Inside Freedom 250’s ‘Great American State Fair’ Kickoff
Washington, D.C. — I arrived at the line to get into the National Mall around 3 p.m., shortly after Freedom 250 sent out last-minute emails announcing the location of the entrance.
As early as I was for the 7 p.m. event, I knew I was in the right place because a line of MAGA hat-clad “patriots” had already formed down and around the block.
This article is written from the perspective of L. Cam Anderson, a journalist who attended the event. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Unicorn Riot.
Even under the unforgiving summer sun, people from around the country risked sun burn and heat stroke for the opportunity to see the president in the flesh. With them, as always, were the bootleg MAGA merchandise sellers, marching up and down the line with wagons filled with t-shirts and hats in tow.
One man held a row of different MAGA hats along his arm and approached a group of teenagers behind me in line.
“Oh, there’s that Charlie Kirk!” He said, revealing a bootleg TPUSA-branded MAGA hat to the group. They all pursed their lips and nodded at him, returning to their phones.
Teenage girls with Bible verses on their shirts weaved their way through the line, stopping random people to ask them if they “knew that God loved them.”
One with big teeth accentuated by braces stopped me with the same question. Seeing lying as the quickest way through, I told her ‘yes.’
“Do you believe you’re getting into Heaven?”
“Yes,” I said again.
“Can I ask how you know that?”
“Oh, I dunno,” I said, giving her a smile and a shrug.
She met my cynical responses with a strange look, and then a smile of her own. “OK! Do you mind if I pray for you?”
And so she did, having me repeat after her each phrase in a ploy to save my ostensibly-already-saved soul. With an “amen,” she quickly made her way to the next person in line with the same line of questioning.
Ahead of me, a man from California with wrap-around sports sunglasses and a baseball hat declaring “I drank today” left his family to ask the staff stationed in a tent towards the front of the line if they were in the right place for the event. He returned irritated, but confirmed they were in the right place.
“Nobody at the gate has any friggin’ idea what’s going on,” he said, frowning. “They said, ‘Are you here for the Trump rally?’ I said, ‘OK, sure.’ I didn’t think it was a Trump rally, I thought he was speaking at this great event.”
He shook his head before changing the subject to California’s recent election, which he said was the sign that their state has finally “gone to hell.” His teenage daughter shrugged, telling her parents it might be time to sell the house they own in the state.
The event he referred to was the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair kickoff event, a stated celebration of America’s 250th birthday. The initial plan supposedly did not have the president headlining it, but instead an assortment of musicians who were as surprised as everyone else when the lineup was announced in May. It didn’t take long for the majority of the musicians to decline the opportunity, with the notable exception of Vanilla Ice who was not able to perform anyway.
“I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does do without a guitar,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform, referring to the change of plans to transform the concert into what would effectively just be another Trump rally.
Another woman in line expressed anger at the artists for canceling.
“People we made millionaires don’t want to perform a concert for us? Bon Jovi?” she said, referencing an artist who was not included in the concert’s announced lineup. “Do you know how many Bon Jovi concerts I’ve been to? Now I can’t even listen to him.”
Whether it was ever actually intended to be a non-partisan celebration is unclear. What people got – and what they were likely going to get regardless – was a celebration of war, terrible music and, above all else, Trump. Undergirding all of it was religion, not the pious kind but the Christian nationalist brand that makes a golden calf out of its president.
In lieu of the original lineup, Trump had his Marine Corps band play renditions of music regularly heard at Trump rallies, including ‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ and Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration.’ Unlike celebrity musicians, the Marine Corp band would be declared insubordinate if they refused the order from its commander-in-chief.
“Let’s give a hand to our band,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on stage later during his speech. “Way better than the libtards who canceled on us.”
At the head of the line, a man was quickly checking phones to see if people had registered for the event. The prominently-displayed QR code was not used, and how he confirmed the authenticity of tickets was unclear.
Beyond that, members of the Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration employees shepherded attendees through security checkpoints, all their bags checked amid a series of metal detectors.
Past security, attendees would have to walk through part of the fair until they reached the giant stage where the event would take place that evening.
