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Washington, D.C., is an overwhelmingly blue city. And so it hasn’t been surprising to see that the local response to President Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall has not been to attend the fair, but to mock it.
Mostly, these conversations, when not venting about the disruption to bus schedules and the noisiness of bomber jet flyovers, focus on the absolute failure of the fair. This 16-day event, put on by the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 organization, was meant, as Trump said in its kickoff speech, to be a celebration of no longer being a “dead country” but instead “the hottest country anywhere in the world.” But a number of musical performers dropped out, anxious about the political backlash. And what the photos ultimately show has been school-play-level infrastructure and comically sparse attendance.
Journalists love to find surprises and unconventional angles, so I aimed to go down to the fair and find something unexpected. It seemed possible those photos were a matter of off hours or poor angles or selective omission. But no, we can confidently report that the Great American State Fair is a big ol’ dud. And nothing made that clearer than the anemic display from its “MAHA Monday.”
“MAHA Monday,” a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “make America healthy again” wellness politics, was billed online as a day to “discover how wellness can be fun, flavorful, and part of everyday life” and learn about “feeling better, living longer, and doing it the American way.” The movement is one of the more interesting factions in Trump-era politics, as it scrambles normal coalitions. Granola hippies have aligned with libertarians and suburban moms to battle the corporate interests of the agriculture and energy industries. The conflict over pesticides has resulted in real angst within the GOP. In short, there were a lot of ways MAHA Monday could have been interesting.
It found none of them.
In the indoor exhibits, vendors pitched a God-and-country vision. These included displays from Focus on the Family, Moms for America, and the deeply conservative Hillsdale College. A church from Florida proclaimed the coming of a “Great Awakening”; a man from the church told me the U.S. was due for another embrace of Jesus because it had been so badly corrupted. We were founded to be one nation under God, he said, and we had strayed from that by welcoming non-Christians into the country.
The booths from various federal agencies were hardly any more nonpartisan. The Treasury booth advertised Trump Accounts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture booth greeted you with a poster of Trump pointing and declaring “AMERICA IS BACK,” and the Education Department booth featured an advertisement for a “patriotic” museum. That department, long a target of conservative ire, didn’t even get a full booth: Half of its space had been given to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The problem, it seemed clear, was that the organizers had put too much emphasis on trumpeting MAGA’s successes. Instead of making partisan politics the backdrop, they had made it the main focus, and in doing so, had apparently forgotten that fairs are supposed to be fun.
The MAHA theme, it turned out, played out exclusively in discussion-based events on two stages on opposite sides of the fairgrounds. On the “Freedom Stage,” there was a panel with Chad Robichaux, an MMA fighter and Fox News contributor who advocates a faith-based approach to veteran mental health; a talk from an anti-vaccine lawyer; and a taping of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s podcast. On the main stage, there was “Holistic Hilda,” emphasizing the value of eating locally; a “Why Water Matters!” event; and a physical fitness group called “Never Surrender USA” discussing how women could build discipline and strength “to show up strong for your future families as wives and mothers.”
In the context of a state fair, these lectures couldn’t hold the crowd’s attention. At one event, in which Oz was interviewed by Dean Cain, an actor who played Superman in a 1990s television show, about 50 people listened in as Oz droned on about an anti-fraud task force. It seemed most of the audience were either die-hard MAGA supporters or administration officials themselves. The more casual fairgoers wandered by the stage without stopping. It was hard to blame them: At a later session, in which Oz spoke with a dubious celebrity doctor, the conversation revolved around images from brain scans indicating the harms of alcohol and drugs. It was 87 degrees out, and there was no shade in front of the stage.
This programming reflected the overall pamphlet-forward approach of this fair. The only event that seemed more oriented toward entertainment than persuasion was the log-cutting competition. This showed in the attendance. There was no line to get in at security; the only lines that day were for the “Freedom Truck Mobile Museum” and the “War Department” display. The overall event felt empty. It wasn’t the heat; someone from the Department of Energy booth who had been there every day confirmed it was only a little lighter, attendance-wise, than the average.
That’s not to say it was an entirely joyless event. NASA and SpaceX had visually interesting displays of their rockets and spacesuits. (These were positioned alongside largely ignored tables from brands such as TikTok, Truth Social, and, for some reason, a company that does 3D laser scanning of fine art.) The National Endowment for the Arts had a couple of stilt dancers from New Orleans. And theoretically fairgoers could have had fun on the Ferris wheel, though I didn’t see anyone lining up for that. ABBA piped through the speakers.
The only real sign of life came from the FIFA “Fan Zone,” where a match was being played between Japan and Brazil. A decent crowd, mostly made up of Brazilians, had assembled. It was just out of earshot from Oz nodding along to musings on how “sleep is when the brain cleanses itself.”
It’s easy to see why this has bothered Trump, who opened the fair with a speech declaring, “We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.” On Monday night, he vented his own frustration over the fair’s failure through his typical defensive bluster. “Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” he wrote on social media. “Ask yourself this simple question, ‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’ THE ANSWER IS NO!”
State fairs can be profoundly delightful events. The Minneapolis State Fair, for example, features immaculately groomed farm animals, stunningly large gourds, thrilling cowboy shows, quilts that clearly took hundreds of hours to make, and perhaps best of all, sculptures of local pageant winners made entirely out of butter. It is a perfect event, and the whole region knows it: A single day typically draws more than 100,000 people, and the whole thing pulls in around 2 million people. Trump’s Great American State Fair made no attempt to emulate the most charming elements of fairs. It instead tried, limply, to spread a Trump rally across a 1.5-mile-long fairground, with some MAHA PowerPoints thrown in. As a result, it committed one of the worst crimes possible, in the eyes of President Trump: It made MAGA look boring.
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