Trump Is Making America’s 250th Birthday Party Unhinged

Trump brought 17 billionaires to Beijing, and RFK Jr. is requiring schools overhaul their lunches without any funding.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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