It's the Ten Percent, Stupid

The "replica Trump arch" at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall celebrating the semiquincentennial (half of 500th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, (Latin had a word, sēstertius, for "two and a half", which would have given us the more mellifluous "sestercentennial", and I think they really should have gone with that). I wonder, can you really have a "replica" of an edifice that hasn't in fact been built and likely never will be? Or is it a replica of one of the three-dimensional mini renderings Trump has been showing visitors in the Oval Office? If so, it's missing an awful lot of architectural detail on its vinyl coating over a wood frame (which had already started to buckle by Thursday evening), and the statue on top is wildly disproportional. Photo by Evy Mages via Washingtonian.

The Wingèd Liberty (classier, by Trump standards, than the flightless French one in New York Harbor), torch aloft, prepares for takeoff while her eagle companions nervously avert their eyes. The ferris wheel might have been full of customers—it was said to have attracted the longest lines on the site—had it not broken down due to generator issues.

As we enjoy our Schadenfreude over the sparse attendance, I think we're missing something important, and I don't mean the fact that the exhibits are a bit partisan, as The New York Times pointed out:

On the first day of the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, there were no butter sculptures, blue-ribbon livestock or prizewinning rutabaga pies to admire. But visitors could take in a gleaming portrait of President Trump, pick up a handbill promoting Turning Point USA and hear a speaker read a poem declaring every teen to be “a conscript in a spiritual world war.”

No, what's striking is how shoddy it is, how poorly conceived and executed, and how cheap, for the $103 million it reportedly cost to build; how little of anything there is to put a crowd in. How on earth did they even spend $103 million? What did they spend it on?

That's a bit of a story whose origins go back ten years to 2016, when Congress established the nonpartisan U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, later known as the America 250 Commission to plan the festivities, expected to cost something north of $250 million altogether from a mix of federal and corporate funds. Then Trump was reelected to the presidency and, about a week after his inauguration, issued Executive Order 14189 setting up a White House Task Force on Celebrating America's 250th Birthday which would seemingly work independently from America 250 in creating its own festivities, such as constructing the Garden of American Heroes in West Potomac Park, still unbuilt, and possibly the Great American State Fair Trump had begun talking about in 2023 to be held for a year on the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, visualized by an artist with this image I found at the terrific blog The Duckpin:

What we got in the Mall is clearly nothing like this (the Iowa version was actually meant for a state, instead of a colonized territory to which statehood has constantly been denied for no reason other than that it has too many Black voters). Note the "America 250" signs in this early sketch; Trump spent several months trying to take over America 250 by appointing cronies to its board, but failed and ended up christening his own commission as "Freedom 250" (as a subsidiary of the National Parks Foundation in October 2025).

Pretty sure I see the hand of Russell Vought the Great Impounder in all of this, especially in what happened to the congressionally mandated federal funding for the celebrations: America 250, which had been expecting at leat $100 million, has only received $25 million, while Freedom 250 has taken at least $68 million, supplemented by private  donations and sponsorships from companies like Palantir, Oracle, Deloitte, and Lockheed Martin, in return, of course, for special access to the president for donors of $1 million or more.

Public Citizen has broken down almost $126 million of all no-bid contracts awarded by Freedom 250 according to declared purpose—one of the most striking things there is $7.1 million given for organizing semiquincentennial events to the company Event Strategies, which organized the Donald Trump rally held at the Ellipse on January 6 2021—but that doesn't really answer the question of why all this money purchased so pathetically little. I found my own idea in a video by YouTuber Adam Mockler, who suggests simply that the money may have gone somewhere else, like into the Trump pockets, laundered through the Freedom 250 label.

We hear a lot about Trump's desperate desire to monumentalize himself and create a legacy in Washington of his presidency unlike that of any previous president, in his lifetime, in the sad knowledge that nobody will do it for him after he's dead. But that doesn't explain why the monuments are uniformly so crappy, cheap and ugly like the State Fair, ineffective and plainly corrupt like the Reflecting Pool, nonsensical like the Ballroom-Bunker, totally implausible like the Arc de Trumphe, embarrassing like the concert program that even the worst performers refused to participate in, or just insanely late (the July 4th fireworks won't start until 11:00 for some reason).

If Trump wants to turn Washington into a monument to himself the way Baron Haussmann turned Paris into a monument to Napoléon III, why are he and his people doing such a terrible job? In particular, why so on the cheap? Maybe, I'm suggesting, because he wants to keep the money himself, ten percent of the contract, payable in crypto. Maybe that's what he's really fixated on. It would certainly be in character.

Hawaii and Alaska exhibits at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall, Washington, D.C., June 25, 2026. Looks like the backdrops and odd little tables, and maybe the rugs were supplied by the organizers, but the Hawaiians must have had to supply their own chairs. Photos by Al Drago/Getty Images via Newsweek.