The bipartisan America 250 Commission planned infrastructure projects, educational activities, and “350 for 250”—an effort to connect all 350 million Americans to celebrations, volunteer efforts, and various other initiatives. 

But on Trump’s first day in office, he announced an executive order establishing Freedom 250: an alternative, much more glitzy celebration that would ultimately take the lion’s share of the funding Congress had originally earmarked for America 250, leaving the latter with $25 million of the promised $150 million. Not to mention becoming a major fundraising tool for Trump, potentially raising hundreds of millions through sponsorships.

Freedom 250 has so far provided funding for this week’s Great American State Fair on the National Mall, and last month’s Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn (which also coincided with Trump’s 80th birthday).

Other construction projects timed with America’s 250th anniversary include Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, a larger-than-life replica of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe that is reportedly being bankrolled by taxpayer funds pulled from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a White House ballroom that is reportedly taking millions from federal funding for the secret service, and construction on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to paint it “American flag blue,” using money pulled in part from revenue made from National Park entrance fees. It’s worth noting that when I visited D.C. last week, the pool was closer to algae green.

But Trump didn’t just steal America 250’s spotlight and its funding. For the past year, he’s also actively limited events being organized by government-linked institutions—namely, our national parks— that would highlight our nation’s history, warts and all. The concern is about protecting the administration’s preferred image of America.

It was an extension of the administration’s efforts to restore “truth and sanity” to American history, based on a March 2025 executive order proclaiming that Americans have witnessed a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.”

The administration began making moves this past January to whitewash history by erasing exhibit signs across national parks. Those that quietly disappeared documented the area’s ties to slavery and the impacts of climate change. Flyers went up at parks asking the public to report scientific displays and exhibits that appear “unpatriotic” or “negative.” Dozens of signs were removed. We saw an extension of this last August, when Trump directed his attorneys to review the Smithsonian museums’ depiction of history, calling it too negative and too focused on “how bad Slavery was.”

A federal judge last month ordered park staff to reinstall the exhibits as part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by activists and historians alleging the administration is engaged in a “sustained campaign to erase history and undermine science.” Meanwhile, a grassroots resistance at national parks is taking root.

The Resistance Rangers began last year as a group of clandestine off-duty and former National Park Service rangers concerned by the direction the parks were heading. And they had reason to be. The White House has moved to dramatically reduce the NPS operating budget while using park entrance fees to pay for Trump’s D.C. projects. (A new report found Trump spent nearly $700,000 in NPS funds to fix a White House walkway.) In the first 11 months of Trump’s second term, 2,750 NPS employees lost their jobs. During that same period, the administration also moved to open more public lands to oil and gas drilling while changing the narratives taught at parks, including removing books it disapproves of from gift shops.

The rangers’ actions have since moved into more organized efforts. In conjunction with six other educational and civic groups, this year they created America 433+, which is named for all 433 sites managed by the National Park Service and aims to shine a light on the silencing of parks.

In mid-June, America 433+ organized a “teach-in” on Juneteenth with former National Park Service Ranger Elizabeth Kerwin in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia—the site of abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on the Armory and Arsenal, the events of which helped set the nation on the path to civil war.

During the event, it was revealed that the Trump administration had halted an exhibit slated to open on that holiday, called “Making a Way Out of No Way.” Kerwin said it was supposed to tell the story of the African American experience in Harpers Ferry.

“We are being forced to participate in the silencing and erasure of stories that have already been ignored, suppressed, and minimized, historically, over and over again,” Melissa Dalley, a volunteer organizer for America 433+ and a former park ranger who left the service this year, told me. 

“My work as a ranger with the National Park Service was like a mission to do whatever I could with my little bit of time and platform, telling all the stories—not just those of a few folks in power—in order to repair in some small way the harms that had been done.”