President Trump’s Freedom 250 birthday extravaganza is looking so bleak that entire states are pulling out.NOTUS has reported that Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have all declined to send a representative to the president’s 16-day fair on the National Mall. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington remain undecided even as the fair begins just two weeks from now.Each state is supposed to have a 600-square-foot themed booth with a representative or official sent by state leadership. With these states declining to send one, the administration has decided to pick their own. Multiple states said they had no knowledge as to who was chosen to represent their homes or why.Other states noted the hefty price attached to the event. Michele Walker, the comms director of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, told NOTUS her state would have to spend a minimum of $100,000 on travel, hotels, and their themed booth all together.“We decided early in the process that we do not have the capacity to participate,” Walker said. “Our limited resources are focused on America250 events across North Carolina.”This news comes just a week after nearly all of the first wave of musical performers—from Young MC to the Commodores—dropped out as well. This lack of enthusiasm only reaffirms that this “Freedom 250” event, unlike the educational America250 commission, is just a birthday party for Trump.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche twice refused to discuss the federal lawsuit threatening Trump's White House UFC fight — with a ruling expected within hours.Blanche was appearing alongside DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin at a Thursday morning press conference on unaccompanied migrant children when a reporter tried to get him on record about the looming court fight."'On the UFC fight—'" the reporter began."'I'm not going to talk about the UFC fight,'" Blanche cut in. "'We're just here to talk about this.'"The reporter pressed: "'If [the judge] does order that it be blocked?'""'I'm not going to talk about the UFC fight,'" repeated Blanche, whose own DOJ filed the brief defending the event. "'We're here just to talk about why we're here.'"His remarks came just hours before oral arguments before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta.The Public Integrity Project filed suit on June 7 on behalf of two Virginia residents, arguing the administration skipped congressional approval for the 92-foot, 600-ton "Claw" arena on the South Lawn, bypassed mandatory environmental review, and misused a temporary National Park Service rule designed for legitimate semiquincentennial events — not, the suit argues, a for-profit UFC card timed to Trump's 80th birthday.A lower court paused construction of Trump's $400 million White House ballroom project in April, citing lack of congressional approval. A separate judge ordered Trump's name stripped from the Kennedy Center in May on identical grounds.Stanford Law's Matthew Sanders told USA Today the complaint "lays out in a careful way the laws that apply and how they've been violated here."DOJ's own brief pushed back hard, arguing more than $60 million had been spent on the event and that plaintiffs had waited too long to file. Blocking it now, the government wrote, would amount to letting them "exercise a heckler's veto."
President Donald Trump's birthday celebration on the White House lawn was disparaged as a "volcano of corruption" in a new legal challenge.Attorneys fighting to block this weekend's UFC matches at the White House told a federal judge Wednesday the president and his allies stand to profit from what they called "the first private, for-profit sporting event ever held on White House grounds" — and warned the country is approaching a historic moment of institutional corruption, reported MS NOW."Such a volcano of corruption, if allowed to go forward, will mark an inflection point in American history," argued plaintiffs Susan Douglas and Paul Romano in their final filing.The plaintiffs, attorneys from the Public Integrity Project, painted a portrait of interlocking financial interests at the heart of the planned three-day spectacle, which is set to culminate Sunday — Trump's 80th birthday — with seven professional UFC bouts staged on the South Lawn inside a massive temporary structure known as "the Claw."They pointed to million-dollar VIP packages, brand placement opportunities near the Lincoln Memorial, and an exclusive broadcast on Paramount Plus, a streaming service run by Trump allies Larry and David Ellison. No American, they noted, will be able to watch the self-described "celebration of America" without paying a subscription fee.They further alleged Trump bought stock in the company that owns the UFC earlier this spring, giving him a direct financial stake in the event's success. UFC head Dana White, who has organized the spectacle alongside the White House, is a longtime personal friend and political ally of the president.The Trump administration called the lawsuit meritless and said the plaintiffs were merely seeking "to complain about that which offends their sensibilities." Officials also argued the suit's last-minute timing alone should disqualify it, noting the event was publicly announced nearly a year ago.U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, must now decide whether the fights go on — or whether the volcano gets capped.
