A storm, overpriced food and a sad ferris wheel: inside Trump’s dreadful state fair

I have been to some disappointing fairs in my time. There was one, in a small town in north-west England, where the main attraction was a little slide that you rode down on a burlap sack: except the guy who owned the slide had forgotten to bring the sacks, so me and my sister slid down on a T-shirt. Another time, at a village fete in a place called Longton, I won the main prize at the bingo. It was a whisky decanter with a bottle of whiskey. I was 11 years old, the decanter was broken and some bigger boys took the whiskey. More recently, I looked on as two farmers engaged in a shouting match over whose pumpkin was larger at a fair in Iowa. Such exposure means I’m probably better equipped than most to see the possibility in Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, but even given my breadth of bad fair experience, the Trump National Mall even sounds absolutely dreadful. “A rather embarrassing flop,” MS Now wrote . “A big ol’ dud”, was the verdict of Slate . “To put it simply, miserable,” the New Republic ruled , while USA Today said witnessing the failure of Trump’s fair is “like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends”. What makes it so bad? Well for one thing, very few people seem to have been going. For another, the fair’s signature attraction, a (quite small) ferris wheel, was plagued by power cuts on the first day. …