The Great American State Fair Is Not Looking So Great

Young MC, Morris Day, The Commodores, and Martina McBride Pull Out of Trump’s Great American State Fair

If you have to trick people into standing next to you, the statement has already been made.

The announcement came Wednesday. Freedom 250 — the Trump administration’s branding arm for America’s 250th birthday celebration — dropped the “first wave” of performers for what they called the Great American State Fair: a 16-day extravaganza on the National Mall, running June 25 through July 10. The lineup included Young MC, C+C Music Factory, Morris Day & The Time, The Commodores, Martina McBride, Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, Flo Rida, and Bret Michaels. CEO Keith Krach called the performers “the very best of who we are.”

By Thursday evening, five of those acts had walked out the door. And the ones who stayed behind to represent “the very best of who we are” were Vanilla Ice and a corny Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory.

Young MC posted on Facebook: “I HAVE INFORMED MY AGENTS THAT I WILL NOT BE PERFORMING AT THE FREEDOM 250 EVENT. The artists were never told about any political involvement with the event.” Morris Day kept it tighter — a graphic on Facebook that read, simply, “It’s a No For Me.” The Commodores put it with some dignity: “Our music has always been our voice and we choose not to publicly affiliate with any single political party. We support the betterment of all Americans.” Martina McBride wrote the longest statement, walking the reader through exactly how she got here: “I was presented with an opportunity to perform at a nonpartisan event but that turned out to be misleading. I asked lots of questions and was assured this was a nonpartisan event that was meant to celebrate ALL 50 states.” And the original studio vocalists of Milli Vanilli told the Associated Press they were “shocked” — because they had never been asked to perform at all. Their name was just on the flyer.

Five acts. Gone. Within 24 hours of the announcement. That’s not a PR stumble. That’s a confession.

Here’s what you need to understand about Freedom 250 and why “nonpartisan” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this story. The organization was not some civic group that formed organically around America’s birthday. It was born from a Trump executive order, signed January 29, 2025, creating the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday. The Interior Department declared Freedom 250 the official branding arm of all 250th anniversary events. Its CEO, Keith Krach, served as under secretary of state during Trump’s first term. The website says “nonpartisan.” The founding says something else entirely.

So when agents were calling artists months ago — asking, hey, do you want to do a show in DC this summer? — they weren’t lying by accident. Omission is its own kind of lie. Especially when the thing being omitted is: this is a Trump-organized event and attaching your name to it will cost you with your audience. That’s the information your artist needs. That’s the whole ballgame. Leaving it out isn’t an oversight. It’s a booking strategy.

Call it what it is: reputational laundering. The goal was never just to fill a stage. The goal was to borrow the credibility of artists who would never have agreed if they’d known — to get Black artists and mainstream acts to stand on a Trump-branded stage and suggest, by their mere presence, that this is just a good-time American celebration and not a political project. The name on the flyer is the point. Whether you show up or not is secondary.

That’s why the Milli Vanilli situation is its own kind of telling. The original studio vocalists — Jodie Rocco and her sister Linda — told the AP they never got a call, never signed a contract, never agreed to anything. Their name was just placed on a lineup and publicized to the world. Now think about what that means. Even without a booking, without consent, without a conversation — their name was out there, attached to this event, generating press, inviting scrutiny, potentially causing real damage to their reputation with people who don’t follow up to read the correction. The flyer is the product. Everything else — whether acts actually show or not — is negotiable.

This is a specific kind of play that this administration runs with a particular kind of shamelessness. It is not the “ask for forgiveness rather than permission” framework — because that framing implies that forgiveness is even sought. It isn’t. The model is: act, attach, announce, and let the fallout sort itself out. If artists stay, you have your legitimacy. If they leave, the original announcement already did its work — it’s been covered, screenshotted, shared. The names were in the headline. No one is issuing corrections at the same volume.

And this isn’t the first time this particular script has been run.

Earlier this year, Kid Rock’s Rock the Country festival — a traveling concert series that also bills itself as apolitical while being headlined by one of Trump’s most visible musical surrogates — went through an eerily similar sequence. Ludacris was listed on the lineup. His rep quickly clarified: “Lines got crossed and he wasn’t supposed to be on there.” Then Morgan Wade pulled out. Then Carter Faith. Then Shinedown, whose exit triggered the cancellation of the entire South Carolina leg of the tour. Multiple artists citing the same essential thing: the MAGA association wasn’t disclosed, the backlash from fans was immediate, and staying on the bill wasn’t worth it.

