President Donald Trump’s failing Great American State Fair has suffered another public embarrassment.
The 16-day event on the National Mall was designed to kick off America’s 250th anniversary celebrations. However, Trump’s celebration continues to be plagued by bad luck, bad weather and bad attendance numbers.
Power cuts on day one of the State Fair saw ice cream in the food hall melt, while the Ferris wheel was also briefly out of action due to generator problems.
On Friday, Vanilla Ice, the last artist standing among the string of musicians who axed playing concerts at the State Fair, had his show canceled due to “inclement weather.”
The elements also saw the State Fair temporarily closed on Sunday afternoon at around 2.00 p.m. However, a digital billboard alerting attendees featured an embarrassing typo in the name of the taxpayer-funded organization staging the event, adding bad spelling to their problems.
Stating that the fair had been postponed due to “severe weather” in reference to the extreme heat and rain in Washington, the billboard then told people to head to “Freeedom 250″ social media for more updates.
The sign, posted by writer Amanda Moore, was quickly seized upon by social media users who spotted the extra ‘e’ in freedom.
One user said the freedom to misspell was “in the Constitootin,” another said the extra ‘E’ stood for Epstein, while one person compared Trump’s event to the disastrous Fyre music festival flop.
The Daily Beast has contacted Freedom 250 and the White House for comment.
The fair re-opened around 4.00 p.m Sunday after the “weather hold” was lifted.
Despite the weather and crowd issues, Trump’s favorite network Fox News has continued to defend the event.
Speaking on Fox’s The Big Weekend Show on Sunday afternoon, hosts Tomi Lahren, Joey Jones, Marty Katherine and Kevin Corke showed footage of the sparsely-attended fair, saying visitors had flocked there despite the weather.
Corke even attempted to defend the event as the panel sat in front of a lawn area where only a handful of people could be seen.
“Sometimes the pictures really don’t tell the full story because if you look behind us, you see, okay, there’s a couple hundred people back there but the truth is, when you make your way over here and you’re in this wash of people,” Corke said.
“I don’t how many people you guys saw on the way over there,” he added, “but I’m not kidding, I think there were thousands.”
Jones noted there had been “pooh-poohers on the X,” questioning his math.
“The North Carolina booth is counting 880 people an hour coming through their booth,” Jones said. “So unless they have the same 880 people lined up going around, there are thousands of people here. And that’s with rain... the fact that it is heightened security just because of the world right now, it’s really an awesome crowd.”
Reached for comment about Sunday’s closure, Freedom250 spokesperson Rachel Reisner earlier told the Daily Beast in a statement: “The media found time to report on a rain delay but somehow missed the real story: states as different as Texas, Colorado, Arizona, California, and New York all showed up to the same fairgrounds and set up booths along the same stretch of the National Mall.
She added, “Red states, blue states, and everything in between, coming together ahead of our nation’s 250th anniversary — and somehow that’s not the story. Maybe try covering that next time instead of the weather.”
