Donald Trump said Saturday he is considering replacing the Freedom 250 concert opening on June 24 with an “AMERICA IS BACK Rally” in Washington, D.C., after a wave of performers pulled out of the celebration. He said he had ordered his representatives to look at the feasibility of holding the rally at the same time and same place.
The timing matters because the concert series for the nation’s 250th anniversary has already been hit hard. Seven of its nine featured musical acts backed out within 48 hours of last Wednesday’s announcement, and Martina McBride said on Thursday she would not perform after being assured the event was nonpartisan, adding that “that turned out to be misleading.”
Trump made the pitch after posting 25 times to Truth Social over two hours on Saturday, shortly after arriving at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, at 11.08am. In the same stream of posts, he denounced a judge’s ruling that the Kennedy Center memorial cannot be renamed for him without an act of Congress and praised progress on turning the National Mall’s reflecting pool blue.
He also leaned into the language he has used before, saying he did not want “so-called ‘Artists’ that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy,” and adding, “Only Great Patriots invited — It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America!” The rally language echoed his 2020 post, “Be there! Will be wild!”
Freedom 250, the group Trump created to run celebrations of the country’s founding, said the Wednesday he was referring to is June 24 and that he will personally kick off the celebration at a previously unscheduled opening ceremony. That ceremony is set to launch a 16-day fair on the National Mall, which was originally scheduled to begin on June 25 with McBride’s concert.
What is not settled is whether Trump’s rally idea becomes a second event, or a replacement for the concert opening altogether. The celebration is still on the calendar, but the opening now appears to be moving around him.
