It Only Seems Unprecedented

[Nevilledog]

https://defector.com/trump-arraignment-only-seems-unprecedented

It is very easy to find video of Donald Trump supporters singing the national anthem, which makes it much more difficult to find the version that periodically stumbles warbling up out of the fog and into my head. It is easy to find, say, a video of a bunch of Proud Boys singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" outside Alex Jones's hotel on November 14, 2020, after the first of several rallies challenging Trump's election loss. There is enough of this sort of thing out there that you don't even need to watch it to know how it sounds; I do not need to tell you about how everyone is bassing up their voices like little kids do and chanting it more than singing it, or that it ends with a U-S-A chant. But because everything having to do with Trump's political career gets repeated near-identically hundreds of times as a matter of course—as a matter of principle, even—the version that I'm looking for is harder to find.

But I can tell you about it. I remember the video as taking place outside of a facility in which votes were being counted. It was sung by a crowd of supporters more like the ones who showed up outside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday for Trump's arraignment on a 34-count indictment—that is, by strange, lonesome, faintly dusty-looking older people in patriotic activewear, and a handful of somehow more cartoonish younger ones, all of whom give the impression of having arrived separately, alone, and by car. They all start singing around the same time, but you could not really say that they are singing together. Everyone is doing their utmost, but they are all singing both as if no one else is there and as if the force of their caterwauling might bring down the walls of that (Arizona? Michigan?) municipal building like Jericho, and so keep their clammy pink king on his throne a little while longer. A couple dozen soloists, swaying or with their hands raised in the megachurch fashion, each on their respective journeys, standing in a parking lot and singing over each other in the hope that it might somehow stop votes from being counted.

The predominant feeling of Trumpism is a claustrophobia edging towards panic: the feeling of sitting in a car in a dead-stopped traffic jam, a television blaring on a commercial break as sunlight pours through the windows, the idle and unreasoning resentment you feel towards someone ordering ahead of you in a drive-through, a darkened room with a computer in it that no one ever turns off, a cocktail reception at which no one is listening to anyone else. Trump has lived his life in this sort of gilded confinement; unnatural as it is, it's long been his natural habitat. A lot of Americans live like this, too, and if it is lonesome and arid and joyless—and it is—that is also what they see as safe. And lonely though it is, this world is busy and even crowded. It is not a community anymore than those weird old ladies in the parking lot were a choir, but if everyone is fundamentally there for themselves, they are also there together.

I am not proud of how many of these people I can describe to you. There is the man who goes to Trump rallies in a custom-made t-shirt that reads Blacks For Trump; he got into a lot of crowd shots, often seated behind the man himself. Or if you prefer there is the man who wears a suit printed with a cartoonish pattern of bricks, like you might find on a wall. Trump called him up on stage at a rally in 2019, one of the many Trump rallies that Brick Suit (that's his handle on various social media platforms) attended. There is a Pennsylvania man named Vincent, who affects the look of an unscrupulous jazz club owner; he poses for photos with other Trump rally attendees, who have for reasons too embarrassing to go into here convinced themselves that he is not a short man in a little hat who drives around in a car covered in Trump stickers but in fact John F. Kennedy, Jr., both much less dead than previously believed and devoted to the bloated and blinking collapsed star that keeps this constellation of goons pinned in orbit.

*snip*

[Eko]

1. Thanks Nevilledog! That was a long but well worth it read. Kicking.

[Nevilledog]

2. ...

[Mr.Bill]

3. That was a good read.

Sort of reminded me a bit of Hunter S. Thompson back in the day. Thanks for posting.