A retired colonel sounded the alarm in a new piece for The Hill this week, warning that President Donald Trump is running headlong into a massive problem that he will inevitably botch.Jonathan Sweet is a retired lieutenant colonel who had three decades of service as a military intelligence officer and now frequently writes about military affairs alongside national security reporter Mark Toth. Their latest piece, published on Thursday morning, argued that Trump "doesn't know how to win in Iran" as the beleaguered peace talks with the Middle Eastern nation drag on with no end in sight."The day the ceasefire began in Iran is the day President Trump’s war strategy began to fall apart," Sweet and Toth wrote. "U.S. and Israeli forces were crushing Iran’s military and were poised to begin systematically targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, Iran’s street-level domestic security force and regime enforcers. Then came Trump’s order to stand down. Operation Epic Fury came to a crashing halt, and the White House and the Persian Gulf have been mired ever since in a ceasefire that is on a road to nowhere."The pair further argued that, counter to the insistence of the Trump administration, Iran's military is not a "complete and total mess," nor has it been "completely defeated." In fact, they countered, "whether Mr. Trump fully grasps it or not, has learned to fight the U.S., Israel, and its Gulf state allies on an asymmetrical basis," meaning that "a traditional air force, navy or ground army is not required.""Trump, simply put, does not know how to defeat Iran’s asymmetric war against him," the pair argued. "Plus, he is failing to understand how the Iranian regime is using kinetic tools on a regional basis to gain leverage in the ongoing peace talks. We have described that approach as a three-ring-circus. Mining the Strait of Hormuz is the center ring or main act. Limited ballistic missile and drone strikes against the U.S. and its allies in the region is the second ring. The third? Linking the survival of Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s axis of resistance against Israel, to the ever-elusive deal being negotiated."They continued: "Trump repeatedly claims that he has effected regime change in Iran. But he has not. The faces changed when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ali Larijani and other top regime leaders were killed on the opening day of the war, but the regime’s militant ideology is the same. In reality, Iran’s regime has only become more entrenched. Most alarming, however, is that Trump seems oblivious that many of his comments, statements, and posts on Truth Social are perceived by Iran’s hardliners as signs of weakness."Ultimately, Sweet and Toth concluded, as they often have, that the only way for Trump to achieve victory over Iran in a meaningful way is to end efforts for a diplomatic solution, and instead "defeat them for real" by renewing the active military campaign against them.
Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power. Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script. On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them. Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can. Within forty-eight hours of the lineup announcement for what Trump’s people are calling the “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, the Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels of Poison, Young MC, and Jodie Rocco of Milli Vanilli all put out statements saying they’d been misled, that nobody told them the event was a Trump-branded MAGA operation. Young MC told Rolling Stone it was a bait-and-switch. The Commodores said their music has always been their voice and they wouldn’t lend it to a single political party.Trump’s response was telling. He didn’t try to recruit new acts or apologize for the confusion. He went on his failing Nazi-infested social media site and demanded the whole concert series be scrapped, replaced with what he called “a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250.” Then he announced he’d personally headline the June 24 opening ceremony himself. The mask came off in about seventy-two hours. The 250th anniversary of American independence has been openly converted into a Trump fascist-fest, and only white MAGA who love to see gladiators beat each other bloody and senseless need apply.Louise and I lived in Washington during the Obama years, and we visited just about every monument the city has, sometimes more than once. We were invited to the White House, and walking up that long drive past the East Wing (which is now rubble) always felt like walking into something larger than any single president. The Lincoln Memorial at dusk, when the reflecting pool went dark and the seated figure of Lincoln doubled itself on that still water, was the kind of place where Americans of every stripe stood quietly together and remembered who we were supposed to be. That reflecting pool, finished in 1923, has held the gravity of Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert when she’d been denied the stage at Constitution Hall because she was Black, and the gravity of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, and every quiet sunset visit by every family who came to the Mall to feel something solemn about this country.Trump has now had that pool painted blue at a cost he claims is around two million dollars, the same shade you’d find at the kid’s pool in a discount motel. He calls it “American flag blue.” Right. He drove his motorcade across the wet coating before it set, climbed out, and held a press conference standing in the middle of the pool with his cabinet secretaries around him, and now we’re paying to repair that damage, too. He told reporters the old gray stone was “never good.” That dark surface that turned itself into a mirror for Lincoln’s face for over a century, he claimed, was “never good.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation has sued to stop his desecration because the project skipped the federal review process that exists precisely to prevent a president from treating a national memorial like the patio renovation at one of his gaudy golf motels.The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture. The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill.
