{"id":328,"date":"2026-07-01T11:36:36","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T11:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=328"},"modified":"2026-07-01T11:36:36","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T11:36:36","slug":"trumps-state-fair-is-a-crime-against-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=328","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s State Fair Is a Crime Against Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Washington, D.C., is an overwhelmingly blue city. And so it hasn\u2019t been surprising to see that the local response to President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cGreat American State Fair\u201d on the National Mall has not been to attend the fair, but to mock it.<\/p>\n

Read more Elena Kagan Was the Only One to See Through the Supreme Court\u2019s New Gift to Trump<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s Freedom 250 organization, was meant, as Trump said in its kickoff speech, to be a celebration of no longer being a \u201cdead country\u201d but instead \u201cthe hottest country anywhere in the world.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019 dud. And nothing made that clearer than the anemic display from its \u201cMAHA Monday.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMAHA Monday,\u201d a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s \u201cmake America healthy again\u201d wellness politics, was billed online as a day to \u201cdiscover how wellness can be fun, flavorful, and part of everyday life\u201d and learn about \u201cfeeling better, living longer, and doing it the American way.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

It found none of them.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cGreat Awakening\u201d; 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cAMERICA IS BACK,\u201d and the Education Department booth featured an advertisement for a \u201cpatriotic\u201d museum. That department, long a target of conservative ire, didn\u2019t even get a full booth: Half of its space had been given to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.<\/p>\n

The problem, it seemed clear, was that the organizers had put too much emphasis on trumpeting MAGA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The MAHA theme, it turned out, played out exclusively in discussion-based events on two stages on opposite sides of the fairgrounds. On the \u201cFreedom Stage,\u201d 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\u2019s podcast. On the main stage, there was \u201cHolistic Hilda,\u201d emphasizing the value of eating locally; a \u201cWhy Water Matters!\u201d event; and a physical fitness group called \u201cNever Surrender USA\u201d discussing how women could build discipline and strength \u201cto show up strong for your future families as wives and mothers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court Narrowly Rules That America Can Stay America<\/a><\/p>\n

In the context of a state fair, these lectures couldn\u2019t hold the crowd\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cFreedom Truck Mobile Museum\u201d and the \u201cWar Department\u201d display. The overall event felt empty. It wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019t see anyone lining up for that. ABBA piped through the speakers.<\/p>\n

The only real sign of life came from the FIFA \u201cFan Zone,\u201d 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 \u201csleep is when the brain cleanses itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why this has bothered Trump, who opened the fair with a speech declaring, \u201cWe\u2019re respected by everybody. Nobody\u2019s laughing at us anymore.\u201d On Monday night, he vented his own frustration over the fair\u2019s failure through his typical defensive bluster. \u201cDo 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?\u201d he wrote on social media. \u201cAsk yourself this simple question, \u2018DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?\u2019 THE ANSWER IS NO!\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Brett Kavanaugh Gave Trump\u2019s Attack on Birthright Citizenship a Road Map<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been to a great state fair. I have now also been to Trump’s state fair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[52,10,140,175],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-district-of-columbia","tag-donald-trump","tag-health","tag-travel"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s State Fair Is a Crime Against Fun - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=328\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s State Fair Is a Crime Against Fun - Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I have been to a great state fair. 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