Can We Run It Through An LLC?

How America's 250th birthday became Freedom 250, a national commemoration that looks suspiciously like a donor racket.

Good morning! In Rights of Man, Thomas Paine wrote that government is “not a trade” to be set up for any man’s “own emolument,” but “altogether a trust” delegated by the people.

America turns 250 today, and under normal circumstances that might invite something like reflection. A republic surviving a quarter millennium is no small thing. It should be a moment to ask what self-government has meant, who has been excluded from its promises, who fought their way into them anyway, and what obligations we inherit from those who kept widening the circle.

Instead, the Trump administration appears to have looked at America’s 250th birthday and asked the only question that matters in this golden age of civic grift: can we run it through an LLC?

NPR reports that House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a 55-page report accusing the White House-backed Freedom 250 operation of helping Trump “hijack” the national celebration and turn it into what they call a “hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment.” That report, its existence and its central charge, is the documented floor here; much of what follows is the committee’s case, not yet a tested finding, and worth reading as such. Congressman Jared Huffman’s own breakdown is more direct. America250, he explains, was created by Congress in 2016 as a bipartisan commission precisely so no president could turn the country’s birthday into his own personal stage. Then Trump tried to take it over. When that failed, Huffman says, the administration created Freedom 250, a shadow entity designed to circumvent and supplant the official commission. This is where the birthday party switches, in the committee’s telling, from civic celebration to something more like procurement fraud with bunting.

According to Huffman, Freedom 250 was registered in Delaware, through what he says is the same anonymous vendor Trump uses for his other businesses, and then lodged inside the National Park Foundation, the trusted nonprofit associated with America’s national parks. That structure, he alleges, let the operation take in large sums without naming donors, sell access to the president, and keep the public from seeing who was paying, what they were promised, or where the money went. If the arrangement is what he says it is: wrap the thing in ranger-green respectability, hide the books, and call it freedom.

Then came the money squeeze. Huffman says Congress set aside $150 million for the semiquincentennial, and America250 was supposed to receive $100 million. Instead, he alleges, the White House whittled that down to $50 million, then $25 million, while the rest flowed toward Freedom 250. NPR reports that Freedom 250 disputes the allegation that funds were improperly diverted, so the diversion itself remains contested. But one thing is not in dispute, whatever the accounting turns out to show: the official bipartisan commission got sidelined while the Trump-friendly substitute got the spotlight, the branding, the Mall, the merch, and the contracts. Huffman also alleges that Freedom 250 went after America250’s corporate sponsors with what he calls a quid pro quo of access to Trump in exchange for cash. The list he names reads like a regulatory favor desk in flag form: Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Mastercard, United Airlines, UnitedHealth. These are not bake-sale donors buying commemorative napkins. They are companies with business before the federal government, and, if Huffman’s account holds, they were writing checks to the president’s preferred birthday machine while sponsorship packages reportedly offered photo ops with Trump at up to $10 million apiece.

Then there is the data, and here the allegation is about capability more than proven use, so it’s worth stating narrowly. Huffman says Freedom 250’s website runs through a company owned by Brad Parscale, Trump’s longtime digital strategist, and that Americans signing up for free events, even families registering for the World Cup fan zone on the National Mall, handed over names, locations, and phone numbers. What he alleges those details could do is feed a political operation built to profile and target voters. Whether they were used that way, the report doesn’t establish. But the collection itself, under a patriotic banner, is enough to raise the question of whether the national birthday doubled as a voter-acquisition funnel wearing a tricorn hat.

The historical rewrite is a separate thread, and parts of it are checkable against the Park Service’s own record rather than only the committee’s account. Huffman says park rangers were ordered to remove factual signs about slavery, climate change, and the forced removal of Native Americans, while taxpayer dollars funded PragerU trucks and an AI-generated George Washington telling children their rights are a gift from God, a framing Huffman notes the founder never used. This is not only about money. It is about control: control the funding, control the contractors, control the donor access, control the visitor data, control the stage, and control the story America tells about itself.

Freedom 250 calls the allegations false and a partisan smear, and that denial belongs in the frame, not as a footnote to it. But strip the contested specifics away and the uncontested shape is still troubling. The country’s 250th birthday should belong to the public. What the documented record already shows, an official commission sidelined, a substitute operation running the Mall, corporate money flowing toward a president’s branded celebration, is a public thing rerouted toward private advantage, and a president who seems incapable of encountering any public good without wondering whether it can be converted into one.

The contrast with Zohran Mamdani’s Fourth of July address could not have been sharper.

Trump went to Mount Rushmore and delivered a speech about America as inheritance, identity, culture, destiny, and enemies. He praised the country as the most exceptional nation ever to exist, warned of a communist menace supposedly worse than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, attacked those who tell children we live on stolen land, and vowed to “vanquish communism quickly” and “send them into exile.” He also told Republicans that if they terminate the filibuster and pass the Save America Act, they “will not lose an election for a hundred years.” It was freedom as possession, patriotism as obedience, and democracy as something to be procedurally managed until the right people never lose again.

