Washington, D.C. — Thousands of sweaty, red-faced people packed shoulder-to-shoulder outside on Madison Drive during a record heat wave in Washington, D.C., that surpassed 105 degrees with high humidity, hours in advance of what the President of the United States was hyping up as the greatest fireworks show of all time.

The line ran alongside the National Mall, where the “Great American State Fair” was seeing its highest attendance since it opened its doors more than a week prior, and led to a stage erected in front of the Washington Monument, where President Trump would be speaking two hours before midnight.

Although titled the “Tribute to America” amid what organizers claimed was a non-partisan celebration, Trump himself took to Truth Social on June 15 to plug the Fourth of July event as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”

Shortly after the crowds began trickling through the facility’s temporary security perimeter, all plans were dropped. Thousands of people filled the street in a chaotic line that stretched half a mile from the event’s entrance to the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden as dark clouds and scattered thunderstorms slowly approached the U.S. Capitol from the horizon.

The first sign of inclement weather was heavy winds, spreading discarded water bottles and wrappers everywhere. The wind whipped around sand and gravel, covering attendees in a fine, blinding grit and bringing small children to tears.

The Great American State Fair was promptly closed, as National Guard personnel brought into the city at the beginning of Trump’s second term to bolster local police flipped picnic tables and ushered fairgoers to the exit.

At the base of the Washington Monument, a light rain began misting attendees who had already spent hours in the sun to snag the best possible seats hours before the event was slated to begin. 

With a greater potential storm on the horizon, organizers made the call to shut the event down and asked people to seek shelter. Some followed directions, others did not, instead arguing with Secret Service agents and breaking off into chants as they reentered the event. Some even blamed a supposed conspiracy of liberals to manipulate the weather.

After the president frantically intervened on both Fox News and Truth Social, comparing himself to the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day during the Second World War, the show was back on.

In the meantime, thousands of attendees took shelter in the mall’s surrounding Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a target of Trump’s historical revisionism aimed at the capital’s museums.

An hour after it was originally scheduled, Trump gave his speech to severely diminished crowds – Trump’s own estimate that night was more than half left following the evacuation order.

The president’s typical, meandering campaign-style speech regularly touted his own supposed achievements while demonizing his political adversaries. The aging octogenarian regularly slurred his words and appeared confused about what he was talking about, a hallmark of his second-term speaking style

Slightly after midnight, on July 5, Potomac River barges began firing off the more than 800,000 fireworks demanded by the President to break the world record. To a background of dated popular music performed by Marine Corps band, the closely packed, record-breaking pyrotechnics quickly disappeared into a thick cloud of smoke..

That was the Freedom 250 Fourth of July celebration, the climax of a month of partisan patriotism in Washington that began with a UFC fight in front of the White House for the president’s birthday and ended less than four weeks later with the Great American State Fair quietly closing up shop. During that period, the Trump Administration transformed the capital city into an international spectacle.

Freedom 250

Behind all of the festivities was a public-private partnership known as Freedom 250, officially designated the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday, created just after Trump’s second inauguration in 2025. 

The group, composed mostly of executive branch members including both the president and the vice president, is organized in a similar fashion to a corporation with limited transparency and regularly engaged in corrupt practices such as exchanging access to the president for donations, according to the New York Times.

The organization quickly usurped the official semiquincentennial non-profit organization created by Congress in 2025, known as America250, which was created by a bipartisan piece of legislation in 2016. 

The coup was not thorough enough, however, as confusion remained over which of the two organizations was official and whether they were even separate entities. On July 2, House Democrats released a report accusing the organization of fraud, tricking donors into donating to Freedom 250 instead of the Congressionally-authorized company.

In the report, they alleged that Trump first tried manipulating America250 to suit his desires and created Freedom 250 when the official group pushed back against him.

