It’s time to get in line.įor the past four years, Trump has systematically done what Barack Obama refused to do: played directly to his base, whipping his followers into fury. The president will be here in less than seven hours. A reality set free from context or history, shimmering with feeling, millions of individual truths-Jones’s, Jesse Lee Peterson’s, the Ping Pong shooter’s-all streaming toward one great fact: Trump. The real of which he speaks-“I was on Yahoo News,” Jones says, holding up the page on his phone-is that of the reality TV from which his leader sprang, The Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice. “It’s good,” agrees another Trump supporter, impressed by Jones’s skirmish with the enemy. “So I said fuck it, I’ll take the guilty plea, because at least what I’m pleading guilty to is good. He claims he didn’t actually threaten to shoot, but he had his lawn service business to attend to. “I’m coming there to save the kids, and then I’m going to shoot you and everyone in the place.” It didn’t occur to him to block his number.Īfter spending 40 days and 40 nights in jail, he says (33, actually), Jones decided to plead guilty to one count of interstate threatening communications. “I’m coming to finish what the other guy didn’t,” he declared. Three days after the assault, according to testimony he later gave, Jones called another pizzeria down the street. pizzeria believed by some Trump supporters to be the HQ of Hillary Clinton’s child sex trafficking ring. On December 4, 2016, a man traveled from North Carolina with an AR-15 and opened fire on Comet Ping Pong, the D.C. There was more, he said, much, much more. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, he spoke of “illegals,” hacking and raping and bludgeoning, “relentlessly beating a wonderful, beautiful high school teenager to death with a baseball bat and chopping the body apart with a machete.” And that, he added, was only what he could reveal. The president himself, in speech after speech, intimates that Judgment Day is coming. There were the Clintons, of course, but a youth pastor promised me that Trump knew the names of all the guilty parties and was preparing their just deserts. One man, a Venezuelan immigrant, explained that many socialists are literal cannibals. “Perverts and murderers,” said a woman in Bossier City. Some were familiar with “QAnon”-the name claimed by believers in a host of conspiracy theories centered around an alleged “deep state” coup against Trump and his supposedly ingenious countermeasures, referred to as the coming “Storm,” or “Great Awakening”-but most were not. Through a season of Trump rallies across the country, before the global pandemic forced the president to retreat for a while from the nation’s arenas, I spoke with dozens of Trump supporters who believe that the Democratic establishment primarily serves as a cover for child sex trafficking. Jones is only the second person I’ve met at the rally, so I don’t yet know just how common this perspective is. Photograph by Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos. Like many of the president’s 14,000 followers waiting for the rally to begin, Jones believes that Trump is on a mission from God to expose (and destroy) the hidden demons of the deep state. That’s what’s drawn Jones here, to the CenturyLink Center in Bossier City, Louisiana, two weeks before Thanksgiving. They love Trump because he makes them feel like insiders even as they imagine him their outsider champion. It’s Möbius strip politics, Trumpism’s defining oxymoron: a populist elite, a mass movement of “free thinkers” all thinking the same thing. Jones, a big, vein-popping, occasionally church-going white man burdened with what he calls an “Islamic” name by his hippie mother, revels in this kind of coded message, a sense of possessing knowledge shared only by a select few. does mean white power-unless you say it doesn’t. The joke worked so well that it became real. It began as a joke-a “hoax” meant to trick liberals into believing that the raised fingers actually represent the letters WP: white power. sign-thumb meeting index finger, three fingers splayed-is a kind of secret handshake. For Trump supporters like Jones, the O.K.
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