The Great American State Fair’s Main Exhibit Is Trump Corruption

WASHINGTON, DC – I visited the Great American State Fair on several days over the past week. Yes, it’s empty. Security is extremely tight, with no clear reason as to why. Federal marshals, Oklahoma state troopers, and others roam the area, providing a mini-museum of cops. The mini-arch is as half-assed as everyone says it is.

But President Trump’s Freedom250 project and the Great American State Fair is really a corruption story. And, in true MAGA fashion, there’s no real effort to hide the graft here: it’s all playing out in front of you. The fair itself showcases different forms of the rampant conflicts of interest and grifting that is coming to define the second Trump administration. On MAHA Monday, I stopped by the “Freedom stage” and listened as a doctor who runs a network of clinics pitched a top administration official on having Medicare and Medicaid cover a controversial scan that his business offers. It was hot, so I went inside an air-conditioned tent; firms funded by Don Jr. had booths on display. Government contractors like Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and others had exhibits in the tents and around the area. A Truth Social representative tried to sell me on creating an account with a video service that the president’s company is launching. 

People have compared the fair to a Potemkin Village. But my experience was more akin to stumbling upon a scam, more like Fyre Festival combined with a turbocharged form of D.C. pay-to-play. It’s eerie: the fair is mostly empty. The parts that are supposed to be for visitors are either falling apart or dramatically fail to deliver. The only real activity appears to come from large businesses using the fair as a vehicle to gain favor with the president. 

Tens of millions of dollars in public money

Congress originally created a bipartisan America250 commission in 2016. Planning started under the first Trump administration, and continued through the Biden years. In 2024, former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush agreed to serve as the Commission’s national co-chairs.

When Trump took office a second time, he first installed a 25-year-old former Fox News producer, Ariel Abergel, and Trump campaign officials to direct it. The commission fired Abergel in September, in part over his efforts to make the celebration about Trump rather than the country’s 250th birthday. In December, Trump dispensed with the bipartisan commission entirely: he announced Freedom 250. It’s a limited liability company that exists within a congressionally chartered nonprofit, the National Park Foundation. It’s the official fundraiser for the National Parks Service. 

In November, Trump added his campaign co-manager, Chris LaCivita, to the nonprofit’s board. At one point, he reportedly asked Congress to give America250 $150 million instead of $100 million; the extra $50 million was to go to the White House. Per a report from House Democrats, Freedom250 ended up capturing the majority of the funding. 

The main contractor for the Great American State Fair is a firm called Event Strategies, Inc., which staged the event on the ellipse before the January 6 Capitol attack. In 2024, Trump named one of its partners, Justin Caporale, as “Executive Producer for Major Events and Public Appearances” at his “external operation.” Caporale remains as a partner at Event Strategies; the White House and Event Strategies didn’t return TPM’s requests for comment. 

Since then, Event Strategies has raked in federal contracts, receiving $38.6 million since the start of 2025, per federal procurement records. Wired first reported that the contracts were mainly for the 250th, and the New York Times reported that they were granted as no-bid contracts. The company later received an indefinite contract for up to $100 million until 2030 for the stated purpose of “conference, meeting, event, and trade show planning services.” 

Trump officials redirected other public funds from America250 to Freedom 250. In December, $10 million went from America250 instead to Freedom 250 for a fleet of six mobile exhibits that tell the story of the nation’s founding. I visited one at the Great American State Fair: it was run by PragerU, and featured a giant AI version of George Washington. 

Real-life access selling

Freedom 250 reportedly offers personal access to the president for those who contribute $1 million or more; $500,000 gets you “V.I.P. access.”

With any access buying, the direction of travel is often unclear from the outside. Is a firm or person purchasing a way in? Is the company there in order to maintain access? Or, in this case, are they only present in response to an existing tie to the Trump administration.

Take Axiom Space. It’s a human spaceflight company that first sent commercial astronauts to the International Space Station on a SpaceX in 2022. It plans to build a commercial space station. In February, it raised $350 million from 1789 Capital, where Don Jr. is a partner, and from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

Axiom had a booth across from SpaceX in one tent (Elon Musk needs no explanation here). On the other side was a display for TikTok, which recently dodged a national ban by selling its U.S. operations to a joint venture led by Larry Ellison. The Ellison family, which also controls CBS, is currently in the process of acquiring the parent company of CNN. 

