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Washington, D.C., is an overwhelmingly blue city. And so it hasn’t been surprising to see that the local response to President Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall has not been to attend the fair, but to mock it.

Mostly, these conversations, when not venting about the disruption to bus schedules and the noisiness of bomber jet flyovers, focus on the absolute failure of the fair. This 16-day event, put on by the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 organization, was meant, as Trump said in its kickoff speech, to be a celebration of no longer being a “dead country” but instead “the hottest country anywhere in the world.” But a number of musical performers dropped out, anxious about the political backlash. And what the photos ultimately show has been school-play-level infrastructure and comically sparse attendance.

Journalists love to find surprises and unconventional angles, so I aimed to go down to the fair and find something unexpected. It seemed possible those photos were a matter of off hours or poor angles or selective omission. But no, we can confidently report that the Great American State Fair is a big ol’ dud. And nothing made that clearer than the anemic display from its “MAHA Monday.”

“MAHA Monday,” a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “make America healthy again” wellness politics, was billed online as a day to “discover how wellness can be fun, flavorful, and part of everyday life” and learn about “feeling better, living longer, and doing it the American way.” The movement is one of the more interesting factions in Trump-era politics, as it scrambles normal coalitions. Granola hippies have aligned with libertarians and suburban moms to battle the corporate interests of the agriculture and energy industries. The conflict over pesticides has........

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