(The Epoch Times)—On the campaign trail in his bid for a White House return, President Donald Trump pledged to give America “the most spectacular birthday party the world has ever seen” in 2026, when the nation will celebrate 250 years of independence. Celebrations started on New Year’s Eve with the projection of images depicting the country’s history on the Washington Monument and will continue throughout the year.
America250, the bipartisan organization established by Congress in 2016 to lead the commemorations, is sponsoring field trips and oral history recordings, and burying a time capsule, among other events in 2026.
Separate from America250, Freedom 250 is the group Trump tasked to oversee the anniversary project.
The organization described the Washington Monument illumination, which will take place through Jan. 5, as the “world’s tallest birthday candle in honor of our nation’s 250th birthday.”
According to Freedom 250 organizers, the 25-minute projection displays will recur at the top of each hour every night and feature five themed segments: Discovery; Revolution (Independence); Westward Expansion; the Industrial Revolution and the 20th Century; and Modern Day and the Future of the Nation.
“This Washington Monument illumination is the opening signature moment of a year-long series of marquee national events celebrating the triumph of the American spirit,” the Freedom 250 statement noted.
Also on New Year’s Eve, the renowned Times Square ball drop at midnight was followed by a second celebration at 12:04 a.m. when the Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball illuminated in a red, white, and blue “America250” design. After that, 2,000 pounds of red, white, and blue confetti were released.
A second ball drop will happen on July 3, the night before Independence Day.
Though the American Revolution did not end until Sept. 3, 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was signed, the United States declared its independence on July 4, 1776.
Trump outlined Freedom 250 festivities in a Dec. 18 video address.
“When I campaigned for president, I pledged to give America the most spectacular birthday party the world has ever seen for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4 next year,” he said. ”Already, we’ve had big celebrations to commemorate the 250th birthdays of the Army, the Navy, and the United States Marines, but there is much, much more to come. We’re going to have a good time.”
Freedom 250’s roster of events will include the Great American State Fair from June 25 through July 10 on the National Mall in Washington. The celebration will feature pavilions from all 50 states and a “Spirit of America” parade to honor America’s fallen soldiers.
“Frankly, you’ll never see anything like it, and you’ll never see anything like it again,” Trump said.
On July 4, Freedom 250 will commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday with Salute to America on the National Mall during the Great American State Fair.
The event will have a military flyover, an address by Trump, and “the largest fireworks display in the world,” according to Freedom 250.
Trump said the White House will host a UFC fight on June 14, which is Flag Day and also Trump’s 80th birthday. It will mark the first sporting event held at the White House.
In the fall, Trump said there would be the Patriot Games, a “four day athletic event featuring the greatest high school athletes, one young man and one young woman, competing from each state and territory.”
Freedom 250 festivities will also feature the National Garden of American Heroes, a park that will include statues of 250 American heroes.
The National Endowment for the Arts was named a partner in Trump’s “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday” Executive Order, which called for the creation of the Garden of Heroes.
Last week, Trump said that construction on what he has coined the “Triumphal Arch” is expected to begin sometime in the next two months. The president has said the arch will serve as a monument to American history and military service. The structure will resemble Paris’s Arc de Triomphe and be funded by money left over from the White House ballroom project, according to Fox Digital News.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.