14 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
S TATENISLANDPOSTCARD
FOOTSOLDIER
J
oseph Saladino, a twenty-five-year-
old known on the Internet as Joey
Salads, stood in his driveway on Staten
Island, waiting for his Tesla Model S
to charge. “I drive around town in my
cars”—the other is a yellow Cama-
ro—“and kids stop me at traffic lights
and ask for my autograph,” he said. “It’s
a home-town-hero kind of vibe. That’s
what people say, anyway. I wouldn’t say
it myself.”
“You just said it, Joe,” his girlfriend,
Gila Goodman, pointed out.
“Whatever, it’s true,” Saladino said,
grinning. “Makes me think about all the
people who ever clowned me: ‘Quit being
a schmuck, go back to school, being a
YouTuber ain’t a real job.’ The flashy
cars say, ‘You get a real job, jerkoff. I’m
doing great.’ ”
Saladino has 2.6 million subscribers
on YouTube. He grew up on the South
Shore of Staten Island, took a few classes
at a community college (“I learned noth-
ing, if I’m being honest”), and, in 2012,
started a YouTube channel, posting a
video a week. At first, most of them were
“Jackass”-style pranks. (He once blasted
his mother in the face with a homemade
air cannon, and she ended up in the emer-
gency room.) Then Trump ran for Pres-
ident, and Saladino became one of his
admirers. He started making a new kind
of video—not political punditry, per se,
but a bunch of ham-fisted attempts to
contribute to the culture war. Although
these videos were branded as vérité “so-
cial experiments,” they were largely staged.
In one video, he wore a cartoonish blond
wig and followed women into a small
rest room, purporting to show that, as
he put it, “most women are not comfort-
able sharing a bathroom with a trans
person.” In another video, he approached
African-American strangers and asked
to borrow their phones. Some said no.
“It was just amazing to see that racsim
goes both ways,” a title card at the end
of the video read, typo and all.
A few months ago, Saladino decided
to transition out of politics-adjacent stunt
commentary and into politics. “Trump’s
a media celebrity turned President,” he
said. “Then you look at A.O.C.”—Al-
exandria Ocasio-Cortez. “She’s a bar-
tender, she’s really good at clap-backs on
Twitter—boom, suddenly she’s a con-
gresswoman. I thought, I could start with
something lame, like borough president,
but why not just go for it?” He filedpaperwork to run for Congress in New
York’s Eleventh District, covering Staten
Island and parts of South Brooklyn. His
opponent for the Republican nomina-
tion is Nicole Malliotakis, a member
of the state assembly; the incumbent is
Max Rose, a Democrat representing a
pro-Trump district. “They can laugh all
they want, but I’m better at social media
than both of them combined,” Saladino
said. “I don’t pretend to be some policy
intellectual, but I know how to get my
message out.”
The Tesla finished charging. Saladino
and Goodman got into the car with Adam
Korzeniewski, a consultant to the Sala-
dino campaign, and Stephen Centineo,
Saladino’s childhood friend, body man,
and YouTube sidekick. (To complement
the stage name Joey Salads, Centineo
goes by Stevie Croutons.) They drove to
a mall and walked into a Chipotle. Good-
man filmed on a camcorder—almost all
of Saladino’s daily exploits are recorded—
but nothing interesting happened during
the burrito-ordering process.
“We have grudging respect for
A.O.C., I’ll admit,” Korzeniewski said.
“Not for her politics,” Saladino said.
“I’m pro-Second Amendment, pro-small
business. She’s a socialist, and I think
that’s very dangerous. But in terms of
pure marketing talent and strategy?” He
said that she and Trump “are far andissued a manifesto warning that “this
attack is a response to the Hispanic in-
vasion of Texas.” And, as the civil-rights
leader Bryan Stevenson says, the insis-
tence on unfettered gun ownership is
a core tenet of white identity politics.
Although the solidity of the Presi-
dent’s base should not be underesti-
mated, a sense of alarm is growing. The
clerical leaders of the Washington Na-
tional Cathedral, where the funerals of
Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan,
and Bush took place, gave voice to that
alarm last week. “When such violent de-
humanizing words come from the Pres-
ident of the United States, they are a
clarion call, and give cover, to white su-
premacists who consider people of color
a sub-human ‘infestation’ in America,”
they wrote, in an official statement. “Vi-
olent words lead to violent actions.” And
they asked, “When does silence become
complicity? What will it take for us all
to say, with one voice, that we have had
enough? The question is less about the
president’s sense of decency, but of ours.”
After the recent massacres in El Paso
and in Dayton, White House aides ev-
idently decided that Trump needed to
dial back his rhetoric. In a brief speech,
he denounced white supremacy, but with
the vacant affect of a hostage reading
for the camera. Liberated from this
chore, he soon regained his usual tem-
per; visiting the bereaved in Texas and
Ohio, he found the time to lambaste
local officials, along with “Sleepy” Joe
Biden, “the LameStream media,” and
other customary targets.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt
characterized the Presidency as “preëmi-
nently a place of moral leadership.”
Trump, by contrast, once told his circle
of advisers that they should “think of
each Presidential day as an episode in
a television show in which he vanquishesrivals.” In the Trump show, which will
soon be up for renewal, immigrants,
Muslims, and people of color are regu-
larly cast as the villains.
Toni Morrison approached the en-
during phenomenon of American big-
otry and nativism from many angles.
But she had a clear sense that the crit-
ical function of racism was distraction.
Racism “keeps you from doing your
work,” she said. “It keeps you explain-
ing, over and over again, your reason for
being. Somebody says you have no lan-
guage, and you spend twenty years prov-
ing that you do. Somebody says your
head isn’t shaped properly, so you have
scientists working on the fact that it is.
Somebody says that you have no art, so
you dredge that up. Somebody says that
you have no kingdoms, and you dredge
that up. None of that is necessary. There
will always be one more thing.”
—David Remnick