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Keith Krach was barely out of high school when the country celebrated its 200th birthday. He vividly remembers images of tall ships in New York Harbor, the Bicentennial Minutes that aired on CBS, and the fireworks by the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit. The war in Vietnam was over, Nixon was no longer in the White House, the energy crisis was nearing an end, and, for millions of Americans, the celebration was a welcome respite. “I saw a study that they did on 1976 where people who were young and had a really positive experience, they did some type of a mathematical correlation, and these people had more confidence and more pride in the United States,” Krach tells me from his home office in Washington, D.C., in a recent conversation.

Krach (pronounced crock) is a youthful 69-year-old with a dark head of hair, an easy smile, and a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars thanks in large part to the software companies Ariba and Docusign, which he led to lucrative IPOs. He’s the sort of unassuming tech executive who makes a point of attending his high-school reunion in Rocky River, Ohio, every five years — which is exactly where he was this past fall when he received a call from Vince Haley, President Donald Trump’s domestic-policy director. “He said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in running the American celebration?’” Krach says, his voice rising to an excited, high-pitched croak. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure! I absolutely will.’ That sounded great! I didn’t know at that time all that it entailed.”

Technically, the country’s birthday celebration was already underway, but the president had decided that America250 — the nonpartisan, congressionally mandated commission formed in 2016 and charged with coordinating the semiquincentennial festivities — wasn’t cutting it. America250 had been given a decade to organize a program worthy of the occasion, and by 2025, it had little to show for it. Or at least the programming it had arranged — a Fourth of July celebration called America’s Block Party, a plan to bury a time capsule, and initiatives that encouraged volunteerism and charitable giving — was not the kind that Trump had in mind. So in December, Trump announced a new public-private partnership that would launch its own slate of “presidential level” events featuring more fireworks, more flyovers, and more Lee Greenwood. The new entity would be called Freedom 250, and, Trump promised, it would deliver “the most spectacular birthday party the world has ever seen.” Krach would be its CEO.

From the start, Freedom 250 was controversial. The new organization and its slighted sibling, American250, both claimed the right to spend money Congress had set aside for the celebration. The existence of two organizations was confusing, but more concerning was the opaque nature of Freedom 250’s private funding. In February, the New York Times published a slide deck that seemed to show the organization offering potential donors access to the president, raising questions about who exactly was giving money to the group and what they expected in return.

Then there was the programming itself. In May, Freedom 250 hosted Rededicate 250, a nine-hour rally on the National Mall with a lineup dominated by Evangelical Christian pastors and Trump officials who praised God and the president. At the same time, six tractor trailers, called “Freedom Trucks,” were dispatched across the country as mobile museums created by Hillsdale College and PragerU, a nonprofit media group that describes its mission as the promotion of Judeo-Christian values. The trucks’ displays include apocryphal moments that paint a Christian revisionist version of American history. One slide includes a dramatic anecdote about Peter Muhlenberg, an Anglican priest, ripping off his robes in front of his congregation in 1776 to reveal his colonel’s uniform before marching from his church to the sound of beating drums. Historians say the story is, at the very least, exaggerated. The trucks also displayed a tribute to prominent Americans that incorrectly claimed the late boxer Muhammad Ali had “disavowed” Islam. (A spokesperson for Freedom 250 told me this was an inadvertent error that has since been corrected.)

Krach was an unlikely choice to lead Freedom 250. He’s not a well-known figure in the MAGA-verse. He never contributed to Trump’s political campaigns, and there are no pictures of him with the president online. He is wealthy but not a member of the Palm Beach crowd. As a CEO, he says he proudly ran his companies “politically neutral,” a claim his friends back up. “He’s not politically active at all,” says Marc Carlson, Krach’s longtime friend and colleague. “Keith is sort of a born-joyful, servant-leader kind of guy. If you dropped him into any situation with 100 people, he’d be the leader of those hundred people.”

Nonetheless, Krach has suddenly been given a prominent platform and some measure of political capital. People close to Krach say that underneath his wholesome persona and rah-rah patriotism is a thoroughly ambitious person. “Keith Krach thinks he can be, and wants to be, president,” one former colleague tells me. He’s branded himself accordingly: His personal website is flooded with press from uncritical media chronicling his ascent in Silicon Valley and portraying him as a folksy, bootstrapping Midwesterner. The site features tabs like “Krachisms,” a page of motivational quotes, and “Mama Krach’s Korner,” a page dedicated to his late mother.

Behind the scenes, things look much different. As Krach tours America, speaking from country-fair stages, his soon-to-be ex-wife has accused him of abusing her and their young daughter. He denies these allegations. I ask him whether they might hinder his political ambitions. “Not one bit,” he says.

Krach tells his story the same way almost every time he’s asked. His childhood was humble and loving. When he wasn’t working at his father’s machine shop, he was tagging along with his mother, a physical-education teacher who coached wrestling at a nearby Catholic school. He left Rocky River for Purdue University, followed by Harvard, where he got his M.B.A. He took a job at GM in Detroit and became the vice-president of its robotics division at 26, the youngest VP in the company’s history. When he turned 30, he and his wife, Jennifer Secoy Krach, left for Silicon Valley, where Krach eventually co-founded Ariba. He held a large stake in the company when, in 1999, it went public. Shares tripled in value on the first day. Eventually, it sold for more than $4 billion.

In 2004, Krach and Jennifer divorced. About a year later, he met his........

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