Michigan Greets Trump With Single Finger Salute
And Dom? Was there.
Yesterday, Donald Trump flew to Michigan to pat himself on the back for fucking up the world faster than any previous US president. And while Gov. “Big Gretch” Whitmer had to grovel (again) to save a key piece of Michigan’s infrastructure (this time its Selfridge National Guard Air Base), there were a hell of a lot of pissed off people who came out to rain on Trump’s parade.
After the White House/Trump 2028 campaign once again denied me press credentials to cover the rally, I opted to do what most journalists do when they’re told not to show up some place: go anyway.
Every Trump rally I’ve ever covered has about a dozen or so merchants selling some kind of bootleg merchandise. T-shirts, hats, stickers, flags, stuffed animals, all sorts of tchotchke crap themed around Trump and Trumpism. You won’t find copies of The Art of the Deal, or bootlegs of the “The Apprentice,” but you can find a flag that shows a weeping Jesus Christ clutching an American flag.
You can’t spell “cultural phenomena” without “cult.”
One of the hotter items was a T-shirt with “Trump 2028.” A man selling them told me that he was just giving the people what they wanted.
“Nobody’s sure if it’s going to be him, or his kids,” he explained. He said he’d sold out of his first 150 shirts before noon and had set up a T-shirt press in the parking lot. As he stamped out new shirts, he said his goal was to sell some more as people left the rally.
When asked if he thought Trump would go for a third term, the man shrugged.
The was also a guy with a duck, and I can’t explain that one either.
Macomb County, just north of Detroit, voted for Trump by 13 points. Macomb is very suburban, very working class, and very white. The metal fabrication, auto repair, and small blue collar businesses that surround the Macomb County Community College — where Trump held his rally — proudly advertised their support for political candidates with signs big and small throughout 2024. Harris and Trump campaigned heavily up here after pundits and pollsters argued it was a bellwether.
And it’s worth keeping that in mind when trying to understand why well over 1,000 people were standing on the side of 12 Mile Road on a Tuesday afternoon waving signs in hurricane force winds to protest Trump’s visit.
Though the protest wasn’t set to start until 4 p.m., there were already two dozen people standing around the intersection of 12 Mile and Hayes at 2 p.m. The crowd grew rapidly, and soon local police were positioning patrol cars to slow traffic and keep pedestrians from getting hit. Cellular jammers deployed by Secret Service forced me to duck inside the local Taco Bell to steal WiFi and send a dozen photos to the wire services. But during that 15 minutes, the crowd began to stretch about half a mile.
As Trump’s motorcade drew near, a lone Trump supporter walked out into a median carrying a “Bikers for Trump” sign, and a Mountain Dew. He barked some slurs and waved his sign, seemingly confident nobody would challenge him.
Then an elderly woman in a yellow vest walked up and put out her arms to keep him from crossing the street. The man puffed out his chest, stomped his feet, waved his sign and yelled, but the woman simply crossed her arms and stood in front of him.
My favorite pic is the woman in the safety vest with crossed arms defiantly staring down the Bikers for Trump creep.
The guy with the duck was Ziggy Sobotka, that loser.
Fuckin' Ziggy.