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House Democrats accuse Trump of ‘hijacking’ America’s 250th birthday for his own gain
President Trump speaks at a rally kicking off the Great American State Fair last week, part of the anniversary celebrations organized by White House-backed group Freedom 250.
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
As America’s birthday celebrations kick into high gear, so too do criticisms of the preeminent national group organizing them, Freedom 250.
Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee published a 55-page report Thursday accusing the group of aiding President Trump in turning America’s milestone into a “hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment” through tactics that potentially amount to criminal fraud.
It’s titled “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People out of their 250th Birthday.”
Rep. Jared Huffman of California, the ranking Democrat on the committee, told NPR that the report was months in the making. It is based on interviews with unnamed whistleblowers, sworn Congressional testimony, internal Freedom 250 documents and other written responses.
“We put it all together to really tell the story … of how Donald Trump hijacked what should have been a unifying national celebration and repurposed it for his own interests,” Huffman said in a Zoom interview. “This was a team of operatives using the Freedom 250 shell company, but it was also Donald Trump himself telling them what to do.”
The White House referred a request for comment to Freedom 250, though Freedom 250 told NPR that it does not speak for the White House.
Freedom 250 is the public-private partnership behind some of the summer’s most high-profile anniversary events, including a UFC fight outside the White House in June, a controversial state fair on the National Mall, a July Fourth fireworks show opening with a Trump rally, and the “Patriot Games,” a high school athletic competition scheduled for August.
It was created via executive order last year, and describes itself as “the national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday.” But it’s not the only one: Congress had created a nonpartisan commission called America250 for this same purpose in 2016.
Democratic critics and watchdog groups say Trump decided to forge ahead with his own group after unsuccessful attempts to pack America 250 with his allies. Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025 under the National Park Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the National Park Service, whose board now includes a number of Trump loyalists, including Chris LaCivita, senior adviser on his 2024 campaign.
Visitors can buy Freedom 250 merchandise at the state fair on the National Mall.
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Al Drago/Getty Images
Thursday’s report describes Freedom 250 as “a shadow organization capable of infiltrating the celebrations and injecting America’s 250th with Trump’s extreme, partisan agenda.”
Several of its events, like the “Great American State Fair” and a prayer gathering on the National Mall, have been criticized for their sanitized presentation of history and overtly Christian bent. The report accuses the group of funding its programming through opaque and questionable avenues, including soliciting foreign funds, misleading donors and selling access to the president.
“Once you siphon off the funds and supplant the real bipartisan commission with this new entity and you declare it the main platform for our nation’s celebration, and you award all these shady contracts to your friends, you can do anything you want,” Huffman said. “And what these folks chose to do was to push a very divisive, very extreme and explicitly sectarian religious agenda into all these materials in our name, using our taxpayer dollars.”
Some of the accusations, if true, could be found to violate federal law. For example, the report alleges that the deception of donors who thought they were supporting America250 — but were actually given banking information for Freedom 250 — could constitute wire fraud.
Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez denied the report’s claims as “categorically false,” calling it a “partisan smear.”
“Congressional members should be ashamed they are spending countless hours fabricating a report instead of joining Americans in creating an absolutely beautiful celebration,” Alvarez wrote in a statement shared with NPR.
The report has not been adopted by the Natural Resources Committee, so does not reflect its official view. Republicans on the committee have so far refused to conduct any oversight on the issue, despite Democrats raising concerns at previous hearings. Republican ranking member Rep. Bruce Westerman did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.
Huffman said his team had tried for nearly a year to get information from Freedom 250, but faced “resistance and obstruction every step of the way.”
“I would hope that Freedom 250, if they claim that … there’s nothing to see here, open up your books,” he said. “Give us the documents that we’ve asked for, and the information we’ve asked for.”
Huffman said his investigation will continue well past July Fourth, especially if Democrats reclaim the House in this fall’s midterm elections. In that case, he didn’t rule out the possibility of subpoenas or criminal referrals if applicable.
Regardless, he believes more information and witnesses will come to light — and says a full accounting is critical to prevent such a playbook from being used again.
“We may not be able to undo the damage they’ve done to us and the national celebration,” Huffman said. “But we can do something very patriotic by reminding everyone that our government belongs to all of us, not to Donald Trump.”
What the report alleges
Trump also wants to commemorate the anniversary by building a 250-foot arch, a replica of which stands at the state fair.
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Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
The report accuses Trump of long wanting to place himself at the center of the anniversary agenda. It points to events held on his birthdays — last year’s Army 250th parade and this year’s White House UFC fight — and longer-term projects like his plans to build a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch.
It alleges that when America250 resisted that vision, the Trump administration turned the National Park Foundation from a “beloved nonprofit into a presidential shell” by standing up Freedom 250 under its auspices.
