{"id":739076,"date":"2026-07-02T14:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T14:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/739076\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T14:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T14:36:10","slug":"trump-hijacked-uss-250-anniversary-to-serve-political-ideology-and-pet-projects-congressional-report-says-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/739076\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump hijacked US\u2019s 250 anniversary to serve \u2018political ideology and pet projects\u2019, congressional report says | Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US\u2019s 250th anniversary celebration<\/a> to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.<\/p>\n

The interim report, \u201cFrom Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday\u201d, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives\u2019 natural resources committee<\/a>\u2019s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder President Donald Trump<\/a>, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,\u201d it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted \u201cinto an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President\u2019s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HowHow Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself \u2013 video<\/p>\n

In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the nonprofit America250 Foundation<\/a>, to plan the nation\u2019s 2026 celebrations on a nonpartisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.<\/p>\n

When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250<\/a> as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.<\/p>\n

The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O\u2019Rourke and Chris LaCivita<\/a>, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF\u2019s nonpartisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.<\/p>\n

Jared Huffman<\/a>, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: \u201cI can\u2019t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America\u2019s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that\u2019s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.<\/p>\n

Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O\u2019Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250\u2019s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.<\/p>\n

This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair \u2013 including Martina McBride and Young MC \u2013 were assured the event was nonpartisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally<\/a>. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a \u201cbait and switch\u201d.<\/p>\n

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a \u201chistoric photo opportunity\u201d with Trump.<\/p>\n

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event<\/a> on the South Lawn to celebrate the president\u2019s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for \u201cSuper Bowl-level security\u201d marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).<\/p>\n

Fighters received bonuses in \u201cUSD1\u201d, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial<\/a>, a trust run by the president\u2019s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC\u2019s parent company weeks before the event.<\/p>\n

Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies<\/a> \u2013 the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack \u2013 was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.<\/p>\n

Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250\u2019s website, initially managed by ex-Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.<\/p>\n

Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale<\/a>, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target \u201cpersuadable\u201d voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attendees of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.<\/p>\n

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250\u2019s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission<\/a>, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.<\/p>\n

A central feature of this effort was \u201cFreedom Trucks<\/a>\u201d \u2013 a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.<\/p>\n

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that \u201cour rights are a gift from God\u201d, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the Revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.<\/p>\n

Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage<\/a> detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history \u2013 slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn\u2019t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech<\/a> and a massive fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they\u2019re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,\u201d the congressman said. \u201cWe should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don\u2019t challenge them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US\u2019s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":739077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-739076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=739076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/739077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}