Next to all of this was a booth for Truth Social, the social media firm where the president is majority shareholder. It had four TV screens; one showing content from the company’s video streaming platform. Another showed Trump 2016 campaign chairman Steve Bannon on Real America’s Voice; another showed NewsMax; and the fourth showed conservative weather station WeatherNation TV.

There was no booth for Ultimate Fighting Championship, though it was listed as a sponsor. Financial disclosures show that Trump personally bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in stock in UFC’s parent company, TKO, in March, while promoting a separate UFC Freedom 250 event. A Trump family business partnered with UFC to sell commemorative coins marking the anniversary; the most expensive one goes for $11,999. UFC President Dana White is a Trump ally who entered into a “Sports Diplomacy” public-private partnership with the State Department this month. His energy drink firm Phorm Energy also sponsored the event. 

Nearly all of these firms have business before the government. 

There was another, uniquely Trumpian, example of this kind of messiness. On MAHA Monday, I went to the “Freedom Stage,” where Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Dr. Mehmet Oz was interviewing a psychiatrist named Dr. Daniel Amen.

It was over 90 degrees and sunny outside during this interview, in which Amen showed a slideshow to a small crowd of people that featured the brain scans of people suffering from various forms of mental illness. The pitch, Amen said, was that these scans could diagnose psychiatric disorders. At the end of the presentation, he and Oz produced a blender and made “brain healthy hot chocolate” in the sweltering heat. 

Around halfway through, Amen mentioned to Oz that “CMS should start covering scans,” telling him, “I bet I could save you billions of dollars. This is the MAHA moment.” 

All this prompted me to try to better understand what was going on here. Amen, like Oz, is a celebrity doctor. He offers counseling on ways people can overcome common psychological problems like anxiety, depression, and more, and sometimes does so on Fox News. Amen also runs a network of clinics that offer the scans, known by their acronym SPECT, for people experiencing a range of psychiatric and relational issues. It’s controversial: the American Psychiatric Association found in 2012 that this kind of neuroimaging impacted neither diagnosis nor treatment. 

Getting public insurers to cover these methods would be a boon to Amen’s business. He told me by email that he had previously asked CMS to cover it, and that he was “working with FDA to try to get  neuropsychiatric indications for SPECT which will increase wider adoption.” When asked how he came to present at the fair, he wrote: “Dr Oz invited me.” I asked whether he thought his appearance was an example of the kind of arrangements in which people with business before the federal government use the fair to gain access to influential officials. “No,” he replied.

CMS didn’t return TPM’s request for comment. 

Where did the money go? 

It’s not clear exactly how much money went from the federal government to the fair.

The National Park Foundation received a $68.3 million grant from the Department of the Interior for “semiquincentennial events.” Beyond that, it’s not clear how much money went to the fair.

Event Strategies’ $100 million contract goes until 2030, with an option to extend to 2045. Procurement records show that around $20 million from the contract has been obligated. It’s not clear how much of this went to the Great American State Fair; $262,246 was awarded for “Freedom 250 Exterior Design.” Millions more are being spent on “Trump accounts,” which had a prominent booth at the fair. Those are partly funded by billionaire Michael Dell of Dell Technologies. 

All of this led to an extremely underwhelming experience on the ground. 

It’s hard to overstate the mismatch between the tens of millions of dollars that have gone to Freedom 250 and the result on the ground (Freedom 250 is putting on other events around the country). American flags branded on a white Freedom 250 background appear to have been made out of a thick pillowcase material. The canvas that covers the tents sags; air conditioning barely works to keep the inside areas cool.

At one point, I strayed into a concessions tent. There, I found a woman who had spent $5 on a bottle of water before staff realized that they had run out. The customer was becoming increasingly irate as the staff refused to provide a refund.

I left, and wandered around to a hard-to-find area behind the tent, away from the main festivities. I found a kind woman offering what the fair seemed to be trying to hide: a table full of free water.