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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. And despite organizers’ claims that 56 states and territories would be represented, each given their own booths at the event, several declined to participate due to cost.

The opening ceremony was meant to be a musical extravaganza, featuring acts including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, The Commodores, Morris Day and the Time, Young MC, Flo Rida, but most of those performers pulled out, several saying they had been unaware the event would have a political undertone.

Instead, people attending opening night got a performance from Trump: specifically, a campaign-style rally during which Trump trotted out his usual claims about how the US is the “hottest country anywhere in the world”. (Ironically, the Virginia booth at the fair was closed on Tuesday due to extreme heat, and the fair itself was forced to close early on its second day, because of a storm.)

Things got worse when a Confederate flag had to be removed from a booth at the fair, prompting one of the sponsors to drop out. Then there was more negative publicity as people found out how much things cost at the event: $25 for a pretzel, $23 for a turkey leg, $9 for a lemonade.

Against this backdrop, Fox News has valiantly tried to put positive spin on the fair, like White Star Line claiming people had enjoyed a very pleasant four days at sea before the Titanic hit that iceberg. The channel even broadcast live from the fair on Monday, the idea being to champion the event. But, as the journalist Aaron Rupar documented, all that achieved was to prove that very few people were in attendance.

So what have we learned? Maybe the lesson is: don’t try to throw a big celebratory fair when you are a historically unpopular president. Or: if you do host a fair, make sure it is a) good, and b) doesn’t have a racist flag on display.

The fair is larger than the ones I went to as a kid. But you know what ? At least those ones were fun. And cheap. The sack/T-shirt slide only cost 20p. The scar on my knee, sustained when friction caused the T-shirt to rip? That will last a lifetime.