There are events that fail quietly and there are events that fail on live national television during the broadcast specifically designed to celebrate them, and the Great American State Fair achieved the second outcome Tuesday morning when “Fox and Friends” broadcast from the National Mall and found, according to Raw Story, nobody there.
Aaron Rupar captured the footage and Raw Story ran with the framing Tuesday morning: “Fox & Friends is broadcasting from a completely empty Trump state fair on the National Mall. There seems to be little risk in ruling out the rapture as an explanation.” The joke requires explanation only if you have not seen the footage. A national celebration of America’s 250th birthday, organized around the president’s personal involvement, broadcast on the network most sympathetic to that president, found an empty field where the crowds were supposed to be. Per Raw Story: “You can hear the whispering in the White House across the Mall from the Smithsonian Aviation Museum, ‘Well, that didn’t work, and that’s bad, really bad.'”
This is the same fair where Trump claimed 45,000 attendees on opening night, a figure that diverged from independent crowd estimates by a margin wide enough to constitute its own controversy, and where the words “8647” were burned into the grass nearby in April as a coded message about the president that the White House called “absolutely sick.” The code has now reportedly appeared again, this time inside the fairgrounds themselves, according to Raw Story’s ongoing coverage, meaning the protest is no longer confined to the grass outside the event. It has moved inside the event, during the event, while the cameras were rolling.
The fair is scheduled to run through July 10. The opening night drew, by Trump’s own count, 45,000 people, a figure The Washington Post and NBC News independently estimated as closer to 1,000. The empty-Mall footage from Tuesday morning did not require independent verification. It was simply empty, on camera, during the broadcast that was supposed to show America celebrating itself.
Raw Story’s piece closes on the observation that liberals following “Jesus’s real message” sit “firmly ensconced pretty much anywhere but the Great American State Fair,” which is the kind of joke that only works because the Mall genuinely had nobody on it when the cameras turned on.
When the network built to celebrate the president’s birthday party broadcasts live footage of an empty field, who exactly is the party for?
Sources
Raw Story: Ex-Bush official says Trump is handing Democrats a loaded weapon
Raw Story: Trump news roundup
