As an American, I can’t either. I live in a deep red area and it’s common to see giant trucks with mounted flags for Trump and America. BIG flags. I can’t imagine being so enthralled with a politician that I would go to the trouble to buy a flag, mount it, and then carry it around town like that. That is a fervor beyond my ken.
Because trump is not a politician to them. He’s a personal savior.
The kids wearing the Jeremy Corbyn shirts a few years back, (pretty much dead now) is at least as bizarre. He was never the PM but he could have been.
I’d love to see a reporter say to Trump “Pam Bondi just released the so called ‘Epstein List’ which shows your name as well as [other names], what’s your reaction to that?”. It wouldn’t be true, but I’m interested in his reaction.
Trump is one of those people that you can trick into admitting something by ‘underestimating’ him. He’s one of those people that would rather admit what they did than have someone think they’re not able to do it. I bet if someone told him, point blank, that the list has been made pubic, they’ve read it, told him some [made up] facts from it and asked for his reaction, he’d start correcting the facts with something closer to the truth. Like, if the reporter said “the list shows you and Bill Gates flying down to the island together at least 15 times in the 10 years before he was arrested” Trump would reply 'nuh uh, that’s fake news, I’ve never even been on a plane with Bill and I only saw him on the island twice, and he wouldn’t even go near the girls, not like me". When, of course, his reaction should be ‘I wasn’t aware of that and I’m not going to answer any questions about it until I can meet with my advisors’.
And the way he always HAS to answer off the cuff AND make sure every one knows he’s the smartest guy in the room is his MO and I think we should exploit that more often. As long as he’s going to reply to reporters with some combination of calling them fake news, telling them to do their research and/or useless unrelated word salad, they don’t have a whole lot to lose by goading him into telling them something that might, if nothing else, at least relate to the question instead of whatever’s on his mind at the moment.
As an American, I can’t imagine wearing a T-shirt with the president’s name/picture on it, even if it was the one I voted for, at least outside of election season (personally, I wouldn’t do it then either, but at least it makes sense). Turning your entire personality into worshiping Trump, even if you’re just doing it for show, doesn’t help to dispel the idea that you’re in a cult.
Yes, there’s racism involved but also classism.
I keep seeing this, but the same people are champions of blue collar folks not paying taxes on their moonlighting income and even using their employer’s truck and equipment on moonlighting jobs.
That was the text on a small sign displayed by someone in my neighborhood. I drove past it many times.
Because I’m addicted to yard sales, (and because I figure you try to help out / interact with neighbors, even ones with hateful political beliefs) I stopped by when the lady had a sale.
I almost never haggle at yard sales, but her prices were so ridiculously high I asked, “these add up to such-and-such; would you take blah-blah-blah?”
“No,” was her answer. “The prices are firm. My mother’s in the hospital, and we don’t have health insurance.”
Leopards, indeed.
MAGA in general definitely does those things - but I’m not so sure that the Trump supporters who are here illegally don’t make a distinction between themselves as business owners, factory workers, foremen etc and people mowing lawns for a landscaping company or working on a farm. Believe me, blue collar people can still be classist. I haven’t noticed any news coverage of laborers who get hired out of the Home Depot parking lot being surprised when they are detained.
Here’s a classist example for you:
The US is dependent on agricultural labor to pick its crops
Trump keeps talking about “highly skilled” immigrants, meaning people with advanced degrees and white collar jobs.
They don’t want blue collar immigrants, even though our food system has become dependent on them.
As an American I find this behavior bizarre and appalling.
The only time I’ve ever inquired about the current name of the president is during those mini mental health evaluations.
You think my Cthulhu 2024 shirt is weird? In all seriousness, outside of election season, you didn’t see many Americans wearing shirts with the name of the president on it. This is a rather recent phenomenon with Trump in particular. For whatever reason, MAGAts deliberately go out of their way to let the world know who they support. I don’t recall seeing a lot of people wearing Biden merch when he was president.
The evil genius of the right was to turn ordinary boring policy-based politics into a combo of reality TV show hero worship and tribal sports team allegiance.
One hell of a lot of people watch the talking heads on ESPN for hours a day and wear football team regalia regularly than ever attend games in person, or toss a ball in a park themselves.
Applying that same thinking to party politics was genius. sheer f***ing genuis. Same as the 9/11 hijacking crashes.
With the result that now, one hell of a lot of people watch the talking heads on Faux et al for hours a day and wear political team regalia regularly than ever attend political events in person, or think about public policy themselves.
Folks wearing trump merch are as much signaling to one another as they are signaling to the rest of the world. With a side order of: Since their team is founded on belligerence and bullying as central tenets, they do get a little extra frisson of fun out of waving their merch in front of people from the other team.
All that emotional energy is simply lacking from decent people trying to live a decent life in a decent country not riven by angry know-nothingism. And that emotional deficit is rapidly turning into (or already has) an insurmountable electoral problem.
In fairness, I remember Obama “Hope” shirts being pretty common before Trump got into politics.
Maybe I’m putting my own spin on it, but to me, those “Hope” shirts were saying, more or less, “I hope for the future and things to get better.” The “Trump is my President” and other similar shirts/hats/onesies, OTOH, are basically saying “…and fuck you if you think different.”
I live in the Chicago suburbs; when Obama was elected in 2008, I was commuting into the city every day on the CTA’s “L” train; I rode with a lot of Black people. Especially in the first year or two of Obama’s presidency, I saw a fair number of Blacks wearing Obama hats and t-shirts – and not just the famous “Hope” shirt, but a lot of what was clearly independently-made garb with Obama’s name on it, and slogans like “our first Black president.”
But, as you note, I think that the reason behind that was different from Trump garb: they were wearing the Obama stuff out of celebration and pride, that a Black man – and one who lived in their city – had overcome the country’s inherent racism, to become President. I never had the sense that most of Obama’s supporters here – even the Black supporters – were blindly worshipping him, or supported him in the same rabid-fandom way that they’d support the Bears or the Bulls.
That said, it’s possible that there was a bit of “fuck you” to racists in what they were wearing.
I own a couple of campaign t-shirts. One with Obama’s name, another saying, “Stronger Together”. But then again, I’ve volunteered during elections so it’s merch. Nice to know about British mores, and at least my shirts don’t equate a politician with God. T-shirts might partly be a side effect of Presidential campaigns lasting 2 years, as opposed to 2 months.
That was a rather puzzling profile. They also said that they couldn’t go back to Iran because they were Armenian Christians. The overwhelming majority of Armenians in Iran are Christian. And they have 2 seats reserved for the group in the Iranian Parliament. Many Armenians fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, but tens of thousand remain. The profiled family look to me like economic migrants, though I wouldn’t want to deport them.
They want immigrants to take the good jobs, and Americans to take the low pay back breaking jobs.
We can only hope that it’s the “dreaded vote of confidence.”
“Bothsiderism” doesn’t work here. 
lol, wut?
Miller is factually correct. There’s no ‘bothsiderism’ here because the facts are the facts. “Bothsierism” is about moral equivalency, not factual.