The Fight for America's Story
America's 250th anniversary has become a battle over national identity
The greatest Fourth of July speech in American history called the celebration a sham.
On July 5, 1852 — the Fourth fell on a Sunday that year — hundreds of people paid twelve and a half cents each to file into Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. A minister opened the program by reading the Declaration of Independence aloud, to warm applause. Then Frederick Douglass stood up.
He began by admitting that he had never come before an audience “more shrinkingly,” with greater distrust of his own ability. And then he told them the truth. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.” The rich inheritance of justice and liberty their fathers had left behind was “shared by you, not by me.” The day’s celebrations were a sham, he said, as long as millions of Americans remained in chains. And he warned them about men who drape themselves in the founders’ courage while abandoning everything the founders risked: “The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”
Then, having said the hardest thing anyone had ever said about the Fourth of July, Douglass did something harder. He refused to despair. The Declaration, he told the crowd, was “the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny,” and its principles were “saving principles.” Stand by them, he urged — “on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” “I do not despair of this country,” he said.
The audience did not walk out. They rose in a burst of applause, and before the meeting adjourned, hundreds paid for printed copies of the speech, so the truth told in that hall could travel far beyond it.
Douglass staked his hope on something we are still deciding whether to believe: that this country can survive an honest accounting of itself. That telling the truth about America is not an attack on America. It may be the most patriotic thing there is.
That was the promise of the effort to recognize the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. The formation of an entity known as America250. A national moment to reflect. A commemoration not just of how we began, but of who we’ve become. It was supposed to be a celebratory history lesson.
Instead, it’s become a political campaign.
America250 vs. Freedom 250
To mark this momentous anniversary, Congress created a nonpartisan commission in 2016. Members were Democrats and Republicans, including lawmakers, members of the executive branch, and private citizens, with oversight from all three branches of government. It was supposed to coordinate the planning of America’s semiquincentennial in 2026: a worthy celebration not of one president or one party, but of the people themselves.
The original vision was expansive. The commission’s 2019 report, titled “Inspiring the American Spirit,” promised the most inclusive commemoration in US history: 100,000 events across every state, territory, and tribal nation. Millions of participants. The commission asked the public to share ideas for how best to honor the milestone: “We want you to shape an America250 that is of, by, and for all the people,” the site once read. “Tell us how the American spirit sparks your creativity and imagination.”
In 2020, then-president of America250 Tony Rucci said, “Our objective is to be fully inclusive in developing... [national] programs [for the celebration] and ensure we capture the voice of individual Americans in the process.”
That invitation is no longer on the website.
And the programming that would have brought it to life, which included community exhibits, student contests, oral history projects, and grants for small-town museums, has now been replaced by something very different.
Last year, a 25-year-old named Ari Abergel was appointed executive director of the commission. He previously worked at Fox News and as the deputy communications director for Melania Trump, and after assuming his new role, Abergel tried to pressure four sitting commissioners to resign. (To remove them outright would have required a two-thirds majority vote.)
The four commissioners in question weren’t Democrats. They had been appointed years ago by then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. One of them, speaking on behalf of the group to The Atlantic, said the move appeared designed to install Trump loyalists ahead of the anniversary, and that Abergel’s role “should have been reserved for a much more experienced and substantive candidate.” None of the four agreed to step down. Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly got involved to help pressure them.
Abergel was eventually removed from the commission himself. But the power struggle over how the American public would actually celebrate this year continued as the Trump administration has built up the “White House Salute to America 250 Task Force,” now more commonly known as Freedom 250. The task force has overseen a significant portion of the programming for the anniversary, including its largest budget items, headline events, and external partnerships. Freedom 250 uses similar branding and language as America250, so much so that the public would have no reason to know there was a difference between the two, or that the task force was essentially bypassing the congressionally mandated system to pose as America250.
But the difference matters.
Freedom 250 is staffed almost entirely by Trump loyalists, including senior advisor Chris LaCivita, fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, and events planner Justin Caporale, whose company Event Strategies helped coordinate the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally. Under their direction, $33 million was budgeted for events that happened in 2025, like a military parade, a rally at Fort Bragg, and a kickoff event in Iowa where Trump told the crowd, “I hate Democrats. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.” That event was branded under the America250 banner.
