{"id":358398,"date":"2026-07-02T09:58:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T09:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/358398\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T09:58:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T09:58:08","slug":"what-trumps-great-american-state-fair-got-right-and-wrong-about-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/358398\/","title":{"rendered":"What Trump’s Great American State Fair got right and wrong about Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the version of itself that Texas wants to present to the country, a fun, lively oasis where NASA sends astronauts into space and people bury Cadillacs in the ground <\/a>for the sheer spectacle of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There’s plenty that the state’s tourism officials missed. There are no blue bonnets or barbecue \u2014 save a brief flash of brisket in a video \u2014 no replicas of oil rigs or breakfast tacos.<\/p>\n

Doug\u00a0Latham, a South Carolinian who was stationed in Texas while serving in the Air Force, thought they’d done an okay job, except for one thing.<\/p>\n

“The size of Texas. There’s no way you can comprehend that,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To be fair, there’s only so much you can say with a modest-sized room of identical dimensions to the 39 other states participating in the fair \u2014 11 states declined Trump’s invitation.<\/p>\n

Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for the Governor’s Economic Development and Tourism Office, which organized the booth, said the aim was to give visitors “a real taste of what makes our state exceptional.”<\/p>\n

You can watch a video of musicians performing at the Austin City Limits music festival while checking out a scaled-down version of Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch before walking inside a replica of a NASA spacecraft.<\/p>\n

And if you fancy entering a raffle for a free trip to Texas, there are tablets set up quizzing visitors about which soda was invented in Waco in 1885, “making it a full year older than Coca-Cola,” and which Texas city is known as the “boot capital of the world” and where Buddy Holly was born.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then it’s back outside into the almost, but not quite Texas-level heat, a little revived, with a complimentary sticker declaring, “Let’s Texas.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is the version of itself that Texas wants to present to the country, a fun, lively oasis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-358398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}