Photograph at OC Fair condemned by county Republicans as call to violence against Trump

The OC Fair‘s inclusion of a photo of two young boys perched out a car window – one with a “Happy Last Birthday” sign in hand and the other with an apparent caricature of President Donald Trump – among the displayed contest entries has sparked outrage among Orange County Republicans.

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.

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 from hundreds of commenters who called the pictured sign an attempt to incite violence against Trump.

Will O’Neill, chairman of the Republican Party of Orange County, demanded that the fair remove the “politically charged” photograph and explain who approved its display.

“Public 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,” O’Neill wrote in a letter to OC Fair Board Chair Barbara Bagneris. “At 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.”

OC Fair spokesperson Terry Moore said entries for visual arts competitions are chosen on “artistic and technical merit” only.

“The photograph in question was reviewed by the judging panel and accepted as a representation of a public event,” Moore said in a statement. “The viewpoints of the artists are their own.”

The photographer contacted fair officials on Tuesday requesting that the entry be removed from display, Moore said.

O’Neill said fair organizers had denied the OC Republican Party’s participation at the year’s event, for the first time in more than a decade, in order “to avoid political activity.” Yet, displaying a photo captured at a No Kings protest is “anything but politically neutral,” he said.

“Will the fair reconsider its policies to ensure that no political ideology receives preferential treatment in future exhibitions?” he asked in his letter.