Each of the structures had a facade that resembled something like an ancient Roman stripmall, a single, long building split into smaller subsections with their own entrances. The stark white pillars and contours characteristic of the classical design were flat, printed on paper and stuck to plywood underneath
Inside the structures, any illusion of Roman elegance was out the window. The interiors resembled barns, metal frames with a white tarp enclosing it and a dirty, gray tile floor. The store counters were worse: corrugated metal on the bottom and garden porch lattice crowning the top.
The event prohibited attendees from bringing in food, but once inside you could buy a long, messy sausage for $20 or a simple turkey leg for $23.
The stage itself was massive and covered in Freedom 250 branding, the inside lined with bulletproof glass as they often have been since the July 13, 2024, attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Freedom 250 is a private-public partnership set up by Trump that has received more than $80 million in public funding despite Congress having already set up an organization for the same purpose years prior.
Rally-goers without “special guest” passes had to sit further from the stage directly under the brutal sun with no clouds in the sky to offer relief. Unfortunately, sunscreen was on the list of prohibited items to bring into the event, so were umbrellas.
People in the audience scouted out the front rows from afar, leaning over each other in awe as they picked out members of Trump’s cabinet and inner-circle mingling with one another and all of the “special guests” like Blake Marnell, the man in the red brick suit who manages to be present at every MAGA and MAGA-adjacent event.
“Oh my God,” one young man muttered to his friend. “There’s Kash Patel, I see Kash.”
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel was meeting and greeting in front of the stage, along with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and others.
“Where? I don’t see him.”
“Uh, right there. Next to the lady in the striped dress,” he responded. “He’s the little Indian guy.”
Early on in the rally, Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins sang a remarkably flat rendition of the National Anthem, which nonetheless moved some people in the audience to tears. One woman began ugly-crying, her face contorted as though she were in pain.
The performance was received poorly online, with many accusing the event of hiring her solely due to her relationship with the director of the FBI, which Wilkins, whose Spotify has barely broken 6,000 followers, adamantly denied.
The anthem was followed by a rendition of Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue, a patriotic country song that exploded in popularity in the jingoistic atmosphere following the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.
Immediately afterwards, Pastor Jentezen Franklin, who at a Faith Summit in October, 2024, referred to Trump as a “chosen vessel,” led the crowd in prayer where he flatly declared the U.S. a Christian nation.
“Touch our president,” he said in prayer. “Touch his cabinet, bless our Supreme Court, bless our Congress.”
After multiple other speakers and other Marine Corps band renditions of pop songs from decades past, “the President’s own tenor” Chris Macchio performed an operatic version of ‘Hallelujah’ in a style very reminiscent of the president’s favorite Italian musician, Luciano Pavarotti.
At the song’s crescendo, when budget Pavarotti belted out the song’s titular line and held it as long as he could, a massive B2 stealth bomber flew overhead.
A woman from Alabama seated to my left began weeping and turned to me, wiping tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry, I just love our country so much,” she said, barely managing to get the words out without choking on them.
More flyovers would occur throughout the rally, and each time the audience stood in wonder, staring at the flying death machines in religious rapture at each passing.
Jocko Willink, a retired Navy SEAL and podcaster, roused the crowd with a hyper-masculine speech, veins bulging and teeth practically gnashing together throughout as though he were going to leap over the bullet-proof glass encasing the stage and attack the audience like some sort of feral animal.
The largest flyover capped off Lee Greenwood’s raspy performance of God Bless the USA when he introduced Trump as “the 45th President” more than two hours into the event. Attendees leapt to their feet to catch a glimpse of the president and take selfies with the blown-up live footage on the side of the stage in the background.
Nothing Trump said in his relatively short speech was particularly new or remarkable. The attendees seemed to be there to see him and not hear him.
In fact, footage from the back of the event shows attendees leaving the area well before Trump finished his formulaic rant.
Before closing his speech, he pleaded with attendees to attend his next rally on July 4, adding that any empty seats will be used by the “fake news” to claim nobody attended. Many had already left by this point, however.
The band followed Trump’s speech with a rendition of the Village People’s YMCA, which has become a staple at Trump rallies and has been described by the president as “the gay national anthem.” When the crowd realized what was happening, they began to lose their minds.
The cameras followed Trump as he walked away from the podium and stopped with him as he turned back to the crowds. When he started doing his strange dance, people began screaming and jumping, pulling out their phones to record the octogenarian.
Cover image contributed by L. Cam Anderson.
Stay tuned for more upcoming coverage from DC.
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