It is not clear where that directive came from: Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who serves as ex officio director of the foundation’s board, testified before Congress in May that he was “not aware of the final decision maker on Freedom 250.” That same month, he told CNN the organization is “run out of the White House.”
In any case, Freedom 250 emerged with more visibility and more federal funding than America250.
Alvarez, of Freedom 250, says it “stepped in to rescue our nation’s 250th birthday from years of wasted time, wasted money, and failed planning.” But the report argues it supplanted America250 “through a series of diversions and misrepresentations that drained the chartered Commission of the resources it needed to function.”
The report says Congress allocated $150 million in federal funds last year to the Interior Department for events celebrating the 250th anniversary, with the “understanding” that $100 million of that would go to America250. The group has only received $25 million, it says, citing unnamed sources.
A statement from Freedom 250 says no funds were specifically earmarked for one entity over the other, so “claims that federal funds were ‘diverted’ from America250 to Freedom250 are baseless.”
When asked for comment, America250 Chair Rosie Rios — who served as U.S. treasurer under President Obama — did not address the report. She said the organization “will continue to focus on the values-based programming approved by our bipartisan Commission” and is “supportive” of organizations planning events for the 250th.
The America250 logo is seen on a White House Christmas tree skirt in December. That group is less visible than Freedom 250, but is planning many community-based anniversary events and a concert in Los Angeles.
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The report alleges that Freedom 250 was advertised as an addition to America250 rather than as its replacement, creating confusion. For example, many of the performers who withdrew from a scheduled concert last month said they had falsely believed the event was nonpartisan (it was later rebranded as a Trump rally).
The report alleges that Freedom 250 capitalized on donors’ confusion in a way that potentially amounts to fraud.
“Donors who intended to support America250 were misled and apparently provided with Freedom 250’s banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the nation’s nonpartisan birthday foundation were routed instead to the President’s substitute entity,” it reads.
Freedom 250 said in a statement that “every major sponsor received documentation identifying Freedom 250 as the recipient’s organization before funds were transferred, and donors were free to decline.”
Alan Zibel, a researcher with the progressive consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, called those allegations “very troubling.” He applauded House Democrats for looking into them, even though they don’t have subpoena power at the moment.
“They’ve given House Democrats, should they take the majority next year, months and months of investigative work to do,” he said. “And there are some pretty rich target opportunities.”
Many questions remain
The Freedom 250 logo is visible on fencing around the National Mall on Thursday.
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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
The bigger-picture problem, critics say, is the lack of transparency throughout the entire process.
“All of these things have been so thoroughly conducted outside of public view,” said Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, a program director at the nonprofit Revolving Door Project. “But I think the House Dems’ report is an excellent extension of those sort of remaining questions that continue to plague just the entire situation and Freedom 250 organizationally.”
Aguilar Rosenthal co-authored a separate report on Freedom 250’s contracts and tactics, along with Zibel from Public Citizen.
Based on their analysis, Aguilar Rosenthal said of the more than $120 million in public funds funneled toward the anniversary celebrations, over $100 million has been “funneled” directly to projects, events and entities with ties to the Trump administration.
Some of those public contracts raise particular alarm among watchdogs. Federal contracts have directed tens of millions of dollars to a company called Event Strategies, Inc., which helped organize Trump’s infamous rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“They had a chance to do this in a bipartisan way or a way that wouldn’t enrich cronies, but they pretty clearly didn’t do that,” said Zibel. “I think that this is a follow-the-money situation that needs to be explored.”
Zibel says many companies — including major defense contractors and tech firms — that have donated to the 250th celebrations also rely on the government for contracts, funding and regulatory oversight. The report mentions that Freedom 250 circulated sponsorship packages culminating in a photo op with Trump, effectively selling access to the president.
Both reports raised questions about potential foreign influence. Alvarez, of Freedom 250, says it does not accept foreign donations.
But Keith Krach, a former Trump administration official who is the CEO of Freedom 250, appeared to solicit just that while speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, offering “toolkits for countries, states, companies, all of that.”
“What could be funner than marketing America, or really marketing freedom,” Krach said.
There is little visibility into the origins and destinations of donations in general, Aguilar Rosenthal says. Best case, they are still being used for some of America250’s original goals, she says. Worst case, she says, “public dollars and funds that have been earmarked for semiquincentennial celebrations are being used as a slush fund” for the administration and its political allies.
The report says the National Park Foundation’s donor structure “conceals the identities of those who give and the benefits they may be promised in return.” And at a congressional hearing in February, the foundation’s president and CEO, Jeff Reinbold, promised anonymity for any Freedom 250 donors who requested it (but said donations would otherwise be disclosed in the regular reporting process).
Huffman conceded that any anniversary celebration of this scale would merit scrutiny over spending and contracts. But he said if this had been organized by the bipartisan commission that Congress authorized — with representation from both parties to ask questions and do oversight — it would have been more transparent.
