the massive arch was for, he said, “Me. It’s going to be beautiful.”
