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President Donald Trump, somewhere between his seizure of the Kennedy Center and his assault on the Fed, recently considered adding another independent government body to his collection: the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, which is charged with celebrating America’s birthday this summer.
The takeover would have made Trumpian sense. The 250th anniversary festivities (semiquincentennial is half of 500, in case you don’t see that word a lot) are a presidential preoccupation and a major channel for corporate fundraising. The bipartisan commission was established under President Barack Obama. It’s led by figures from a lost age of American politics, including former Rep. Joe Crowley, who lost his seat to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the first glints of a new left-wing insurgency, and Cathy Gillespie, the wife of Bush-era Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie. The commission reflects a different ideological and aesthetic spirit than Trump’s. And MAGA figures on social media began calling for the head of its chairwoman, Rosie Rios, a Biden appointee.
Trump suggested to aides before Thanksgiving that he’d replace her with his longtime adviser Kellyanne Conway, a member of the commission, two Republicans familiar with those conversations said.
But the president then uncharacteristically demurred, and instead announced the creation of a parallel group called Freedom 250 to fund and produce his passion projects.
“I’ve seen collaboration, not confrontation,” Conway, who also advises Freedom 250, told me Sunday. She said she was “pleasantly surprised” by the comity between the parallel efforts.
And so, fittingly for a divided 2026 America, two quite different groups are preparing for the same date. The bipartisan, Establishment group has been promoting the anniversary at football games and the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop, and is sponsoring national programs like a student competition called America’s Field Trip.
The Trump-centric Freedom 250, meanwhile, will focus on big events featuring the president. The group was behind the lighting of the Washington Monument last month, and this summer it plans to stage a Great American State Fair, a prayer event on the National Mall, and an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House, as well as begin the proposed construction of a triumphal arch.
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The launch of Freedom 250 came after slow-burn conflict between the White House and the Semiquincentennial Commission, which some in the administration viewed as both ideologically suspect and without the Trumpian production chops or taste required to deliver “the most spectacular birthday party the world has ever seen,” as the president described the plans in a launch video. Last summer, a new Republican executive director staged what The Atlantic described as an “attempted takeover” of America 250, only to be repelled by congressional procedures.
Then in September Rios fired the executive director in a classic fracas in part over whether he could post about Charlie Kirk’s murder from the official account. And Rios, a former California government official whom Joe Biden made Treasurer of the United States, effectively managed the new regime, one of the Republicans said. She was careful to include Trump allies in the commission’s large array of contractors, and she also trimmed the project’s ideological sails: America 250 dropped from its programming references to the past mistreatment of Native Americans, African Americans, and women.
“We wanted to do the good, the bad, and the ugly,” said a Democrat closely involved in the pre-Trump planning. “That’s the one thing they were not going to do. It’s all going to be good, good, good.”
Unlike virtually every other conflict since 2024 between a MAGA project and the old bipartisan establishments, this one hasn’t escalated. Rios has won praise in the White House as a careful, capable operator, and Domestic Policy Council officials Vince Haley and Brittany Baldwin, as well the new Freedom 250 CEO Keith Krach, have impressed commissioners of both parties with their political skills and constructive approach, people involved on both sides said.
Most sensitively, they’ve managed to reach consensus about the money.
The party-line tax and spending plan Republicans passed last summer appropriated $150 million for “celebrating America’s 250th Anniversary,” to be distributed by the Department of the Interior. People familiar with talks between America and Freedom groups said they reached a funding compromise: $50 million for the America 250, and $100 million for Freedom 250.
The anniversary “belongs to EVERY American because we all share in the extraordinary legacy of unwavering freedom that generations before us fought to preserve. Let’s unite around the principles that make America exceptional: hard work, individual freedom, and the belief that our best days are still ahead. It’s exactly why President Trump’s Freedom 250 is focused on bringing Americans together to celebrate the greatest nation on Earth,” Freedom 250 spokeswoman Rachel Reisner said.
“Americans care most that there are meaningful opportunities to engage and celebrate this milestone. The more energy and effort that goes into creating those opportunities, the better,” a spokeswoman for America 250, Emily Kaplan, said.
Ben’s view
The parallel anniversary operations are a literal reflection of the deep rupture in American politics right now — though unlike many others, this one has been handled as a kind of velvet divorce, largely sans Trump Truths and mutual denunciations.
The revolutionaries and the representatives of the old republic (all of them, it should be said, canny political operatives of various vintages) get along quite well on the ground.
How will the actual anniversary go down? That will be up to Trump.
The president is, aides say, looking forward to the big show this summer, and to a high-profile series of events in the lead up to July 4. Much of Freedom 250’s work will go into these high-profile, TV-friendly, DC-area celebrations. They’ll arrive at an intensely political moment, with the president’s popularity (almost certainly) still underwater and midterm campaigns fully underway.
For all the careful planning, it may be difficult to separate Americans’ feelings about the anniversary from their feelings about the president.
Notable
- The body in charge of the nation’s 200th anniversary of the country’s founding was hamstrung by “poor morale, lack of understanding of purpose and an unworkable structure,” per a 1976 New York Times article, but a House inquest failed to substantiate charges of manipulation “for commercial purposes.”