Supporters of former President Donald Trump pose with a demonstrator who identifies himself as Steven Daniel Wolverton dressed like the Q-Anon Shaman outside Trump Tower.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty
When I arrived at Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, a man was heckling one of the only Trump supporters who’d shown up to protest a potential indictment of the former president—who had posted on his platform Truth Social to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK” after warning he would be arrested in connection with an investigation of hush money he paid to a porn star. The Trump supporter was an Asian woman; the heckler’s face was obscured by a bandanna. “Yo, you from Wuhan,” he shouted. “You brought the virus over.” Another man told him to cut it out with the racism. Then the small crowd’s attention snapped to a stranger spectacle: a counter-demonstrator with a Trump mask, a fake diaper, red tape over her nipples, and black tennis shoes. She stuck her tongue out, posing for photos.
Despite Trump’s calls for “PROTEST,” there was no real protest to speak of outside Trump Tower, or seemingly anywhere else. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appears to be on the verge of reviving a years-old scandal as he tests a novel legal theory against a former president who tried to steal an election. It is the type of thing that Trump’s supporters could be reasonably expected to get in the streets about. But at least so far, they’ve mostly stayed at their keyboards.
“Yo, this shit is wack,” one man said. “Where is the action at?” There was only one upside. He boasted that he’d gotten “so much free content.”
“It’s more cops than people,” the woman in the diaper, a self-described “attention whore,” said to those around her. “I was the best thing here.” She added accurately: “It’s just press.” Reporters and streamers far outnumbered the former president’s fans and critics.
One of the only obvious Trump backers was a man named Joshua. He was wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirt and a hat featuring Trump’s face. “Wanted by the FBI. For Making America Great,” his baseball cap read. Joshua told me he’d flown in from Louisiana on Monday on the advice of a Rumble streamer who runs a page called “Professor Toto’s Conservative College.” In a video this weekend, Professor Toto said an indictment would backfire by reinvigorating Trump’s drifting base. Its imminent arrival was evidence that “Yahweh uses the enemy for good.”
“Professor Toto gettin’ on an airplane,” Professor Toto said at the end of the stream. “I’ll be in New York on Tuesday to watch the show.” It was unclear if he got an airplane, but Joshua did. I asked him if he’d been expecting more people.
“I thought there would be,” he said. “I figured the crazies would show up, which they obviously did.”
“Who’s the crazies?” I asked.
“The naked lady with the shitty diaper,” Joshua replied.
Joshua was leaving town on Wednesday, which meant he’d miss the bigger protest he said had been pushed back until Thursday. He was confident the prosecution would fail. “They don’t have anything on him,” he said. “This is just another distraction.”
A few minutes later, a passerby shouted a different perspective to no one in particular. “They got Gotti,” he said about the federal government, who are not the ones expected to indict Trump. “What makes you think they’re not gonna get Trump?”
The event, if you can call it that, was dying down so I left to grab lunch at the Beach Cafe, New York Republicans’ Upper East Side haunt. As I ate an unusually good (and large) $21 cobb salad alone at the bar, a man with a Philly accent sat down looking for a Budweiser and a double of Cuervo. He settled for Bud Light, well tequila, and an avocado toast.
At a nearby table, I overheard someone asking the question, “Is Trump going to jail?” It appears he won’t today.
