Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been busted trying to hide how few people bothered to watch her speak at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair flop.
Rollins was interviewed by Debbie Kraulidis for the Moms for America podcast on stage at the sparsely attended event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
The top Trump ally promoted the talk on X with a brief seven-second video that crucially did not show the crowd. At one point, the camera cuts to a shot of Rollins and Kraulidis from the back of the stage, which also strategically obscures the audience.
However, another video posted by FactPost embarrasses Rollins by revealing the “nonexistent crowd” watching her, confirming that only a handful of people were in front of the stage.
The Great American State Fair, organized by the Trump-backed Freedom250 group, was supposed to be a triumphant celebration marking America’s 250th birthday.
However, the event has been dogged by a series of setbacks, most notably its poor attendance.
The lack of turnout at the much-hyped event is particularly embarrassing for Trump, who has frequently fixated on crowd sizes at his rallies and events.
The 80-year-old president was reportedly irate at how few people came to watch his speech on the National Mall last week to kick off the 16-day event.
Trump, who only decided to give a speech after so many musical acts scheduled for the fair pulled out, was enraged after he saw an aerial shot revealing just how sparsely attended the event was, CNN reported.
Multiple White House officials who had shared similar photos of Trump’s speech on social media quickly deleted their posts to avoid further embarrassment for the president.
The lackluster attendance is now causing panic over whether Trump will also draw a similarly small crowd when he delivers his July 4 speech on the National Mall as part of the Independence Day celebrations.
Trump’s inner circle is now scrambling to find someone to blame for the poor turnout at the Great American State Fair, which still faces several more days of embarrassingly low attendance.
“The mistake here was not driving attendance,” a person close to the White House told CNN. “It was an ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality that failed.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Rollins’ office for comment.
