Dead country fair
David Roth gets to the heart of this country's current state.
There are basically no metrics by which Trump's second presidency could be called a success. Even in the areas in which it has excelled, virtually all of which involve the generation of needless human suffering, its predations and brutality have fallen short of the depraved fantasies of the aspiring genocidaires who conceived and oversee them. These were very ambitious goals for people with so limited an understanding of and so little respect for actual work. Their actions will, we can hope, be adjudicated at truth and reconciliation hearings sometime in the future, but for now we might as well take them at their word when it comes to how sincerely they want all this awful shit. It's just that these are not people who could really have other jobs, from the gnarled TV creatures and defective podcaster atop vital agencies to the weedy groyper freaks and chittering adult libertarians filling out the ranks below; they scream at underlings on speakerphone and suck up to their bosses in meetings that lack the substance to fulfill the "could have been an email" part of the remit, and then they fuck off on vacation, or just back onto their phones. The metaphors collapse instantly into slapstick—they literally are clomping around in too-big shoes while Playing Daddy.
For his movement, the work of governance means terraforming reality so that it more closely resembles its own incoherent fantasies—ghoulish AI regurgitations of postwar soda-shop bullshit, and bombs exploding in night vision; big white monuments and big white families; every cloying trope of midcentury advertising somehow becoming real and instantly curdling. For Trump, it just means replacing everything with himself, and what he likes. Projects like the Freedom 250 event, of which the Great American State Fair is a leading part, is a synthesis of those aims. It's a blowzy, stilted celebration of something no one really wants to celebrate, a janky void guarded by phalanxes of bored cops and otherwise literally and figuratively empty of humanity. It sucks.
Taken on its face, it is tough to figure out what was even being celebrated here. But it scans much more intelligibly as a characteristically hapless attempt at transubstantiation from Trump himself, an attempt to create an America that's as small and shabby as one of those ruddy second or third weddings at Mar-a-Lago into which the president sometimes wanders and Makes Some Remarks.
That the event itself is so deserted, that it was failing and crumbling from the moment its security gates opened, that no one seems to want it or even understand what it is, certainly has caused Trump some embarrassment. But its failure is less a refutation of his vision than its apotheosis—a lavishly gated and shoddily finished Dead Country brought to life for him to rule from in front of his television. It's a desolation that Trump understands as safe precisely because it is so shadeless and sparsely populated, and because that exclusive purgatory has supplanted a place that disgusted him precisely because it was so open. The National Mall is, among other things, a place they let anyone into, and so in that sense not really all that Hot. That space has been successfully closed off at Trump's command, and as such not just transformed but brought back from the dead. Behind those fences, beyond the cops, is Trump's vision for the hottest country in the world. It's baking and empty and joyless, and echoes all day long with praise for the clown that made it.