Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first month. It’s also allowed us to hold our first Substack Live with independent journalist Erin Reed, with more to follow in the coming weeks. You make this possible. That means everything.

If you’re not yet a paying member, I’m asking you to join us today. Independent media has never mattered more. Support our people-powered movement and upgrade your subscription today.

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The United States’ 250th birthday is less than two months away, and Trump has big plans — including some taking place this weekend. Goddess willing, the country will make it to 251. Let’s talk about it.

America’s 250th Birthday Party Makes P.T. Barnum Look Tame

So here’s what’s happening around July 4, 2026, when the United States turns 250 years old: there’s going to be a UFC fight on the White House lawn, somewhere in the ballpark of 250 presidential pardons, a Christian nationalist prayer rally on the National Mall, commemorative coins with Trump’s face on them, and the “largest American flag in history.”

Buckle up.

The administration has been planning what it calls Freedom 250 for over a year now, a full calendar of events kicking off at Memorial Day 2025 and running through the end of 2026.

Some of it is normal enough: tall ships in New York Harbor, baseball’s All-Star Game in Philadelphia, a nice fireworks show. But then there’s the other stuff.

The UFC fight is real. A 5,000-seat arena is going up on the South Lawn of the White House for an event called UFC Freedom 250. It is scheduled for June 14th, not July 4th, but Trump’s 80th birthday. The White House appears to have decided these two occasions are essentially the same thing.

The pardons are also reportedly real. White House officials are discussing a plan to issue 250 pardons to mark 250 years of American independence, potentially announced on, again, June 14th. The pardon list is still being assembled, though there’s speculation a certain ex-girlfriend of Epstein will appear on it.

And then there’s “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” a daylong rally on the National Mall, organized with the White House’s blessing and headlined by some of the loudest voices in Christian nationalist circles. Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Mike Johnson are all on the program. Trump is addressing the crowd by video.

The whole thing is being funded through a mix of taxpayer money and corporate sponsorships, with those giving around a million dollars reportedly receiving a reception with the president.

There are actually two Trump coins in play. The Treasury released draft designs for a commemorative $1 coin featuring Trump’s profile on one side. On the other, his fist raised in front of an American flag with the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT,” a callback to the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt.

A separate 24-karat gold commemorative coin was also approved by a federal arts commission, featuring Trump leaning forward at a desk looking stern. Legal experts have raised questions about whether putting a living president on a coin violates federal law, but that hasn’t slowed anything down.

Trump is also painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue. "American flag blue," which makes it look less like a national monument and more like a resort pool. The project was awarded via a no-bid contract to a Virginia firm, bypassing competitive bidding on the grounds that the country's 250th birthday created an "unusual and compelling urgency."

Trump initially said it would cost $1.8 million and take one week. Federal records show the actual cost has ballooned to $13.1 million, after the Interior Department quietly added $6.2 million to the contract last week.

And finally, the world’s largest American flag measures 776 feet wide and 1,492 feet long, longer than the Empire State Building is tall and nearly half the size of the Pentagon. The kicker: the National Mall isn’t big enough to unfurl it, so officials are considering venues like Joint Base Andrews, a NASCAR speedway, or a location in Lebanon, Kansas.

America250’s executive director summed up the vibe perfectly: “At the end of the day, America 250 will be remembered as President Trump’s celebration — nobody else’s.” He meant it as a compliment. We don’t think it is.

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Make America Healthy Again, But Keep It Under $4.60

RFK Jr. overhauled the national dietary guidelines in January under the MAHA banner, urging Americans to ditch processed foods and prioritize high-quality protein and full-fat dairy at every meal. Sounds great on paper.

The problem is that those guidelines now form the basis of federal nutrition standards for every school participating in the National School Lunch Program, which fed 30 million children last year, and nobody gave schools any money to actually implement them.

The federal reimbursement rate for a free school lunch is $4.60 per meal. Protein is already the most expensive item on the cafeteria plate. Schools that currently rely on processed, premade foods to stretch that $4.60 are now being told to swap them out for nutrient-dense whole foods, with no increase in funding to cover the difference.

