Donald Trump’s so-called state fair is a fucking disaster.
No one is going.
No. One.
But Mr. Reality-TV Game Show Host wants you to believe it’s PACKED. He keeps saying it — over and over, to anyone who’ll listen and plenty who won’t. “Packed! Tremendous crowds! People are saying they’ve never seen anything like it!”
My guy…
My saggy, overcooked-rotisserie-chicken-skinned guy…
Nobody is saying that. Nobody is there to say anything.
“Packed.”
My daughter’s seventh birthday Zoom during COVID had more bodies per square inch — twelve kids in twelve little boxes, half of them frozen mid-blink in 480p — and they still showed up harder than the entire United States showed up for this. Seven-year-olds who couldn’t unmute themselves out-attended America’s national birthday party.
This “fair” has all the desolate, dolorous, dust-blown energy of a mall food court after the apocalypse. A Spirit Halloween in February. The funeral for a pool vacuum, closed casket, no flowers. I keep looking at these pictures wondering what the fuck I’m even looking at. Where’s the food? Where’s the Gravitron? Where’s the giant slide that gives a kid a wedgie so violent it rearranges his ancestry? Where’s the rigged ring toss everybody keeps feeding another five bucks because this is definitely the time we win the giant stuffed banana?
This isn’t a state fair. It’s a county zoning hearing with a Ferris wheel.
They gave America’s 250th birthday exactly two rides. Two. For the most powerful country in the history of the planet. Somewhere on that field a single, solemn, sunburned child rode one creaking Ferris wheel bucket to commemorate two and a half centuries of revolution and jazz and the moon landing, while a refurbished carousel wheezed its calliope into the empty air for an audience of no one. A music box playing itself in a house where everybody died.
Into that silence walked Dean Cain, trying to help. Trumpy Superman climbed to the top of the Ferris wheel to prove it was packed and accidentally posted the loneliest game of Where’s Waldo? ever printed. Dean. Buddy. That’s not a flex — that’s an aerial survey of an extinction event. Faster than a speeding lie, dumber than a bag of capes, hovering over a field of resolutely fucking nobody.
He wasn’t the only one who came back with evidence for the prosecution. The porta-potties looked busier than the midway. The only ride with a line was the exit. Somewhere out there, a funnel cake vendor is explaining to his wife that they can’t make rent because he bet the summer on a fair that drew fewer people than a smoke break.
And the Fox anchors planted themselves in front of that vast, bald, barren nothing and swore to the nation, straight-faced, that there were “thousands of people here” — poor bastards who stared into the abyss and the abyss stared right back and filed for fucking unemployment.
Then some genius decided the cure for all this emptiness was a monument. The sad peeling arch on the Mall is just the mockup of the real one he’s trying to force into existence: a hundred-million-dollar knockoff Arc de Triomphe he wants to plant right where it would blot out the view of Arlington, so four hundred thousand buried veterans can spend eternity rotting in the shadow of his ego.
And the preview — the goddamn trailer for his own immortality — is already peeling. Already exhausted. Already standing there with its own emotional support traffic cone. The Romans built arches that survived emperors and invasions and two thousand years of weather. This one is sagging in a stiff breeze off the Potomac. Spoiler alert: it won’t survive Tuesday. He reached for permanence, posterity, and prestige and shat out a wet church pamphlet with delusions of grandeur.
If the arch was the low point of ambition, the actual nadir arrived in handcuffs. Because the universe has a savage sense of humor, the biggest headline out of the Great American State Fair wasn’t a sold-out concert — it was police arresting a fifty-four-year-old livestreamer in a head-to-toe Uncle Sam costume for allegedly beating off to the acrobats. Three witnesses. Broad daylight. Stars and stripes from stovepipe to spats. Two hundred and fifty years of Lexington and Gettysburg and the goddamn moon landing, and the most passionate patriot at the entire semiquincentennial was a pervert in a Sam suit spanking himself senseless at the circus — and honestly, he’s still the only person at this fair who felt anything.
The only one who came willingly anyway.
That’s the fair. A bald lawn, a buckling arch, and a busted blowjob to patriotism. And Donald Trump — who wasn’t even there, who couldn’t be bothered to attend his own vanity project — gets on Truth Social and says… “PACKED.”
If that’s packed, then I’m a natural fucking blonde who never fucking swears.