“There would have been public reporting,” he said, “because a publicly-created commission from Congress can’t hide behind the cloak of secrecy of an LLC.”
Azar Nafisi on the set of Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran
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A new film version of Azar Nafisi’s critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi’s home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi’s way to fight back.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, “I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children.”
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.
It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.
Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran.
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Greenwich Entertainment
“These girls were very different, one from the other,” Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.
“Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn’t talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect,” she said.
Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. “It reached a sort of magic,” she said.
The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi’s homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized
“This wasn’t my land,” she told Simon. “This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death.”
When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.
“The expression on her face is fear, because by and by, she disappears into this garment,” Nafisi said. For some, the headscarf was a symbol of the place of women in society, but for Nafisi the stakes were even higher.
“This is not a political fight. This is an existential one,” she said. “Our identity as human beings, as women, has been taken away from us.”
When fighting against covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi found small ways to rebel. “I never wore my scarf properly. I would always show a few strands out of the scarf to tell them, ‘You don’t own me.’”
Nafisi’s book about fighting the Iranian Revolution through the simple act of reading was an international bestseller, won numerous literary awards, and was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to make a passionate case for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of Islamic Revolution. The new leaders tore down the statues of the king and the royal family and changed the names of streets. But when they tried to bring down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, and erase his place of honor within the culture, the people opposed it.
“I thought how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can’t touch the poet,” she said.
Get ready to catch a whiff of stink. Not one, but two rare corpse flowers are set to bloom at the Huntington in the coming days, with one of them making its first-ever public bloom.
If both plants unfurl on the same day, it would be just the second time a double bloom has ever occurred at the Huntington.
For those unfamiliar with these funky flora, be warned. Corpse flowers bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, and once opened, they reek of gym socks, rotten eggs and decaying flesh … or, well, a corpse.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids for the Huntington, speaks to reporters in front of two corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Couple that with their tropical native climate of Sumatra, Indonesia, and you’re in for a sweaty, stinky viewing experience.
The stench is important for pollination, said Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator of orchids. It attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which lay their eggs on rotting animal carcasses.
At the Huntington, pollinators aren’t the only thing it entices. Since the garden exhibited its first corpse flower in 1999, thousands of people flock to its conservatory every summer, just to smell these putrid plants.
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It smells like rotting flesh, but thousands of people will be lining up to catch a whiff.
“The kids that first came in 1999 are now bringing their kids — their own kids — to experience this over 20 years later,” Tam said. “It’s amazing, this plant, the impact that it has had over many generations.”
Glendale resident Trinity Shi, 42, witnessed three blooms at the Huntington in 2022 and 2023 and compared the smell to rotten fish: pungent, but not unbearable. She was excited to feature such an unusual specimen on her Instagram plant blog, @cubehousejungle, and hopes to make it to this year’s bloom too.
“It feels really prehistoric to look at this plant, because it is so giant,” Shi said of the corpse flower, which can grow over 12 feet tall. “It’s become kind of like a mascot for the Huntington.”
Thanks to cultivation techniques, the Huntington coaxes the plants to bloom every two to three years, not four to six like they do in their natural habitat, where they’re endangered.
Still, the blooms are notoriously unpredictable, Tam said. He guessed one of the plants will bloom in the coming days.
This upcoming bloom spotlights a plant nicknamed Odora, who last opened in 2024, and Odorysseus, a rookie public bloomer. Visitors offered name suggestions for Odorysseus on the Huntington’s Instagram page, where contenders included Stinkerbell, Gagatha and Count Flatula, among others.
It’s not unusual for the Huntington to have multiple soon-to-be bloomers on display. But only once, in 2018, did two plants actually unfurl on the same day.
A detailed view of a corpse flower as it prepares to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
For Odora and Odorysseus, siblings from a 2002 pollination, a double bloom is unlikely, Tam said. The plants are inclined to bloom out of sequence, “because they want to pollinate another plant that’s in the vicinity.” That can’t happen if they bloom simultaneously.
Though many refer to these plants as “flowers,” they are actually an “inflorescence,” a flowering structure containing hundreds of smaller blooms inside.
When it’s almost time for the plant to open, the spadix — a conic protrusion from inside the plant — emerges and accelerates in growth, climbing up to six inches per day. After a few days, its growth slows down.
“When it gets to about the one-inch range, we’ll know it’s about to bloom for us fairly soon,” Tam said.
When it does bloom, the spathe — leaflike structures encasing the plant — unfurl around 3 or 4 p.m., reaching maximum size in the early hours of the morning. The odor comes from the spadix, which heats up to about 98 degrees to strengthen the smell.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids at the Huntington, walks past the corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
From there, visitors have until about 3 to 5 p.m. to smell the plant before it closes back up and collapses, losing its odor. Eventually, the plant returns as a leaf or a flower, photosynthesizing energy in preparation for its next bloom.
