I stopped by the Great American State Fair on Tuesday. The website listed the day’s theme as "Innovation, Technology & Progress.” It doesn’t get more on-theme for The Future, Now & Then than that.
I documented the trip in a bluesky thread, the highlights of which are featured on Flaming Hydra (have you subscribed to Flaming Hydra yet? It is the absolute best. Please subscribe.).
The most striking part of the experience, really, was just how boring it all was. I did not expect the Fair to be good, but I expected it would be an interesting sort of bad. Trumpist aesthetics include an awful lot of trolling and demagoguery. Both are bad and socially corrosive; neither are boring. The UFC fight on the Whitehouse lawn was an absolute assault on the senses. The Fair was something else.
The Great American State Fair isn’t like a trip to Epcot, or to the World’s Fair. There just isn’t nearly enough to do there. I have spent 14 hours at Epcot with small children. I do not recommend it. But the kids never lacked for entertainment at Epcot.
It also isn’t much like a state or county fair. It has the trappings of one. There’s a Ferris Wheel. There is a daily rodeo. There are (air conditioned) booths, where you can learn about states or federal agencies. But it’s all half-done, as if the planning team got DOGE’d early and no one noticed the to-do list left undone.
Really, what are we doing here, folks?
It also — and this is the real, inexcusable flaw — is not like the Smithsonian. The National Mall is home to world-class, free museums. If you are going to hold a 250th anniversary celebration on the National Mall, it either has to be distinctly different than the Smithsonian, or else it has to be better than the Smithsonian.
The state exhibits are lackluster. But they’re particularly an embarrassment because the National Museum of American History is right there, across the street, just steps beyond the fencing. The largest display belonged to SpaceX. It was underwhelming in its own right, and rendered downright pathetic when you consider the National Air & Space Museum is two blocks away, open to the public, with much better exhibits.
The crowds are sparse, on par with the tourist traffic you’d see on the Mall during a normal summer day. The Fair is much too spread out, extending across seven city blocks. It runs eleven hours a day, for two weeks straight. And, again, there is nothing to do there.
When I visited, the largest crowd I found was watching the rodeo. That crowd filled a pair of small bleacher seats. Imagine the away crowd at a high school football game, in a state that doesn’t particularly care about high school football. That’s as big as it got.
I walked the entire Mall and saw everything there was to see in under two hours. It is punishingly hot outside. People aren’t going to spend the day just hanging out at the fairgrounds. And they aren’t going to cluster around the big events or attractions, because they either don’t exist or haven’t been publicized.
Another reason for the lack of crowds is the complete absence of any public schedule of events. The Fair has three performance stages. You cannot search online to find out who is performing when. You are not handed a program upon arrival. It turns out that when you register (for free, no actual ticket required), you are added to an email distribution list. Each morning, they send out the day’s schedule of events. I signed up on Tuesday afternoon, so I didn’t receive an event schedule until Wednesday. (Glenn Beck appeared on the Wednesday mainstage. His was the only name in the lineup that I recognized.)
This is no way to run a fair or a festival. It’s no way to run an event of any sort.
The saddest moment of my visit came while watching a performer on the National Endowment for the Arts stage. He had an audience of one. In between songs, he thanked the crowd and asked them (her) to follow him on Instagram. Logistically, this is unavoidable. People will not show up to a concert if no one informs them it is happening. Particularly not in 100 degree heat.
The worst part of the Fair is the Freedom Truck. DO NOT ENTER THE FREEDOM TRUCK! Inside you will find a Prager U exhibit on American history. Again, let me remind you that the National Museum of American History is RIGHT ACROSS THE GODDAMN STREET, PEOPLE!
The second worst part of the Fair was everything else.
animated George Washington, powered by Prager U. This broke me. I am broken now.
My hunch is that the event organizers got spooked by all the cancellations, so they decided to keep the performance schedule quiet. Another possibility is that they are still scrambling to fill performance slots, and they simply don’t have the schedule locked in until the day-of.
I cannot decide which possibility is more embarrassing. These are not professionals. They are not qualified to plan a toddler’s birthday party. I cannot imagine being this bad at the nuts-and-bolts of your job, in public, where everyone can see you being see your basic incompetence on full display.
Just imagine planning a cross-country trip to attend this fair: It spans two weeks. There is no advance agenda to plan around. So you… pick a weekday at random? You arrive to find empty exhibit halls and overpriced food. I hope you like Glenn Beck, and I hope you happened to show up on Glenn Beck day? The nice thing, I suppose, is that you can get real close to the stage. But that’s because attendance is so low and spread out that you feel basically alone.
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian museums are just past the fencing. You could have a better experience, cheaper meals, and (much) better air-conditioning just a block or so away. But it isn’t a special occasion for the Smithsonian. It’s just a weekday. This is what they do all the time.
So it isn’t a state fair, and it isn’t the World’s Fair. The in-person experience is like the empty shell of a fairground experience. One Ferris Wheel, and no other rides. Three event stages, but no performance schedule. Dozens of booths, with nothing to offer visitors.
But what it does have is cameras, all pointed at those event stages. The performances have the texture of a Congressman giving a fiery speech to an empty chamber, broadcast live on C-SPAN, for an audience of no one in particular.
The Great American State Fair isn’t meant for the attendees at all. It’s online content. It’s meant for the streamers and online viewers.
That’s what it most reminds me of: it’s a digital Potemkin Village. They didn’t bother to create a real fair, or bring people together to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. They just threw something together that would look good-enough for the propaganda outlets, and called it a day.
And that’s the element of Trumpism that it most invokes: the rank amateurism… the slapdash construction… the sense that they just can’t be bothered to try anymore. Planning a national, multi-week event is a huge undertaking. It requires planning and execution. It is hard work. And what visiting the Great American State Fair reminds you of is that our current government just doesn’t do the hard work any longer.