{"id":424005,"date":"2026-08-05T00:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/424005\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T00:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T00:26:08","slug":"photograph-at-oc-fair-condemned-by-county-republicans-as-call-to-violence-against-trump-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/424005\/","title":{"rendered":"Photograph at OC Fair condemned by county Republicans as call to violence against Trump \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

The OC Fair<\/a>\u2018s inclusion of a photo of two young boys perched out a car window \u2013 one with a \u201cHappy Last Birthday\u201d sign in hand and the other with an apparent caricature of President Donald Trump \u2013 among the displayed contest entries has sparked outrage among Orange County Republicans.<\/p>\n

The framed photograph was taken at a No Kings protest in Torrance earlier this year, according to the caption. It was labeled as street photography.<\/p>\n

A video calling out the photo, posted to X on Monday, Aug. 3, had been viewed more than 200,000 times by Tuesday afternoon, drawing condemnation<\/a> from hundreds of commenters who called the pictured sign an attempt to incite violence against Trump.<\/p>\n

\"ScreenScreen grab from an X.com video posted by Wall Street Apes that shows a photo hanging at the OC Fair in Costa Mesa showing kids holding signs that read \u201cHappy last Birthday\u201d and \u201cNo Kings.\u201d The photo also has an caricature of President Donald Trump with the words, \u201cYou\u2019re not a king, so stop playing one\u201d<\/p>\n

Will O\u2019Neill, chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County, demanded that the fair remove the \u201cpolitically charged\u201d photograph and explain who approved its display.<\/p>\n

\u201cPublic institutions should exercise extraordinary caution before displaying imagery that can reasonably be interpreted as normalizing or trivializing rhetoric surrounding the death or elimination of political figures,\u201d O\u2019Neill wrote in a letter to OC Fair Board Chair Barbara Bagneris. \u201cAt best, the display demonstrates astonishingly poor judgment. At worst, it contributes to the toxic political environment that leaders across the political spectrum claim they want to reduce.\u201d<\/p>\n

OC Fair<\/a> spokesperson Terry Moore said entries for visual arts competitions are chosen on \u201cartistic and technical merit\u201d only.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe photograph in question was reviewed by the judging panel and accepted as a representation of a public event,\u201d Moore said in a statement. \u201cThe viewpoints of the artists are their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

The photographer contacted fair officials on Tuesday requesting that the entry be removed from display, Moore said.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Neill said fair organizers had denied the OC Republican Party\u2019s participation at the year\u2019s event, for the first time in more than a decade, in order \u201cto avoid political activity.\u201d Yet, displaying a photo captured at a No Kings protest is \u201canything but politically neutral,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWill the fair reconsider its policies to ensure that no political ideology receives preferential treatment in future exhibitions?\u201d he asked in his letter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The OC Fair\u2018s inclusion of a photo of two young boys perched out a car window \u2013 one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,3372,536,23,100,17455,611,136],"class_list":["post-424005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-costa-mesa","tag-donald-trump","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-oc-fair","tag-orange-county","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}