Today, the Huntington houses 43 corpse flowers, making it one of the largest corpse flower collections in North America. The Huntington cultivates them on-site and has distributed many to botanic gardens and zoos across the country.
“It’s important when it comes to conservation that we make plants accessible,” Tam said. “If we’re able to share these plants with other organizations and other hobbyists, we’re able to decrease the amount of plant theft that occurs in the wild, where a lot of conservation work is much needed.”
Eager sniffers can visit the Huntington from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Monday. Be sure to stay hydrated, cool and patient, as it’s humid inside the conservatory and lines can be long. For those who want to track the blooms’ progress from afar, catch the Huntington’s online livestream.
Library, art museum, botanical garden
The Huntington
Address: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
Admission: $13-34; children 3 and under, free; “Museums for All” (SNAP EBT) program, $5.
Info: huntington.org
Entrepreneur David Huang tests out a VR headset while conducting demonstrations of the social dance lesson app Dance Guru at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., June 17, 2026.
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Wedding season is in full swing, bringing with it a familiar sense of dread for anyone who fears the dance floor.
But relief may finally be at hand with the help of a new app, Dance Guru, and a virtual reality (VR) headset.
The social dance instruction app transports users to a spacious, digital dance studio. Waiting inside is a computer-generated coach: a handsome, male avatar wearing a shirt open to his navel. He speaks with a slightly gravelly English accent.
“Watch me now,” he instructs at the start of a waltz lesson — which NPR tried out at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.
The avatar then demonstrates a basic box step.
From there, the lesson becomes interactive. The coach tells the user to hold his hand while an electric pinging sound tracks the student’s foot placement.
“One, two, three, four, five, six,” the virtual teacher counts down.
When the user stumbles, he remains remarkably patient. “Do not worry, foundations take time. Let’s try that again. Work on grounding your steps more intentionally.”
Solving the beginner’s dilemma
Dance Guru creator David Huang said he came up with the idea for the app a couple of years ago out of frustration.
“I always wanted to learn to dance and I was always terrible at it,” Huang said. “And I always ended up stopping midway through the lessons.”
He soon realized that many beginners hit the exact same roadblocks.
“Private lessons are too expensive, and you feel like you’re always forgetting the dance steps,” Huang said. “You cannot find a partner to dance with. So I figured maybe I can create something like this.”
The Dance Guru platform currently offers tutorials in salsa, bachata, waltz, and cha-cha, in both lead and follow modes. To make the digital instruction feel authentic, Huang used motion-capture technology to record the movements of real-life dance teachers — with their permission.
Building on the legacy of online tutorials and video games
Dance Guru belongs to a small but growing wave of apps using VR to demystify social dance. At a nearby booth, conference attendee Victor Chen is testing out a competing app called Trip the Light. It currently offers salsa lessons, as well as freestyle options, where a user can dance with a partner without having to learn specific steps.
Trip the Light’s booth at the Augmented World Expo included posters of the app’s virtual instructors. Real-life performers, who gave Trip the Light permission to motion capture their movements, were used as a basis for these avatars.
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“A lot of times when you’re trying to learn a choreography, it’s watching a YouTube video and you have to pause it, rewind, and play it,” Chen said. “If you were to have a virtual avatar dancing in front of you and correcting for any parts that you missed, it might be a lot easier.”
Interactive video games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance, and YouTube tutorials have been helping people improve their skills in private for years. But those games are mostly aimed at solo players. Unlike the new generation of immersive VR apps, they cannot simulate the mechanics or confidence required for partner dancing on a live dance floor.
The reality check
But this kind of app won’t work for every dancer.
“Everyone learns a little bit differently. And so unless you have a game that has lots of different ways of teaching, you’re going to have things that work for some people and don’t work for others,” said Ariana Katana, a trained contemporary dancer and dance content creator who’s active on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms. “Also, it’s hard to dance with a headset on.”
And then there’s the issue of not being able to physically feel a virtual partner’s hand or shoulder while dancing with them. Patrick Ascolese, the creator of Trip the Light, said the experience could become more tactile in the future. “Haptic suits and wearables will be coming, but I think we’re a little away from that,” he said.
Ascolese said even with their limitations, immersive tools like Trip the Light have immense potential as judgment-free training grounds — giving reluctant dancers the baseline confidence they need to eventually step onto the dance floor with real partners in the real world, including at weddings.
“Just like anything else, practice makes perfect,” said Ascolese. “So the more time you spend in VR with a virtual partner, it works towards helping you get over that social hurdle. We are teaching you the moves that you have to do in order to go out and have fun.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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