President Donald Trump has sought to demonize immigrants — particularly people who aren’t white — by calling many of them crooks.
But when it comes to deceitfulness, a new report from ProPublica suggests that may actually describe the MAGA influencer Trump tapped as his “special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values.”
That’s Nick Adams, the self-described “alpha male” and naturalized citizen from Australia who has fashioned himself into a cringeworthy caricature of MAGA masculinity.
According to the report, Adams launched the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, an organization supposedly intent on teaching civics, in 2016. The important context here is that Trump and MAGA world have condemned historically accurate teachings about things like racial inequality and touted the need to teach civics instead — as if it’s impossible to do both.
And despite being boosted by Trump and other MAGA figures, FLAG doesn’t seem to have thus far done the work it has promised. Per ProPublica:
There is little evidence that the nonprofit has provided the civics education it claims. And Adams and his nonprofit have engaged in a pattern of questionable financial arrangements, including paying Adams and his mother more than half its recent annual revenue, while raising much of its money through a sweepstakes operation that has promised donors a chance to win $1,000,000 — a prize FLAG’s records show no evidence of ever paying.
ProPublica said Adams didn’t respond to its list of questions and that the White House declined to comment.
The outlet noted that FLAG is part of the Education Department’s America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which includes more than 40 conservative groups. In other words, a nonprofit that’s under scrutiny for possibly deceiving donors was involved in the federal government’s taxpayer-funded 250th anniversary celebration.
ProPublica also reported:
Since 2016, as FLAG’s annual revenues grew from $68,000 to $1.1 million in 2024, there is almost no indication in the organization’s annual federal tax filings that it was spending money on its stated mission. No line item in FLAG’s federal tax filing identifies a payment to a school, a teacher or an educational distributor. Only two lines, in a 2017 federal filing, indicate $26,925 for “Student’s Constitutions, Printing” and $5,670 for “Book Donations, Shipping & Supplies.” In the last six years, while FLAG operated under Adams, the only documented instance of FLAG activity that appears to fit the definition of “educational” is a 2020 video showing Adams speaking at what is described as a teachers’ conference.
It’s noteworthy here that Trump’s administration has brought bogus charges against the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center over baseless claims that the group deceived its donors.
I urge you to remember all of this the next time Trump, Vice President JD Vance or other Republicans spew vile racism about fraud and deception among immigrant communities — or, as Rep. James Comer of Kentucky put it in June, “in the minority communities.”
It’s a mystery why anyone would take conservatives seriously on such matters when the Republican president himself has a history of fraudulence (to a criminal degree, at that) and has pardoned numerous convicted fraudsters — and his tourism envoy is Nick Adams.
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