Rehearsals (Clowns Included)

A couple of weeks ago, an author named Jack Luna explored the significance of the Trump-supporting car/truck and boat parades on Labor Day:

“With images of raucous white Americans on parade freshly troubling me, I kept turning that word — parade, parade — over in my head until it suddenly hit me like a ton of mailbags dumped in a California parking lot: the whole Trump brand, and by extension his 2020 campaign, is nothing more than a white coming-out party.

The whole Trump show was more or less “the equivalent of holding a pride march and chanting ‘I’m here, I’m white, get over it.’” [1]

Some of the Labor Day spectacles turned out rather badly.  In Lake Travis, Texas, a boat in the Trump parade was capsized (giving rise to some hilarious online spoofs).  But let’s not go overboard!  Some people use boats for completely sensible things—fishing, travelling back and forth to islands, experiencing and enjoying being on different bodies of water, even simple relaxation; but many others use their boats to send a message about their wealth and bad taste.  This is especially obvious in places like the Intra-Coastal Waterway in Florida.

The Trump boat parades are a kind of conspicuous consumption—along with the MAGA hats and T-shirts.  Even the refusal to wear masks is part and parcel of the same deal. You do have to ask why.  Is there so little else of value in their lives?

It’s now clear that some Trump supporters don’t consider their lives to be of terribly much value—they’re willing to gather in the thousands, shoulder to shoulder, at rallies without masks.  Trump himself seems to be schizophrenic on the matter of his own life—in public, he’s all bravado; in private, apparently scared shit.  That’s probably why his doctors are pumping him up with all those experimental treatments at Walter Reed.

Before going on to make some pretty lame suggestions that anti-racist protesters tone down their actions and rhetoric, lest they rile up the whites lined up behind Trump, Luna advanced one other helpful argument—that the parades represented “nascent para-military forces.”  In that sense, they can be understood as rehearsals for possible action during the election.

An even more specific illustration of what might be coming was evident when a parade of Trump supporters chanting and waving campaign flags disrupted the second day of early voting in Fairfax, Va., by entering a polling station.  In the days since, the boy wonder Don Junior has posted a selfie video urging Trump supporters to join his father’s Election Day army.

Fortunately, these recruitment efforts have attracted the disruptive attention of the K-Pop fans who ruined Trump’s Tulsa rally.  Let’s hope those clever devils are successful once again.

In the meantime, I’d suggest that the rehearsals are designed to get participants used to acting without thinking when they try to intimidate voters.  They don’t really need to know what they’re doing; they can be just like the boaters on Lake Travis.  Even clowns can become part of a mob.

[1]  https://medium.com/@everythinghereistrue/the-only-way-to-understand-white-trump-voters-6122ed88f4d2.