Trump ruins everything
By 
While the reality TV version of Donald Trump would have put on the best semiquincentennial celebration ever, the real one is putting on a combination of banal partisan rally and D- underfunded county fair:
I stopped by the Great American State Fair on Tuesday. The website listed the day’s theme as “Innovation, Technology & Progress.” It doesn’t get more on-theme for The Future, Now & Then than that.
I documented the trip in a bluesky thread, the highlights of which are featured on Flaming Hydra (have you subscribed to Flaming Hydra yet? It is the absolute best. Please subscribe.)
The most striking part of the experience, really, was just how boring it all was. I did not expect the Fair to be good, but I expected it would be an interesting sort of bad. Trumpist aesthetics include an awful lot of trolling and demagoguery. Both are bad and socially corrosive; neither are boring. The UFC fight on the Whitehouse lawn was an absolute assault on the senses. The Fair was something else.
The Great American State Fair isn’t like a trip to Epcot, or to the World’s Fair. There just isn’t nearly enough to do there. I have spent 14 hours at Epcot with small children. I do not recommend it. But the kids never lacked for entertainment at Epcot.
It also isn’t much like a state or county fair. It has the trappings of one. There’s a Ferris Wheel. There is a daily rodeo. There are (air conditioned) booths, where you can learn about states or federal agencies. But it’s all half-done, as if the planning team got DOGE’d early and no one noticed the to-do list left undone.
[…]
The crowds are sparse, on par with the tourist traffic you’d see on the Mall during a normal summer day. The Fair is much too spread out, extending across seven city blocks. It runs eleven hours a day, for two weeks straight. And, again, there is nothing to do there.
And as with much else about Trump 2.0, things would be much better had he just...done nothing:
“We put it all together to really tell the story … of how Donald Trump hijacked what should have been a unifying national celebration and repurposed it for his own interests,” Huffman said in a Zoom interview. “This was a team of operatives using the Freedom 250 shell company, but it was also Donald Trump himself telling them what to do.”
The White House referred a request for comment to Freedom 250, though Freedom 250 told NPR that it does not speak for the White House.
Freedom 250 is the public-private partnership behind some of the summer’s most high-profile anniversary events, including a UFC fight outside the White House in June, a controversial state fair on the National Mall, a July Fourth fireworks show opening with a Trump rally, and the “Patriot Games,” a high school athletic competition scheduled for August.
It was created via executive order last year, and describes itself as “the national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday.” But it’s not the only one: Congress had created a nonpartisan commission called America250 for this same purpose in 2016.
Democratic critics and watchdog groups say Trump decided to forge ahead with his own group after unsuccessful attempts to pack America 250 with his allies. Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025 under the National Park Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the National Park Service, whose board now includes a number of Trump loyalists, including Chris LaCivita, senior adviser on his 2024 campaign.
His reaction after nobody attends his 110 degree Nuremberg rally this weekend is going to be particularly grim.