Have you always wished that you could visit a museum devoted to U.S. history, like maybe the one at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., but wished that rather than a brick-and-mortar museum in the nation’s capital, it could be on a tractor trailer in, say, Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, or Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania?
Well, the Trump administration is making those dreams come true with a fleet of six “Freedom Trucks”—mobile museums that will travel the nation throughout 2026, marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On display are artifacts like a draft of the Declaration of Independence, the Aitken Bible (“the first complete Bible published in an independent America,” per the Library of Congress), a musket used by the British Army known as the Brown Bess, and a pair of George Washington’s spectacles.
The rolling museums are part of the “Freedom 250” initiative, a self-described non-partisan organization leading the semiquincentennial celebration of the founding of the “Nation,” as its website styles it, with characteristically random Trumpian capitalization. Four banners on the website point to “America’s Story,” “America’s Beauty,” “America’s Innovation,” and, for some reason, “America Prays,” with an image of George Washington kneeling in supplication. The display “tells the harrowing story of how 13 colonies declared independence, defeated the greatest empire in the world, and secured American sovereignty 250 years ago,” according to its website.
The interactive displays allow visitors to take a quiz (“Are you a loyalist or a patriot?”), to digitally sign the Declaration of Independence, and to converse with an A.I.-powered George Washington, according to an Artnet News report.
Currently in Columbia, South Carolina, the trucks have been on the road since mid-February and will travel throughout the U.S., with dates currently scheduled through November 1. Aspiring host cities can also apply to have the trucks come visit them.
The mobile museums were created in partnership with and Michigan’s Hillsdale College, a Christian school, and PragerU, which also created a series of bizarre A.I. videos of the nation’s founders for the Founders Museum at the White House, which, Artnet’s Ben Davis wrote last year, constitute a bet on “the future of patriotic education” that makes the future look “pretty janky.” Judging by Freedom 250’s YouTube page, it looks like plenty of those will be on view on the Freedom Trucks.
The patriotic rolling museums are “made possible,” notes the administration, by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which was established in 1966 as the only federal agency that provided resources to museums and libraries across all fifty states and territories. The Trump administration gutted the agency last year, placing its staff on administrative leave in April and proposing a budget that would eliminate it in May. In June, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office issued a decision finding that the administration’s withholding of funds from IMLS was illegal.
