Fox & Friends is back in the studio after two days at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, which it spent talking up over live shots of empty grass.
The 80-year-old president’s favorite morning show had gone to the National Mall to help sell his 16-day festival marking the nation’s 250th birthday, which he kicked off with a rally last Wednesday. Instead, its cameras kept beaming out the bare lawns and thin crowds that undercut his boasts that the event was “packed.”
Trump won’t get much of a break. The weekday crew—Brian Kilmeade, 62, Ainsley Earhardt, 49, and Lawrence Jones, 33—was only ever booked at the fair for Monday and Tuesday. But the weekend team—Rachel Campos-Duffy, 54, Charlie Hurt, 53, and Griff Jenkins, 51—will be back on Sunday to close out the network’s coverage, with other shows broadcasting from the Mall in between.
By Wednesday, the regular couch was back at the studio desk, where Kilmeade welcomed an audience of first responders, veterans, and their families as he and his colleagues filed back onto the set. “Thank you for watching at home,” Kilmeade told viewers. “We’ve been away for 48 hours. They’ve been waiting for us to return. We appreciate it.”
Trump has cast the fair as a runaway success. The president wrote in a Monday post on Truth Social that it had been “packed with happy people” over the weekend, and he claimed that 45,000 people turned out for his opening-night speech.
Fox’s own cameras blew apart the president’s boasts. The network’s live shots from the Mall repeatedly framed wide stretches of empty grass behind its anchors. On other mornings, the walkways and booths behind the set sat all but empty. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, 28, turned up on the show Monday to gush about the fair with a bare lawn.
The Washington Post reported that turnout on the fair’s first day was “relatively sparse compared with past National Mall events,” with Reuters photographs showing nowhere near the numbers the president had touted.
Trump has been decidedly less sanguine behind the scenes. He grew furious after seeing an aerial photo of sparsely filled fields beyond his opening-night audience, CNN reported on Wednesday, and White House aides who had posted the image quietly deleted it afterward.
The event has faltered from the outset. Musicians, including Bret Michaels and Milli Vanilli, pulled their performances over the fair’s partisan tilt, and several states declined to send delegations, citing cost or politics.
Opening-day power failures knocked out the food hall, spoiling ice cream and stalling the 110-foot Ferris wheel. Storms forced repeated closures, and a planned Vanilla Ice set was scrapped and never rescheduled. A Confederate flag briefly surfaced in the North Carolina pavilion before organizers removed it.
The Daily Beast has contacted the network and the White House for further comment.