Since then, federal resources have been diverted to support President Trump’s pet projects, like a new National Garden of American Heroes — a statue park first proposed by Trump in 2020 — while 85% of the funding for other long-planned projects, like events run by local museums and other entities, has been abruptly canceled after DOGE cuts included laying off the majority of the National Endowment for the Humanities staff.
Some of the funding went to an event with hardly any connection to the 250th anniversary at all — the $60 million UFC fight hosted on the White House lawn under the Freedom 250 banner. There’s also been the sparsely attended Great American State Fair, and the planned concert series that was canceled when artists pulled out after realizing they’d been duped about the nonpartisan nature of the planning committee. All this will culminate with a July 4 celebration on the National Mall that the president has billed as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”
“This was going to be a moment that would be a big celebration for the country that recognizes the important work that state and local and national history organizations do,” John Dichtl, the president and chief executive of the American Association for State and Local History, said. “Instead, what’s happening is undermining all that. People are being told that this kind of work doesn’t matter.”
But it’s not just the event schedule or the grant-making that’s been reshaped. It’s the story being told.
A celebration of triumph, not truth
As part of the 250th initiative, the White House task force partnered with conservative Hillsdale College to release a video series called “The Story of America,” featuring narration by secretary of defense and former Fox host Pete Hegseth. PragerU, an organization run by talk show host and author Dennis Prager, has come on board to create a series of YouTube videos called “The Founders Museum.”
Corporate sponsors like Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Coinbase have been added to the branding. Also among the sponsors is Moms for Liberty, a group focused on banning books and DEI from public schools. Then there are the planned Patriot Games, an athletic competition slated for August that will stream on ESPN “celebrating the character, determination, and excellence that define the American spirit.”
The tone is clear: this is a celebration of triumph, not an interrogation of the truth. America is described in terms of its “unprecedented greatness” and its “unimaginable achievements,” with few mentions of the contradictions and exclusions present at the founding.
There is no subtlety in the message. The executive order establishing the task force explicitly rejected “radical indoctrination” and called for a version of history that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.” But a historical education that is devoid of dissent, debate, or discomfort is no real education at all.
Make no mistake: American history has been rewritten before.
Confederates didn’t just give up their beliefs because the Union won the Civil War. In the decades following, Confederates created a Lost Cause narrative — one that painted the South as having been unjustly attacked and invaded by the North. One that helped erect public monuments to Confederate leaders and created textbooks that spread nationwide, promoting the idea that the Confederacy was not just misunderstood, it was noble. The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, according to them, it was about states’ rights. These ideas were pervasive in some places until well into the 21st century. (Scratch that, they are still pervasive in some places.)
The Lost Cause wasn’t just a misremembering. It was a deliberate erasure — one that elevated political power over historical truth. And we are watching it happen again.
Today’s version isn’t being taught in dog-eared school books or with bronze monuments. It’s happening through federal grants, executive orders, branding decisions, and pyrotechnic shows. It’s happening in the replacement of educational initiatives with entertainment ones. It’s happening in who is silenced, who is spotlighted, and what the American people are encouraged to remember.
The original promise of America250 was participation — the idea that every town, classroom, and community could take part in telling our collective story — messy, unfinished, complicated, and still unfolding.
What history will remember is still being shaped. If this commemoration becomes a vehicle for erasure, it won’t just fail to teach future generations. It will teach them something dangerous: that history is whatever the person in charge says it is.
But here’s the good news: we don’t have to surrender the narrative.
America250 doesn’t belong to the task force. Or the commission. Or the president. It belongs to us.
We can still organize community commemorations. Still support educators doing their work. Still fund local museums. Still tell the truth. Still remind each other that the story of America is not about how perfect we are, but about how determined we’ve been to become better.
That is the story that is still worth telling. And no one, not even a line item in a federal budget, gets to take it from us.
I love the way you pull the facts together Sharon! Thanks for helping me to remember that as an American I have a lot to be proud of. We have a potentially great country. We just have a lot to work through!
Excellent!