A 110-foot Ferris wheel is the centerpiece of the Great American State Fair currently come to town in our nation’s capital, which is not a state the last time I checked. It is the brainchild of Freedom 250, an organization overseeing—or, rather, botching—the president’s $60 million marquee celebration of America’s 250th birthday.
On opening day, the Ferris wheel stalled. It lurched. It stopped. It started. Then stopped again. Freedom 250’s spokesperson Julia Friedland called it a “power hiccup.”
She didn’t know how right she was.
You could not have planned this level of epic and symbolic failure if you tried.
On opening night, Trump told another truly Trumpian whopper, claiming the fair drew 45,000 people. He also said everybody stayed until the end of his speech and “loved hearing about a truly successful America,” even as photographs showed dozens of attendees walking out while he was still talking.
Independent estimates placed opening night attendance at somewhere just north of 1,000, and days later, even the most frothy MAGA-loyal coverage from the scene couldn’t obscure the fact that crowds simply have not materialized.
When critical coverage rolled in, Trump did what Trump does: He woke up at 6:27 a.m. (likely, earlier still; it’ll surely take some time to massage those bruised sausage fingers into a state ready to rage-tweet) and fired off a Truth Social meltdown. “Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” he wrote, before questioning, in full caps, whether Obama or Biden could have pulled it off.
The answer, Donald, is that they probably could have kept the lights on.
Because, you see, there has been dairy drama. On the fair’s first full operating day, its food hall lost power. Must have been another hiccup? Vendors stood in the dark. The entire ice cream supply melted. Would this have been an issue with raw milk? Raw milk from Melania the cow, perhaps? Well, it was MAHA day at the fair yesterday, so maybe RFK found out.
Workers were still waiting for a replacement shipment of the sweet treat the following morning. This is not a minor logistical calamity since ice cream, along with butter sculptures and dunk tanks, is at the heart of state fairs nationwide. Has anyone signed up for the Natalie Harp butter sculpture contest? And has anyone confirmed what hours the Don Jr. dunk tank will be operating?
Look, a fair with one ride that stopped working, subpar snacks, an eerie AI-generated president, and Melania the cow was never going to draw enthusiastic crowds.
It hasn’t drawn performers either. In the weeks leading up to the fair, nearly every popular act booked for the entertainment lineup withdrew, citing the event’s political tone. Apparently, “Freedom 250” didn’t fool anyone.
Bret Michaels and Milli Vanilli—not exactly Bad Bunny, or even newly-minted conservative icon Nicki Minaj—pulled out. The marquee replacement was Vanilla Ice. Remember him circa 1991? “I’ll play in Iran if you want,” he said. “I don’t even vote, so I don’t even care.”
But this ice melted too. His performance was canceled two hours before showtime due to bad weather, and he never came back. (Yes, the fair has already been shut down once due to weather conditions.)
Another sad state of fair affairs? The U.S. states themselves. Freedom 250 promised all fifty would be represented through individual pavilions and booths. At least 11 refused to participate, from the hills of Oregon to the shores of Rhode Island, with no-shows in between.
The absent states cited costs and, in Oregon’s case, “growing concerns that the event is shaping up to be a more partisan affair than originally presented.” (Someone from Freedom 250, with the creativity of a bowerbird, subsequently took it upon themselves to build Oregon’s display. It consists of a sign reading “the Beaver State” and a single wooden chair.) The states that did show up ranged from tired to, well, maybe treasonous. Maine’s exhibit was a bare room with lobster facts on the wall, while a subtle “86 47”message was found in artwork within the Texas state tent. Texas!
And what to make of the two-by-four arch taking as much grief as the actor and insufferable Trump loyalist Dean Cain’s photo of ghosts. Looming over the fairgrounds—it doesn’t seem fair to call the grounds fair!?—is a plywood replica of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, a $100 million vanity monument modeled on the Arc de Triomphe which Trump has said he wants built in his honor, as if the White House ballroom wasn’t enough.
The replica, which online critics have already compared to the undersized Stonehenge in This Is Spinal Tap, has been observed to be visibly peeling, its vinyl covering separating from the wooden frame beneath. A monument to a monument to a president falling down fast, like his poll numbers.
Just down the Mall sits the now fenced-off Reflecting Pool. If it could talk, it would tell the fake arch, the melted ice cream, and the stalled Ferris wheel: “Boy, do I feel your pain.” The $16 million renovation is marred by peeling paint and blooming algae. The thing that was supposed to make other reflecting pools green with envy is now a visible green bruise. The mirror that was supposed to reflect America back at itself is now a pungent blight.
This is, in all its infamous glory, the story of the Trump administration. The gap between the scale of the ambition and the shoddiness of the execution. The obsession with the optics of greatness over the unglamorous work of actually governing. The crowds that aren’t there. The promises that melt in the heat. The generator that fails and the hiccups that just keep coming.
But here’s the thing about hiccups: they end. They are loud and disruptive and deeply undignified, and then they become exhausting, and then they are over. Sometimes you just need a scare.
At 250, the Ferris wheel of democracy has lurched and stalled and started and stopped. It has done that before, too. And it has always—eventually, fitfully, stubbornly—started turning again. When it does so again, that will truly be worth a real all-American party.