The through-line between Rock the Country and the Great American State Fair isn’t coincidence. It’s method. Announce a diverse or palatable roster. Let the news cycle do the work. Wait for the objections. Dismiss those who leave. Proceed with whoever remains. The people who stay — a Vanilla Ice, a Bret Michaels — are already yours. The people who leave provided value just by being named. The ones who were never actually booked? Their names were useful too.

Now let’s talk about who took the hit here. Because the artists didn’t just walk away clean.

Young MC, Morris Day, the Commodores — these are Black artists with Black audiences and Black reputations that mean something specific, that carry weight in specific communities, that come with a set of expectations about what you stand for and where you’ll stand. Getting your name attached to a Trump event — even if only for 24 hours, even if you pulled out immediately, even if you announced loudly and publicly that you never agreed to it — that is not a neutral event. Fans saw it. Some reacted before reading the statements. The Commodores, a group founded at Tuskegee University — Tuskegee — had to publicly clarify that they do not align with this administration. That’s not nothing. That’s a thing that shouldn’t have to happen.

Martina McBride noted it plainly in her statement: “It greatly upsets me that any fan who has been moved by my music may now feel like I’m abandoning the meaning behind those songs.” She’s talking about the harm of the association itself — the way merely being named can read as endorsement, can read as betrayal, to people who came to your music for something real. She had to reassure her fans of something that was never true. The organizers knew — had to know — that attaching her name would generate that kind of friction. That was a feature, not a bug.

And this is the part of the story that gets lost in the “artist drops out” framing: the damage doesn’t fully undo itself when you pull out. The headline “Young MC and Morris Day Drop Out of Trump Event” still contains the words “Young MC,” “Morris Day,” and “Trump Event” in close proximity. That’s in people’s feeds. That’s the version some people see and walk away from. The correction requires more effort to read than the announcement.

What’s left on the stage is instructive. Vanilla Ice is staying and his manager confirmed it with enthusiasm — “He is proud to help celebrate America’s 250th Anniversary!” Freedom Williams of C+C Music Factory did a profane and spectacular Instagram video where he initially said he was out — “I don’t f— with Trump, I don’t give a f— about Trump” — and then went on a ridiculous rant where he said no one can tell him what to do, and said he might do the show after all, noting that his audience is “90 percent” white people and “70 percent of those white people probably voted for Republicans.” Flo Rida and Bret Michaels haven’t said anything either way.

That’s what Freedom 250 has to show for its “star-studded lineup”: a genuinely enthusiastic Vanilla Ice, a rapper who caved under pressure while explicitly citing his demographic math, and two acts who have yet to comment. This is the face of the celebration of American excellence. These are, per Keith Krach, “the very best of who we are.”

There is a concept I want to name here, because I think it deserves a name: consent cosplay. The move of staging an event as if it carries the voluntary endorsement of people who never gave it — or who gave it under false pretenses — and then using their names, their images, their cultural weight as social proof for something they don’t actually endorse. It looks like participation. It functions like endorsement. But the consent was never real.

We see consent cosplay whenever a diverse crowd is placed behind Trump at a rally. We see it when historically Black institutions get cited in speeches defending policies that harm their students. We saw it when the Village People had to clarify their feelings about “YMCA” being used as an anthem. And we see it here — in the listing of artists who were never asked, in the booking of artists who weren’t told what they were being booked into, in the announcement of a lineup designed to look like something it was not.

The artists who walked away did the right thing. That should be acknowledged clearly and without the hedging that usually softens these stories. They were deceived, they found out, they said no publicly and on record, and several of them absorbed real public backlash in the process of doing so. That’s not a controversy. That’s people with integrity doing what integrity requires.

But the more important point is the one the coverage tends to skip past: the organizers knew exactly what they were doing. You don’t need a confession to know that. The behavior is the confession. When your event can only be populated by tricking people into agreeing to it, when the announcement itself is designed to travel faster than the corrections, when the Commodores have to tell their fans they do not align with this administration — you already know what you’ve built.

If you had to lie to get the lineup, the lineup is the lie.