Mamdani, by contrast, spoke from New York City and treated America not as a finished monument but as an unfinished promise. He began with New York Harbor: Lenape dugouts, ships of explorers, men waiting at the docks to take others into bondage, tenements, smoke, industry, and the Statue of Liberty glowing with worldwide welcome. His America was not pure. It was contradictory, wounded, made and remade by the very people told they did not belong.

It would be a mistake to call one speech artless and the other crafted. Both were performances, and both had targets, Trump’s enemies were communists and immigrants and the people who say the land was taken; Mamdani’s were the trillionaire, the oligarchs who buy elections, the masked agents in unmarked vans. Each aimed as deliberately as the other. The difference is not that one was rhetoric and one was truth, but that they proposed two incompatible theories of what the country is. Trump defined America through culture and exclusion; Mamdani defined it through motion. America, Mamdani said, is exceptional not because it is richer, stronger, or more powerful than everyone else, but because here “nothing is fixed into place.” That is the line this whole birthday needed. Not supremacy. Possibility. Not a gated inheritance. A public trust.

When Mamdani said patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws, he named the thing Trumpism cannot tolerate. Patriotism, in his telling, is not silence but righteous dissent, protest under the heavy sun, neighbors linking arms when ICE invades, working people demanding more not just for themselves but for one another, and the refusal to surrender the country to those making it smaller. Whether he lives up to that framing is a separate question, and one worth holding him to. But as an account of what the day is supposed to mean, it is the one that squares with the founding the fireworks are for.

So there were really two birthday speeches this week. One put freedom behind barricades, wrapped it in threat language, and hinted at a future where the ruling party might not lose for a century. The other remembered that America has always been made by people pushing through the barricades, insisting the promise belongs to them, too.

Then, as if the metaphor gods were on deadline, came the Great American State Fair.

The fair on the National Mall has been providing the sort of visual symbolism no writer deserves to receive this easily. Simon Marks described it as so sparsely attended that there were no lines even for the children’s rides. Visitors interviewed by The Independent called it underwhelming and political, with one saying it felt like “a program-length advertisement for the president.” The model of Trump’s planned triumphal arch reportedly struggled in the extreme heat, with industrial glue oozing from the structure, which may be the most honest architectural review yet produced by this administration.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins nevertheless went on Fox News to insist the fair was hitting every mark, claiming 150,000 people had come through and calling it a huge success. Marks noted there was no indication the event had come close to those numbers. But crowd-size denial is practically a founding sacrament of Trumpism now.

On Friday, reality intervened in the form of Washington, D.C. becoming a steam tray. The Great American State Fair temporarily shut down in the afternoon because of dangerous heat. Today, the capital is under an Extreme Heat Warning until 9 p.m., with the National Weather Service warning that heat index values could reach 110 to 115 degrees. The forecast shows temperatures peaking around 101 degrees, with thunderstorms possible this afternoon. Even the weather appears to be filing an objection to hijacking July 4th.

There is, of course, a responsible public-safety argument for closing an outdoor event in dangerous heat. Nobody needs to collapse between the state pavilions and the merch tent so the administration can pretend its birthday carnival is working. A celebration of American greatness, run through a shadowy access-and-contract machine, staged on fenced-off public land, lightly attended, politically branded, physically melting, and finally forced to pause because the climate had other plans.

This is the Trump era’s civic formula in miniature. Privatize the public thing. Brand the public thing. Sell access to the public thing. Route the money through opaque structures. Harvest the data. Hire friendly contractors. Rewrite the history. Put the president’s face at the center. Call it patriotism. Then act surprised when the whole production looks like a bankrupt carnival with federal backing.

This Fourth of July feels sour. America’s 250th birthday should belong to all of us: to the people who built the country, challenged it, defended it, expanded it, exposed its hypocrisies, and kept insisting that the words on the parchment apply beyond the men who first wrote them. It should belong to immigrants, workers, veterans, teachers, nurses, organizers, students, tribal nations, descendants of the enslaved, new citizens, old dissenters, and everyone still stubborn enough to believe the republic is not finished.

Trump, instead, tried to put the birthday behind a velvet rope. The result is Freedom 250: a national commemoration that looks suspiciously like a donor racket. And the Great American State Fair: a patriotic midway so lightly loved that even the heat seemed embarrassed to be there.

Two hundred and fifty years after independence, America is still worth fighting for. But the people currently wrapping themselves in the flag appear to be trying to sell it by the yard.

And with that, we are going to keep our own little republic quiet tonight.

Marz, stalwart soul that he is, remains largely unbothered by the bangs and pops of fireworks. He has the temperament of a frontier sheriff and the body mass of a small upholstered horse. But many pets are deeply alarmed by the noise, and many people are, too. So we will be staying in, keeping the doors closed, the water bowls full, and the moonbeam vigil lit for everyone trying to get through the evening with a little peace intact.

May your Fourth be safe. May your pets be calm. May your neighbors be merciful. May the thunderstorms behave themselves. And may this strange, battered, beautiful, maddening country somehow find its way back toward the public trust Paine imagined, the unfinished promise Mamdani named, and the stubborn democratic work that still belongs to all of us.

Happy semiquincentennial, friends. Hold your people close, check on the anxious creatures, and we’ll see you on the other side of the smoke.