A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021
sent a message to supporters that
read, “#FJB or LET’S GO BRAN-
DON? Either way, President
Trump wants YOU to have our
ICONIC new shirt.”
The former president’s son,
Donald Trump Jr., has repeatedly
promoted the meme, and the
original chant, on his social me-
dia feeds. At a speech in Georgia
in September, he took the stage
after the crowd had been chant-
ing “USA! USA!”
“There’s a couple other chants
I’ve been hearing going around,”
Trump Jr. said. “Have you heard
the other one that’s been going
around?” The crowd took the cue
and broke into cries of “F--- Joe
Biden!”
The vitriol has even entered
the House chamber. Rep. Bill
Posey (R-Fla.) wrapped up a floor
speech l ast w eek with the sign-off,
“Let’s go Brandon.” Then, in a
jarring return to House decorum,is on another level, far more
vulgar and widespread.
The ubiquity of Trump signs,
especially in rural stretches of the
country, has long been striking,
and possibly unprecedented for a
losing candidate — especially
nearly a year after the election.
But now, in towns like Boise — in
states both red and blue, and
almost all across the country —
anti-Biden signs are cropping up
as well, frequently with angry and
profane insults.
Some of the signs are scrawled
by hand. Others are bought on
Amazon. Still others are profes-
sionally procured. The crude
signs are held by people lined up
along Biden’s motorcade routes
and clustered near his events.
Protesters shout obscenities from
outside his appearances.
Then there are the chants. In
early October, a “F--- Joe Biden!”
cry broke out among the crowd athe concluded, “I yield back.”
When Trump was in office, he
deployed public profanity in a
way unlike any other modern
president, which his supporters
saw as truth-telling and his oppo-
nents as vulgarity and sometimes
racism. He railed against immi-
grants from “shithole countries.”
He tweeted that Sen. Mitt Rom-
ney (R-Utah) was a “pompous
ass.” He was elected after boast-
ing of grabbing women’s crotch-
es.
Sometimes he prompted ob-
scenities from Democrats in re-
turn.
“One of the many legacies of
the Trump presidency is he nor-
malized angry speech,” said Mike
Murphy, a Republican strategist
and Trump critic. “Trump and our
culture in general has beaten de-
corum out of politics, so now it’s
just angry rage therapy — so you
get out your Magic Marker and
you do your coarse lawn sign.”
Murphy, whose Twitter bio de-
scribes him as “Infuriated GOP
Strategist,” added, “When Trump
acts like a savage, it makes other
people think it’s okay to act like a
savage.... We’re so tribal, every-
body now is an angry Democrat
or an angry Republican.”
That tribalism is reflected in
surveys. A 2020 AEI poll found
that 64 percent of Democrats see
the Republican Party as so mis-
guided that it poses a serious
threat to the country, while
75 percent of Republicans say the
same thing about the Democratic
Party.
Schwarz — the Idahoan with
the spray-painted sign — said he
was motivated in part by his
anger that the 2020 election was
stolen, an assertion Trump has
repeatedly promoted despite its
falsity. “I don’t see how he won
without doing fraudulent things
to the voting machines,” Schwarz
said of Biden. “How the hell did
he get a landslide?”
Now that Biden has been in
office for nearly a year, Schwarz
said he has lost faith in his ability
to handle foreign policy, a s well as
such domestic issues as immigra-
tion and the current labor short-
fall.
“A lot of people don’t want to
work,” Schwarz said. “They’re
waiting for the government to
hand out another check.”
For Johnson — who immedi-was greeted at t he corner of Biden
Street by a woman holding a
handmade “F--- Joe Biden” sign,
with an American flag as the
vowel in the offending word. And
back in Boise, Rod Johnson, a
retired gunsmith, has hung a blue
flag from the roof of his home that
reads “F--- Biden.” Underneath, in
smaller letters, he added, “A nd f---
you for voting for him!!”
“I’m not the only Republican
that doesn’t like Biden,” Johnson,
68, said in an interview, sporting
a red “Proud White American”
hat and puffing a skinny cigar. “I
just chose to show it.”
During the 2020 presidential
campaign, one of Biden’s political
superpowers was his sheer inof-
fensiveness, the way he often
managed to embody — even to
those who didn’t like him — the
innocuous grandfather, the bum-
bling uncle, the leader who could
make America calm, steady, even
boring again after four years of
Donald Trump.
But it’s clear that after nine
months in office, Biden — or at
least what he represents — is
increasingly becoming an object
of hatred to many Trump sup-
porters. The vitriol partly reflects
Trump’s own repeated baseless
claims that Biden is a usurper,
depriving him of his rightful
claim to the presidency, and part-
ly stems from B iden actions that
Republicans deplore, from his
spending plans to his immigra-
tion policies.
Yet the anger also demon-
strates how a political party or
cause often needs an enemy, a
target of vilification that can
unite its adherents — and, in this
case, one refracted through the
harshness, norm-breaking and
vulgarity of the Trump era.
Boos, jeers and insults are
nothing new for politicians, espe-
cially those who reach the White
House. Former presidents George
W. Bush and Barack Obama, as
well as Trump, were all heckled,
weathering protests along their
motorcade routes and at some of
their events. At one 2011 fundrais-
er in Los Angeles, a heckler called
Obama the Antichrist; “F---
Trump” graffiti adorned some
walls in Washington.
The current eruption of anti-
Biden signs and chants, however,
BIDEN FROM A
Vulgar anti-Biden messages are sign of the times
CARISSA WOLF FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Michael Dick makes plain his disregard for President Biden with signs at h is Boise home that sarcastically thank
Biden for grievances including high gas prices and the deaths of U.S. soldiers during the pullout from Afghanistan.exchange quickly turned viral.
T he result has been a prolifera-
tion of chants in recent weeks,
both of “ Let’s go Brandon!” —
now used as a stand-in by the
Trump faithful — and the more
vulgar original, sometimes short-
handed as “FJB.”Trump’s Save America PAC has
even begun selling a $45 T-shirt
featuring Biden’s black-and-
white visage above the phrase
“Let’s go Brandon.” And the PACAlabama’s Ta lladega Superspeed-
way. Kelli Stavast, an NBC Sports
reporter, was interviewing NAS-
CAR driver Brandon Brown live
on air at the time, and she
quipped, “You can hear the
chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go
Brandon!’ ”Trump supporters instantly
saw signs of a coverup, claiming
on social media that journalists
were deliberately censoring anti-
Biden sentiment. The brief video“Trump and our culture in general has beaten
decorum out of politics, so now it’s just angry rage
therapy — so you get out your Magic Marker and
you do your coarse lawn sign.”
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