The Great American State Fair feels rushed, simulated and oddly sterile
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Trump administration’s signature 250th celebration is strangely short on nostalgia — and long on defense contractors and “Fox & Friends.”
There is a garishly illuminated Ferris wheel, a few animals and, when I visited Thursday, an hour-long rodeo display that pitched the sport as a MAGA metaphor for American grit, courage and exceptionalism. But beyond that, it felt like a trade show for Christian groups, tourist boards and the military industrial complex. Luckily, crowds were thin, so it only took about 10 minutes to get into the short, immersive Northrop Grumman Sky Tunnel theater, which lets you fly along with a B-21 Raider and a Talon Blue, “the company’s next‑generation autonomous ‘wingman’ aircraft.”
Visitors pose for a photo with the Founding Fathers. (Nathan Howard/Reuters)
In the Faith and Family pavilion, you could get your picture taken with the Founding Fathers courtesy of Hillsdale College, and pick up literature from Revival Ministries International, whose founder Rodney Howard-Browne has said that child sacrifice and cannibalism are rampant in Hollywood , and that the horrific 2019 mass murder at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand , was a false-flag operation.
America’s 250 th might have been celebrated with a genuine festival of state fairs, or a 21 st century version of the national and international expositions of art and science that were popular in the 19 th century. The Trump administration could have let the Smithsonian stage a giant festival of American folkways, music, dance, art, craft and food. It could have defaulted to something like a theme park, which would at least have produced a seamless illusionism and a facsimile of the same folkways that are absent in the Trump show.
And it might have given the states the time, funding and freedom to create their own pavilions, representative of the magnificent diversity of this country’s architecture and design. Instead, everything is stuffed into a fake agora with Doric columns and arched niches painted onto cheap theatrical flats, which look like someone scaled up the photo murals found in a tatty Greek diner that sells gyros, moussaka and heart-bomb platters of pastitsio.
The prevailing diagnosis of this failure of imagination is that it was another rush job . I asked Eric Dowdle , an artist from Utah who paints brightly colored, highly detailed cartoonlike cityscapes full of American icons, how long he had to prepare, and he said he got the call to join the fair a week ago. He was pleasant and enthusiastic and occupied an enclosed booth next to Puerto Rico. He was happy to be there, but it felt like he was squatting in an Auntie Anne’s pretzel shop at the forlorn end of a soon-to-be-decommissioned shopping mall.
The weird phantasmagoria of classical architecture may be a symptom of bad or rushed planning, a lack of funds or perhaps the whimsical intervention of one of President Donald Trump’s ardent supporters in the beleaguered circle of traditionalist architects. Or, this could all be more intentional. I was reminded of the supposed Potemkin villages created for Russian Empress Catherine the Great by her minister: fake, portable visions of happy locals designed to convince the monarch that everything was for the best in her new, war-ravaged colonial territory of Crimea.
Or, perhaps we have a vision of what Trumpian culture mixed with Trumpian economic policies will yield for future Americans, if they can be made content with reality reduced to bite-size nibbles of experience, pleasure and swag.
Consider the difference between the UFC match at the White House on June 14, and the Great American State Fair, which runs through July 10. The former was meticulously planned, engineered and promoted. It cost more than $60 million for a one-night event, and probably more now that the grass on the Ellipse is ruined . The UFC match was staged for an elite audience of the president’s family, supporters, donors and corporate leaders (while ordinary Americans could watch it on screens far from the event, or for pay on Paramount+). And the design of the UFC arena, made of giant steel arches, framed views of the White House .
The fair’s grounds include a mock-up of the president’s planned triumphal arch. (Al Drago/Getty Images)
The Great American State Fair is a much more provisional affair. The layout of relentlessly straight, linear pavilions creates desultory, enclosed plazas of grass that don’t take advantage of the magnificent axial views of the Mall or the architecture along its north and south sides. A mock-up of Trump’s triumphal arch is intrusive and makes no sense given the supposed celebration of the gritty, granular authenticity of American cultural life.
The whole thing is turned inward and reduces American culture to the blindingly bland local tourism images you see upon arrival at a regional airport. It is an insular, denatured America without a whiff of apple pie or half-smokes; instead, you can take a selfie on a mock-up of the curved white sofa from the “Fox & Friends” studio. The Great American State Fair mimics in the real world the degraded pleasure and mindlessness of scrolling social media, a snatch of this, a bit of that and on to the next decontextualized nugget.
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I have thought this way too. The White House UFC event was a slick spectacle, for the wealthy and connected. The 4th of July event for the masses looks slipshod and incomplete.
Of course we know whose side trump is on.
I'm surprised that the hillsdale pedophile college isn't operating a daycare center, or youth ministry on the site ...
this is completely inexcusable
brought to you by the same thumper scum that organized the ellipse gathering prior to the attempted insurrection on J6.
Co-pilot
Rodney Howard‑Browne’s rhetoric overlaps with QAnon because he promotes the same core narrative structure—a hidden cabal of elites, satanic child‑abuse themes, apocalyptic spiritual warfare, and claims of secret plots against America. He does not need to say “QAnon” for the content to match QAnon’s worldview.
How does a "minister" like this get a spot at America's 250th anniversary celebration? Lets call that a rhetorical question.
it's getting worse