As soaring temperatures continue to rock President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., several state exhibits at the event were forced to shut down Saturday, leaving the pro-Trump network Newsmax wondering whether exhibits had essentially become “hotboxes.”
“Looking at the state displays... we're assuming there's no portable air conditioners in there,” a Newsmax anchor said, speaking with Newsmax’s Alana Austin, reporting from the fair. “Are they just hotboxes?”
Austin conceded that attempts to cool down the fair’s state exhibits for attendees had shown only “mixed success.”
“They do have fans going,” Austin said. “Some of them are quite cool; I've heard Florida and Georgia are doing pretty well. A couple of the booths here and there have actually had to shut down because they said it was just too hot.”
A local D.C. journalist, Eric Flack of WUSA9, recently did a deep dive into the fair’s state exhibits, learning that they ranged wildly in quality, with some amounting to a barren cubicle where organizers “basically just put up some chairs.”
Some states didn’t participate in the state exhibits at all, such as with North Carolina, which instead was organized by a company that built tractor trailers for the Trump-linked group Freedom 250. The North Carolina state exhibit featured a race car and what appeared to be a cardboard box of North Carolina potatoes resting on the ground.