Trumpening II: Miami Vice

A Conversation with Lincoln Mitchell

“Top Miami officials said the city is prepared for anywhere from 5,000 to upward of 50,000 protesters ahead of the arraignment of former President Donald Trump,”

-Miami Herald, 6-12-2023

On Tuesday, June 13th, thousands of armed Trump supporters burst through the glass doors of the Miami Federal Courthouse just as the former president stood to plead Not Guilty. His rabid supporters shattered every window, beat everybody inside the courthouse to death, and then drove Trump back to Washington at the head of an enormous trucker convoy. Navy SEALS moved quickly to send Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, and Dylan Mulvaney to Guantanamo Bay, where they were summarily executed. All colorful clothing for children has been banned, lest it turn them gay, and smoke from the book-burnings hangs thick in the air.

“”We should have prepared more thoroughly,” a spokesperson from the Miami City Council sobbed on CNN shortly before the news station headquarters was razed to the ground by Patriots in novelty T-shirts. “We should have had more helicopters circling loudly overhead. More police on tactical golf carts. More roving bike patrols, more officers circling in squad cars, more bafflingly random blocades of streets and parks. But it’s too late now. It’s over.”

**

Four states in five days is too many states, especially when combined with a three-day conference, a 2,000-word article, and a very hot, very boring Florida protest. Texas, Miami, Philadephila, back to NYC again. I said I’d get you a summary of the Trump protest on Wednesday morning. I was lying. What I was actually doing Wednesday morning was riding a bus from Philly to Penn Station because you can only get to NYC from Miami on Frontier Airlines on Thursdays and Mondays, and then what I was doing was sleeping, and then what I was doing was catching up on the various phone calls and appointments I’d rescheduled from my last-minute trip to Miami on Tuesday, and then I was trying to write something that was good enough to justify taking this long to write it.

There is no such article. I’m honestly not sure what to say about the protest except that it was kooky and horrifying and boring in the way all protests are kooky, horrifying, and boring these days. About 300 Floridians were very upset in front of the Miami Federal Courthouse, many more people were upset in front of their TVs or at work or wherever people are on Tuesdays, and many other people remained very excited about possibly the funniest indictment ever written.

What did not happen—what was never going to happen—was a murderous assemblage of between 5,000 and 50,000 freedom warriors excited to commit crimes for Trump. It’s too hot, and I don’t just mean Miami in June, which feels a bit like the center of the sun if the center of the sun were wet. I mean that a lot of these people believe January 6th was entrapment and now see every right-wing protest as a potential op, and that it makes the serious players stay away and the crazies who show up stay the regular kind of crazy instead of the dangerous kind.

One way to gauge the temperature of a crowd is to see what happens when someone the opposition wanders into said crowd. That happened pretty early on, when this guy strode confidently onto the scene:

At first there was some confusion about whether the gentleman was referring to Trump or Biden, thanks largely to the efforts of Forgiato Blow, the MAGA rapper behind such smash hits as “Boycott Target” and “Rittenhouse 2”. Blow threw his arm around the man and insisted to reporters that they knew each other, were great friends, and both hated Biden. Once the protester managed to get a word in edgewise, however, he immediately became the center of the traditional protest hairball, in which the interloper is surrounded on all sides and screamed at from every direction. But this hairball did not escalate into violence, never showed any signs of escalating into violence, and eventually dissipated thanks to bike cops who separated the protesters from the prisoner for a while.

It’s strange, when you think about it. July 13th was a day of deep historical significance: the first former United States president to ever be indicted for a crime that matters. The charges are hilarious, but the Espionage Act is no joke; Trump is looking at a maximum sentence of 400 years. Storing highly classified documents in a hotel shower puts national security at risk. Half the country (myself included) thinks Trump should spend the rest of his life in jail for these crimes; the other half believes that Joe Biden is a “wannabe dictator” who had Trump arrested to distract the world from his own nefarious scheming.

Either way, though: doesn’t it seem like the reaction should have been bigger?

I’m glad there was no violence, I’m glad the protest was small, but there is something deeply menacing about this level of anger provoking so little open reaction. We have become so used to being angry, as a nation, that the bar for active outrage is scarcely visible from the ground. Everyone I know believes that democracy is under attack. That there might be civil war. We have reached a point where our standard for a significant and dangerous protest is January 6th. How much more rage can this country handle?

Lincoln Mitchell, a political scientist who teaches at Columbia University and writes the Kibitzing with Lincoln substack, points out that yesterday marks the 8 year anniversary of Trump’s escalator speech. This little historical moment we find ourselves in isn’t a moment anymore—it’s damn near a decade. Our version of normal bears almost no resemblance to the normal of 2015. That normal is dead and gone.

Yesterday, Lincoln and I recorded a conversation about that anniversary, and the Trump protests, and where it’s all going. You (and should!) can check out that conversation here, on his substack. If you like this substack, you’ll probably like his substack; if you like baseball and also this substack you will definitely like his substack.

You can also watch it below:

If you’d like to read about the protest in all its granular weirdness, you can do that here, on Threadreader. Because Bluesky is still locked down, I returned to Twitter for one day only to live-tweet the event. I’m gone now, but the thread itself remains.