“When America250 would not yield, the White House created a replacement: Freedom 250 LLC, a shadow organization capable of infiltrating the celebrations and injecting America’s 250th with Trump’s extreme, partisan agenda,” the report reads. “Lodged within the National Parks Foundation, the new entity could exploit the credibility and donor relationships of a beloved public charity while operating outside the transparency and accountability requirements Congress wrote into the semiquincentennial framework.”

In August, 2025, Freedom 250 first began transforming the capital city with banners draped from the roof of the Department of Labor building, one featuring Trump’s presidential portrait blown up to the size of two stories with the text “American Workers First” beneath it.

Naturally, Trump has done very little in the way of putting American workers first. In fact, many of his policies have only degraded their quality of life, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

A significant part of Freedom 250 was its “Freedom Trucks,” traveling museum displays that received $10 million in diverted funding from America250. These trucks, a minor spectacle in Trump’s campaign to rewrite history, featured AI exhibits created by the private conservative Hillsdale College and the right-wing conservative media organization PragerU. Both groups attempt to whitewash American history by minimizing slavery or villainizing the 20th Century’s civil rights movement.

In addition to the highly publicized UFC fight in front of the White House on Trump’s birthday, Freedom 250 also held the Rededicate 250 event, “a national jubilee of prayer, praise & thanksgiving,” that exhibited a clear and explicit Chrsitian nationalist rendition of American history and drew minor crowds that included the violent January 6 Capitol-attacker Edward Jacob “Jake” Lang.

The organization’s most significant event, besides the Salute to America fireworks display on July 4, was the multi-week Great American State Fair, which coincided with a historic heat dome that cooked the city and left at least seven attendees on “advanced life support.”

The Great American State Fair

The Great American State Fair was officially opened to the public on June 25, after Trump’s flaccid campaign speech the night before.

The fairgrounds, which stretched the National Mall from 4th Street North West to 14th Street North West, was split into several quadrants. Poorly ventilated white tents were arranged, semi-hidden by screen-printed plastic sheets stapled to plywood, giving an illusion of stark-white classical architecture.

The interiors of each tent resembled barns, especially in the tents where attendees could buy food and drink. Modular plastic square flooring quickly became filthy as people tracked in mud from gravel paths in the fairgrounds where water pooled following rain showers. The stalls were made in a faux-rustic style with corrugated metal, lattice and wood.

Inside Freedom 250’s ‘Great American State Fair’ Kickoff

Since outside food was forbidden and re-entering required waiting again in security lines, many had to indulge in the fair’s food offerings, which included $23 turkey legs or $20 for a single cheeseburger.

On the eastern end of the fairground, the Freedom Stage was flanked by raised stages for right-wing media to broadcast from and showcase the anemic crowds meandering in the background. Some 500 feet away to the west, a rodeo ring was set up, used for agricultural showcases, and competed for audiences with the Freedom Stage performers as they struggled to hear one over the other.

On the western end, the massive Legacy Stage where Trump gave his kickoff speech on June 24 towered over a large green space that was regularly empty despite everything the country and Christian contemporary cover bands did to draw them in. On an average day, less than a dozen people attended the performances, swaying back and forth to musicians who gamely pretended to play to a packed audiences as they would follow songs with some brief crowd work.

“Do we have any veterans in the audience?” The singer called out to an audience of eight hugged up close to the stage. A man walking nearby raised his hand as he passed.

“This one is for you!” She said into the microphone, pointing at the man before he disappeared around a corner.

The main purpose of the fair was to give each U.S. state and territory a showcase booth, usually vague and minimal. Some states and territories, such as Alaska and Hawaii, simply set up a trifold background with the state’s name on it and a chair in front of it with no staff in sight. Others, like Utah, created an ostentatious marketing display that could still be experienced in less than a minute.

At North Dakota’s booth, on the other hand,you could strap on a heavily-used virtual reality headset and shoot pheasants. In Michigan’s showcase, attendees could handle fake cow udders and squeeze dubiously sourced milk into a bucket.

