The Inauguration of the Anti-President
It was sunny last Wednesday, when the President took oath before a socially-distanced Washington audience whose mood was more relieved than jubilant. He gave a speech that made up in reassurance what it lacked in detail, talking to America like we had just snapped out of a collective fugue state. I know you’re feeling a little disoriented, he seemed to say, but I promise that everything is going to be okay. You’re home now. You’re safe.
Half of the country, having held its breath for four years, finally exhaled.
But where was the other half of the country?
They were in Jacksonville, Florida, and I was among them.
I’m holding a Starbucks cup and my iPhone, shivering in the surprisingly frigid morning. This seemed to be enough information to let the crowd know that I was an outsider. One of them looked like he was about to spit, then contented himself by saying, “Fake President Joe’s gonna try and make us all drink Starbucks when he gets in. He can kiss my ass.”
It’s not the first conspiracy I hear today, nor will it be the last. People disagree about the culprits — Soros, the Chinese Communist Party, Hilary — but they agree on some fundamental details. There has been an attempted coup in America, and anti-democratic forces are trying to install a Fake President. But it’s going to be okay.
I had arrived at the site of the rally at 7am and there were already at least 500 people there. Many had camped out overnight, some slept in their cars. The first people I spoke to were an elderly couple who had spent the night in their Winnebago but looked surprisingly refreshed. When I introduced myself as a journalist, they made a face like sour milk, but they continued to be polite. I must say, I respect that kind of old-fashioned courtesy.
“I just love him,” says Edith (not her real name — she didn’t want anyone to know she’d talked to the lamestream media). “He’s so handsome, energetic, successful.”
“He is America,” said her husband, who I’ll call Archie. “You know, this is a great country. We build things. We make things. We lead the world. And he’s the embodiment of all that.”
I put a question to them. Is it fair to say that the strongest emotion here today isn’t fear or anger or bitterness, but love? Love for the leader? They agree.
Most attendees are avoiding the press like we’re radioactive, but a chubby guy in a bowtie actively seeks me out, keen to explain today’s events to me. He’s a Catholic, but he describes both our new Catholic president and the current Pope as “agents of Satan”. He’s keen to explain early Christian history to me — the Avignon papacy and the Western Schism of the 14th century, and how the Catholic Church had two popes who argued over their legitimacy for almost a century. The antipope was in the pocket of the French elites while the real Pope wanted to return to Italy.
“Who won?” I ask.
“Who do you think,” he laughs. “The guy who wanted to make Rome great again.” He tells me how the schism led to conflict, but ultimately traditional values won out. “Sometimes, it’s good to split and allow ideas to compete naturally.”
I ask him about the Confederacy. He looks genuinely puzzled and says, “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
Everyone else I talk to is surprisingly rational. I meet a community organizer, a social worker, a guy who runs a landscaping business. There’s a surprising amount of racial diversity, and the Boomers only outnumber Gen Z by a margin of around 2:1.
The atmosphere is like the church picnics I attended when I was a kid. I wonder if this is what it felt like when the last Civil War started.
The Fake President is taking the stage at exactly noon, so of course the self-proclaimed Real President has to start at 11.55. There have been a cavalcade of warm-up acts at this point, including his sons and the guy who played Hercules in that old TV show. But the crowd doesn’t hear them. They are vibrating with passion for the appearance of their savior.
At the appointed hour, he waddles onstage. I think he looks tired. To the people around me, he looks like the future.
It’s rapturous. It’s almost the Rapture. People scream so hard that I can almost see their souls leave their bodies. It makes The Ed Sullivan Show on Beatles night feel like being in a library.
His speech is rambling and full of greatest hits. We get to chant “Lock! Her! Up!”, and “Build! That! Wall!” and the new one: “Stop! The! Coup!”
In the middle of it, there’s a little call and response bit. He says, “Is Phoney Joe the legitimate president of the United States?”
They roar with all their might to say, no, he is not.
“Who is the real President?”
They scream his name with such passion, with tears in their eyes, and their energy seems to be visibly increasing his lifespan. He throws his hands back and stands there like Cristo Redentor, feeding on their devotion. I honestly believe he might be immortal.
“I think we should make it official, don’t you, folks?”
The audience agree, although they don’t know what’s going to happen next. Something that had been discussed on blogs and Twitter a lot, but nobody thought he was crazy enough to go through with it.
Have we learned nothing in four years?
His daughter performs the ceremony. She wears a black robe, and later people will talk unironically about how she’d make a great Supreme Court juror. She holds out a heavy bible in her manicured hands, and he places his fat, orange fingers on the book, and swears an oath to defend this country and its constitution.
I’m suddenly aware of how many army people there are here. There are a lot of members of the United States military, cheering as loud as anyone else. Chanting for four more years. I think of that old question we ask when a third-world regime is toppling: who’s side are the military on?
This whole ceremony is a joke, of course, and all the late-night shows and Twitterati will have fun with it. SNL has a moderately amusing sketch where the Nuremberg rallies are held in Jacksonville. It ends with Hitler being devoured by a gator.
Except to the people here, this is not a joke. They have attended the inauguration of the new President. The guy in the bowtie comes back to me. He’s drunk and yells that Babylon is about to come crashing down. He calls the elected president “the antipresident”. He calls our new vice-president some sexist and racist terms that I can’t repeat in good conscience.
Ethel and Archie very kindly warn me to get a more respectable career, or to fall in line behind the Real President. “Before it’s too late,” says Ethel. She is very concerned about me.
I talk to a few more people and I notice the rhetoric is changing. They talk about the country as a body, and they talk about their opponents as an infection. One man gets so angry that I can’t help myself. I say, “you’re talking about your neighbors, your co-workers.”
“They’re not my neighbors,” he says. “They’re traitors.” Other people join in and yell other terms at me. Libs. Elitists. Socialists. Illegals. Atheists, degenerates, fifth columnists, traitors, ratfuckers, pod people, demons, frauds, cheats, phoneys. The real virus in our body politic. And the only vaccine is fire.
The mood turned ugly, so I split. A buddy of mine, a photographer for a national, got beaten pretty badly, but the cops filed it as an unrelated mugging.
I’m not smart enough to tell you what all this means. I don’t have the polling data or demographic analysis to tell you where this movement will go next. All I can say is that the relived half of the country saw this ceremony as the end of something. For the people thousands of people who attended, it was not. It was just the beginning.
