Like his fellow HBO host Bill Maher, John Oliver dedicated the opening portion of his hit show “Last Week Tonight” with a takedown of President Trump’s Freedom 250 concert series celebrating America’s 250th birthday that initially boasted a lineup of not-so-relevant acts like Vanilla Ice, C+C Music Factory and Milli Vanilli.
“It is a stacked lineup of people that you haven’t thought about since 2009,” joked Oliver. “Honestly, that sounds less like America’s 250th birthday and more like the playlist at Rhonda’s 50th. The only really surprising thing about that lineup is there aren’t special appearances from the ShamWow guy and the Gushers kid whose head turned into a raspberry.”
Running June 25 to July 10 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Freedom 250 concert series was initially billed as a nonpartisan celebration of America’s Semiquincentennial. While planning initially began in 2016 from the bipartisan congressional nonprofit America250, the Trump-aligned group Freedom 250 took over planning during Trump’s second term as a means to politicize the celebrations.
“Now, crucially, the organization planning that event, Freedom 250, is not the same thing as the non-profit America250, led by a bipartisan board created by Congress. Instead, it’s a public-private partnership launched by the White House with some dicey elements, including the fact that for $1 million, donors to it could get access to Trump,” Oliver explained, adding, “And as its political slant became clear, acts who were part of that initial announcement quickly began to bail.”