On the fair’s first day, MAGA livestreamer Gian Rachtelli, dressed in red, white and blue overall shorts with an Uncle Sam top hat, was arrested for allegedly masturbating during a performance by an all-female acrobatic troop at the National Endowment for the Arts stage.

In the center of the fairgrounds, another public act of masturbation was the subject of regular ridicule online: a mock-up of Trump’s planned “Triumphal Arch,” which remained unfinished for more than a week, with exposed plywood and little detail outside of the flat, screen-printed sheets encasing it.

Only days before the Fourth of July celebration, additional details were added, such as pillars and molding with spray foam spilling out of the cracks. Despite its many flaws, attendees flocked to it for photos and additional shade.

Across 7th Street NW from the arch stood the Ferris wheel, which was branded with a Freedom 250 logo on the screen in the middle that would occasionally pop in and out in a PowerPoint-style transition.

Attendees riding the Ferris wheel could be guaranteed nearly an hour cooking inside of a passenger car, completely exposed to a blistering sun behind greenhouse-like glass.

On the Fourth of July, the fairgrounds faced stifling temperatures crawling towards 110 degrees with high humidity, and the mall’s green spaces filled with attendees boiling alive in their skin while military jets conducted choreographed ear-shattering moves overhead on regularly scheduled, 30 minute intervals.

The organizers’ answer to the heat was to hand out thousands of warm plastic bottles of water off of pallets that had baked in the day’s oven-like atmosphere. Empty bottles piled in overflowing garbage cans, often spilling  onto the ground.

Finding Jesus at the Fair

Attendees shocked by the amazingly low attendance at the fair on most days can be assured they did not just miss the rapture.

Near the entrance of the fair, on the northern side of the National Mall, sat David’s Tent. Even on the slowest days, the evangelical tent was guaranteed to be full of hollering and singing.

The tent, organized by a group of the same name, has been in location since 2015 and was able to secure a spot on the National Mall during the fair, even getting a place on the fair’s official directory.

The point of the tent is for people to constantly play Christian music around the clock. At the tent’s stage, an Israeli flag flew alongside an American flag for several days before it mysteriously disappeared at some point during the fair.

In the back of the tent, attendees could be baptized in an above-ground swimming pool set up especially for the fair. As the fair progressed, eventually it became a place for seniors to take a dip to avoid heat stroke, which regularly triggered ambulance visits during the fair.

From the fair’s beginning, very few attendees went unmolested by the hundreds of street preachers that seemed to appear in waves, interrupting conversations to ask random bystanders if they thought they were getting into heaven and then praying for them.

They appeared to be coming in waves because they were.

At 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. every day during the fair, a table near David’s Tent leeched off of its evangelical fervor to train street preachers to “win souls.”

The table was operated by the South African-born minister Rodney Howard-Browne’s Tampa Bay, Florida, megachurch, The River. According to a young man tabling the booth, the church paid to send 120 of the church’s congregants to the capital with the express purpose of “winning souls” during the nation’s birthday.

Howard-Browne, who made his name in the 1990s with a failed attempt to bring an evangelical revival to New York City, regularly publishes books in the ‘red scare’ vein, such as “Socialism Under the Microscope” and “Killing Uncle Sam.”

In his prime, Howard-Browne popularized “holy laughter,” which is very similar to ‘speaking in tongues’ except the Holy Spirit makes you laugh uncontrollably.

In recent days, however, it seems like Howard-Browne spends the majority of his time posting music he had an AI generate for him onto his X account, publishing the instrumental tracks with English and Spanish titles.

Most days of the fair, attendees could find Howard-Browne slumped over his phone and seated at his Revival Ministries International booth, two chairs in front of an AI-generated backdrop with the Q-adjacent text “The Great Awakening” overhead (this phrase has been a part of Howard-Browne’s branding long before QAnon adopted it).

The Reflecting Pool

Outside the fair, a short walk from the western end of the National Mall, beyond the Washington Monument, sat the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool where it’s always sat for more than a century.

