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Where Did the IMLS’s Funding for Museums and Libraries Go? Into Trump’s ‘Freedom Truck’ Road Show, It Seems

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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…

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