The USDA says it is still working out exactly what the new standards will require of schools, describing the guidelines as kicking off a “multi-year effort,” which is another way of saying the mandate arrived before the plan did.

On top of that, schools are simultaneously contending with cuts to programs that helped them source food locally. The Farm to School Grant program was paused, then reopened with DEI requirements stripped out, which isn’t much help when your problem was always that you can’t afford grass-fed beef for 400 kids before third period.

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Trump Brought Every Billionaire He Knows to Beijing

Donald Trump took seventeen billionaires to Beijing this week and somehow still came home empty-handed.

Trump’s delegation included Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and the CEOs of Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, Meta, and Visa, among others. Every one of them has major business interests in China. Every one of them needed something from Xi Jinping.

That is the context in which Trump sat across from the leader of an authoritarian state and said nothing about Uyghur detention camps, nothing about Hong Kong, and nothing about labor rights. When asked by reporters whether he thinks about ordinary Americans’ financial situations during the talks, he said he doesn’t think about it at all, not even a little bit.

Meanwhile, two weeks before the trip, China quietly locked down the Uyghur region, blocking calls, restricting movement, and cutting information flows to ensure nothing inconvenient escaped while the Americans were in town. It worked.

AlterNet America did not send a billionaire to Beijing. We do not have a broadcast license the FCC can yank, a pending merger the DOJ can slow-walk, or a general counsel calculating the exposure on every story. We are not publicly traded. There is no advertiser to call in the morning asking us to cool it.

What we have is readers, and that is the only reason we can cover this without anyone running it through legal first.

Independent journalism doesn’t get bought by billionaires and survive on principle. It survives on subscriptions. If you’ve been reading for free, this is a good week to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

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We'll keep reporting. Air Force One doesn't have room for us anyway.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America

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Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first month. It’s also allowed us to hold our first Substack Live with independent journalist Erin Reed, and we have more to follow in the coming weeks. You make this possible. That means everything.

If you’re not yet a paying member, I’m asking you to join us today. Independent media has never mattered more. Support our people-powered movement and upgrade your subscription today.

Subscribe now

Last weekend, I wrote about how I believe Democrats are going to sweep the midterms despite GOP gerrymandering. I still very much believe that. If you’re feeling hopeless, I’d recommend going back and reading that. But we still have to address how this redistricting is going to affect Black voting power.

Southern Republicans Trade the Literacy Test for Gerrymandered Maps

Memphis has had the same congressman since 2007. By Thursday afternoon, Memphis no longer had a congressional district.

On April 29, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority handed down its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that had created a second majority-Black district. The decision was 6-3 along strictly partisan lines.

Election law experts called it one of the most consequential and damaging Supreme Court decisions in a generation. Although the court technically left Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act on the books, the ruling continued a years-long pattern of decisions that have gutted the landmark 1965 law born from the Civil Rights Movement.

Republican state legislatures heard the starting gun and sprinted.

Just one day after the ruling, Trump took to Truth Social to announce he had spoken with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who committed to redrawing the state’s congressional maps to deliver another GOP House seat. By Thursday, it was done.

Tennessee lawmakers passed a new congressional map dismantling the state’s 9th Congressional District. It was the only majority-Black district in the state, centered in Memphis and held by Democrat Steve Cohen since 2007. Under the new lines, Shelby County would be carved up between three separate districts, and every one of Tennessee’s nine congressional seats would have backed Trump by at least 20 points.

The scenes inside the Tennessee statehouse were extraordinary. Democrats linked arms and walked out of the chamber after the vote. Protesters flooded the gallery with shouts of outrage, booing Republican lawmakers as they left the floor. One Republican member arrived on the House floor wearing a Trump campaign flag as a cape.