The pool captivated many around the country in recent weeks when a hasty renovation initiated by Trump resulted in the 2,030-foot long pool turning a vibrant shade of green as algae began blooming in it only days after it was refilled.

The renovation, which began in April, was intended to paint the base of the pool “American flag blue” as to increase the intensity of its reflection. The Trump administration wanted the renovation completed by the Fourth of July for the planned celebrations, and the company that previously renovated the pool declined because the short time frame was “unfeasible,” CNN reported.

Luckily, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a company that previously did work on Trump National Golf Course in Virginia, readily accepted a no-bid contract to paint and seal the pool’s concrete base. 

One of the express purposes of the remodel was to remove algae from the pool, and to do that the administration upgraded the pool’s filtration system. The company that was given the no-bid contract to do this was Greenwater Services, a company owned by billionaire Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor John J. Cafaro’s investment trust.

National Park Service employees clad in waders stood in the pool and vacuumed out water thick with algae, their tubes snaking off into the grass and dumping the water in nearby storm drains. On June 16, they resorted to pouring hydrogen peroxide from single gallon bottles into the pool, which may have led to the pool’s greatest controversy: peeling paint.

Trump was quick to pin blame for the peeling paint on the “radical left,” who at first he alleged used chemicals – likely the very same chemicals added to the water by federal employees – and later invented a slash in the bottom of the pool that he first claimed was “250 feet” and later became a “350 foot gash.”

The controversy began monopolizing the news cycle, with reporters and tourists flocking to the area just to linger. Some stuck their hands in the water, sometimes grabbing a blue paint chip floating with the algae, only to be scolded or arrested by the eclectic grab-bag of police, sheriff’s deputies, federal agents and National Guard soldiers mobilized for the fair but deployed to the pool for extra security.

After the Fourth

Only minutes after the last fireworks exploded over the Potomac River, a heavy rain began pouring down on the audience. The soaking wet masses began spewing from the area, many heading towards the L’Enfant Plaza metro station nearby, which was made free – along with every other metro station – for the celebration. The line into the metro, pushing the facility to its maximum capacity, remained long into the night.

National Park Service employees spent the next day cleaning firework debris out of the fenced-off reflecting pool, which had returned to its emerald green form despite around-the-clock surveillance and a regularly patrolled and secured perimeter.

At least four people have been officially charged with felonies for allegedly damaging the reflecting pool as of July 9, the Daily Beast reported. In one case, a woman was simply found by police to have a chip of paint from the pool in her purse.

The Great American State Fair officially ended on the evening of July 10. Even in its finale, the fair was postponed for a final time, closing the fairgrounds until a concert that was scheduled for the evening.

In August, Freedom 250 will be holding the “2026 Patriot Games,” a competition for high school athletes from around the United States, and later the “Freedom 250 Grand Prix,” a race around the National Mall.

During a July 13 press conference promoting the Grand Prix, Trump was gifted his own personal racing helmet. He told the press that “their beautiful cars… are going to make freedom raw.”

“They’re great athletes,” Trump said of the Indycar drivers present. “Nobody can do it. They’re born with something very special. They’re born with an ability to press that pedal all the way down to the ground. Most people can’t do that.”

As of July 13, deconstruction of the Salute to America event space around the Washington Monument continues, more than a week after the rally ended. The area remains surrounded by a chain link fence–much like most of D.C.’s national monuments during and in the lead up to the semiquincentennial –  and full of dead grass, as forklifts leisurely scoot around in no apparent hurry.

The reflecting pool, once again completely drained on July 13, revealed no 350 foot gash in its three-month-old paint job. However, some were quick to point out what appeared to be tire tracks, potentially from when Trump’s motorcade drove over the pool’s still-wet finish in celebration of its completion.

Regardless, FBI agents gathered by the pool on July 15 to gather evidence of crimes committed against the pool liner.

Cover image contributed by L. Cam Anderson.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed the Washington Monument as the Washington Memorial.

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