Musicians who dropped out of the Great American State Fair said they were tricked.

“I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT,” wrote the rapper Young MC on Facebook of the first major celebration of the US’s 250th birthday. “The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event. And despite the claims by the organizers that the event is nonpartisan, SPIN magazine describes it as ‘Trump-backed.’” The country singer Martina McBride said that the organizers’ description of the event as nonpartisan “turned out to be misleading”.

After many of the acts withdrew, rather than perpetuate the charade of neutrality, the humiliated president decided to replace them all with what he called “the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World”: Donald J. Trump.

That makes sense, because the fair’s sponsor is not America250, the nonpartisan body set up by Congress a decade ago to oversee the commemoration of the semiquincentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is an organization called Freedom 250, which is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of Maga

Even had the organizers been more honest, the artists could easily have been confused. Since his first term, Trump has been horning in on the 2026 events, funding his pet projects through opaque and complex structures that confound donors, participants, Congress, the press and everyone else about who is paying for what.

The situation is not just another example of Trump’s impunity in using the US treasury as his personal piggy bank. It is emblematic of the ways in which the president is conflating the celebration of the nation’s founding with a celebration of himself – l’état c’est moi. It replaces substance with spectacle and history with myth. The heroes of the myth are a clutch of white men under the guiding hand of a Christian God. The villains are anyone who dares insert an inconvenient historical truth.

In 2016, Congress created the bipartisan US semiquincentennial commission to plan and coordinate activities, materials and financing of the 2026 commemoration. The commission’s first report, released at the end of 2019, outlined “a monumental initiative” that would engage all 350 million Americans and “recognize and include the ‘many’ Americans in our ‘one’ nation”.

The heroes of the myth are a clutch of white men under the guiding hand of a Christian God. The villains are anyone who dares insert........

© The Guardian