Flags, Fury, and Farce: A Day in Manhattan With the Pro-Trump Protesters

Outside of a Manhattan courthouse, two factions faced off against one another—occasionally in ways that made sense.

This article appears in full at The New Republic

There is no actual pond in Collect Pond Park, which sits across from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, but on Tuesday morning—Trump Indictment Day!—the sunlight reflecting off of what seemed to be every available camera lens in Manhattan made it look, from a distance, as if it were shimmering. The leafless trees locked inside the park’s environs stand haplessly, thoroughly upstaged by two rival factions and their flags of fury, one on either side of the no-man’s-land of metal barricades that divides the park diagonally. On one side: “Fuck Trump And Fuck You For Voting For Him.” On the other: “Trump or Death.”

No birds could possibly find a place to sing in all this racket, and so we must make do with a powerfully built man in a red shirt, red hat, and close-shaven black beard, relentlessly pacing the protest enclosure and singing out, again and again, “There are two genders! Two genders!”

As some readers of The New Republic might recall, we did this protest/media circus combination two weeks ago, when Trump prematurely predicted his arrest. Today feels like a gritty reboot: There’s a larger cast and some recycled plot points, but it’s pointedly lacking the madcap joy of the original. Unlike the first iteration of this carnival, there are far more real protesters here today, though their numbers are still not overwhelming. They have arrived with their flags and costumes and generic, formless rage.

Trump’s theoretical legal troubles have become reality at last. Today is not about the words or social media posts of a man who infamously plays fast and loose with the facts. Here, at long last, there is an actual goddamn arrest. But January 6, The Sequel, this (still) is not.

We have been promised celebrities: Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has dared to set foot into the drug-infested crime-ridden den of debauchery that is lower Manhattan to support the man who, I am told repeatedly, is the only person standing between the godless communist liberal fascists and you—yes, you, a good, hardworking American who is also, somehow, in mortal danger of being arraigned for paying hundreds of thousand dollars in hush money to a porn star…

Read the rest at The New Republic