Tennessee’s special session came just days after Louisiana suspended its House primaries outright to buy time for new maps. Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are all moving to redraw their lines. Between those states alone, five majority-minority Democratic districts are now in the crosshairs. Florida didn’t even wait, as lawmakers approved four new GOP-leaning districts within hours of the ruling.

Republicans aren’t even pretending that this isn’t about race. It is explicitly about whether Black communities in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham have a voice in their own government — and the GOP, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has decided the answer is no.

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The Next Pandemic Might Already Be Here

On May 2, the World Health Organization was notified of a cluster of severe respiratory illness aboard a Dutch cruise ship, the MV Hondius. As of this week, three people are dead, and cases have been confirmed across multiple countries.

Passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was identified have now dispersed across at least a dozen countries, with exposed travelers turning up in five US states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia.

The specific strain is the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people. Scientists know relatively little about how that human-to-human transmission works, which is where things get uncomfortable for the Trump administration.

In June 2025, the NIH issued a stop-work order shutting down all ten Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a network launched in 2020 with $82 million in funding specifically designed to study pathogens that could jump from animals to humans. One of those centers was running a pilot project to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to people.

Trump’s NIH killed it, saying the research was “not a good use of taxpayer funding.”

It gets worse. RFK Jr.’s HHS fired virtually the entire staff of the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the team responsible for keeping cruise ships from becoming floating outbreak vectors. Notably, those employees’ salaries were paid by the cruise industry, not taxpayers. The cuts saved the federal government nothing.

When asked about the outbreak this week, Trump called the reporter asking the question fake news, then said he hoped it was under control and that “a lot of great people are studying it.” Those would be the people his administration didn’t fire.

Public health experts say the alarming thing is not the hantavirus itself. It is what the administration’s sluggish response suggests about America’s readiness for something bigger.

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The War on the Press Just Got a Lot More Explicit

The Trump administration has spent eighteen months telling you it views a free press as an enemy. This week it used two federal agencies in two days to prove it meant every word.

The FBI this week launched an investigation into New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after she published a story revealing that FBI Director Kash Patel had assigned federal agents to chauffeur and protect his girlfriend. Patel’s girlfriend claimed the reporting constituted stalking. FBI agents queried databases for information about Williamson, and Justice Department officials eventually found no legal basis to proceed.

On the same day, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against the New York Times alleging racial discrimination in its hiring and promotion practices. The plaintiff is a white man who says he was passed over for a promotion. The timing was not lost on anyone in the industry.

Neither of these cases may go anywhere. That is not the point. The point is that a reporter now has to wonder whether their sources will call them back knowing the FBI might be watching. The point is that a newsroom’s lawyers are now in the room when editors are deciding what to publish and what to hold.

AlterNet America does not have a broadcast license, a pending merger, or a general counsel calculating the exposure on every story. We are not publicly traded. There is no advertiser to call on Wednesday morning asking us to cool it.

What we have is readers, and that is the only reason we can write this without anyone running it through legal first.

Independent journalism doesn’t get threatened with license revocation. It gets starved. The way to keep it alive is straightforward: fund it. If you’ve been reading for free, this is a good week to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

We’ll keep reporting. Our white guys seem fine.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America

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Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning coffee with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first few weeks. It’s also allowed us to begin lining up exciting, exclusive live interviews in …

Read more

Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first three weeks. It’s also allowed us to begin lining up exciting, exclusive live interviews…

Read more

Good morning, AlterNet America family. Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to remain at #2 in Rising News on Substack for our first two weeks. You make this possible. That means everything.

If you’re not yet a paying mem…

Read more

Good morning, AlterNet America family.

Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you. I don’t actually drink coffee, so special shoutout to those of you having energy drinks or tea with me.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to become #2 in Rising News on Substack w…

Read more

Good morning, AlterNet America family. Welcome to the Saturday Wrapup, where I get you the week’s news as I consume my morning caffeine with you.

To our paying subscribers: thank you. Your support has allowed us to launch this newsroom free of billionaire influence. We showed up because you make it possible. That means everything.

If you’re not yet a payi…

Read more