(credit Aaron Rupar)
He is so congenitally incapable of admitting reality that he’ll survey a fair nobody attended and pronounce it rammed to the gills, because his ego cannot metabolize rejection. It comes back up as all-caps grievance about OBUMA — the psychic reflux of a man who has never once in his gilded life sat with not being wanted.
Eighty years old and still throwing the tantrum of a tiny tyrant whose bounce-house birthday got rained out.
Temu Commodus can’t handle the truth. This Mar-a-Lago Mussolini prince of pomp and pretense cannot handle that his star-spangled stupidfest bombed — that nobody, not one living soul, wanted to come to his small-in-the-pants, box-of-potatoes party.
So, he lies. Again. About something every one of us can see with our own two fucking eyes. And underneath the whole sorry spectacle sits something that isn’t funny at all. This was never supposed to be his party. It was the 250th birthday of the whole blood-and-bone, bruised-but-beautiful experiment — every off-key kid who ever butchered the anthem at a ballgame, every grandmother who ever ironed a flag flat on the kitchen table, my father, your father, the whole sprawling impossible country of us. And the country looked at its own birthday cake and stayed the fuck home.
My kids only get one 250th birthday. Yours do too. This was supposed to be theirs. Instead, they got two rides, a peeling arch, and another vanity project built around a man who can’t stand celebrating anything that isn’t himself.
He doesn’t give a single wet shit about this fair because he doesn’t give a shit about the country’s 250th. He doesn’t want one goddamn thing on this earth honored if it isn’t honoring him first, loudest, and forever, world without end, amen. They saw his name stapled all over it and stayed home. I have seen more give-a-damn out of a bitter ex-wife cornered into picking the fucking decorations for the baby shower of her former nanny and future stepmom to her own kids — than this hollowed-out, humorless husk of a man put into the birthday of the nation he swore an oath to. It’s the party a malignant narcissist throws when the guest of honor isn’t in the mirror: an empty field and a lie about the crowd.
The sickest joke of all isn’t even at the fairgrounds. In 1976, people flooded into Washington for the Bicentennial — a whole week of it, proud, joyous, and, say it with me, packed. Our generation never got that, and most of us will be pushing ninety by the next one, gumming our pretzels through dentures. This was the one that was supposed to be ours.
There was a plan to give it to us, a good one: America250, the bipartisan commission Congress stood up back in 2016 to build a party that belonged to everyone — left, right, and everybody too goddamn tired to pick a side. So naturally he strangled it in the crib. Wheeled out his own tacky knockoff, Freedom 250, elbowed the real thing off the stage, and watched seven states grab their coats and get the hell out. The headliners bailed too — every one of them would rather eat a parking ticket than share a marquee with this shit — so he scraped together a military band and turned what was supposed to be a concert into another sweaty, self-pitying, self-congratulatory rally about deportations and grievance and the boundless, bottomless tragedy of being him.
Congress set aside a hundred and fifty million dollars for the bipartisan commission — the one legally required to open its goddamn books to daylight — and to date it has choked down about twenty-five million of it. His shadow operation, Freedom 250, with its curtained donors and it’s who-the-fuck-knows oversight, run out of the White House like a numbers racket out of the back of a shuttered dry cleaner, has hoovered up sixty-eight million and counting straight out of the Interior Department.
For months, Senate Democrats have been asking the questions any half-sentient citizen would ask — is there foreign money sloshing around in that slush fund? Is face time with the president being auctioned off alongside the “donations” like a fucking timeshare? — and the answer, every single time, is the sound of a phone ringing in an empty room while somebody in there decides you’re not worth the lie.
Twenty-five million for the country’s birthday. Sixty-eight million for his. Fucking congratulations, America — you finally threw a party where the cake ate you.
They’re not celebrating America. They’re celebrating him.
You can see it in the grass itself — acre after untrodden acre, green and unbothered, holding the shape of everyone who stayed away. Two hundred and fifty years of a country, shoveled into the mouth of the smallest man it ever produced — and he’ll die still hungry.
Empty.
And sad.
Happy birthday, America. Save me a pretzel. I hear they’re twenty-five bucks, and the ice cream’s already fucking gone.
And with that, today’s song:
via @YouTube
It might not be much of a fair, but it continues to be one helluva circus. (Just don’t tell Uncle Sam). 🤢
I love you guys!
Stay safe out there, stay strong, and stay connected to each other!
💙 Jo
