SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE AShe was feeling better now. She
turned her phone on again,
where she had more than 100
updates waiting for her attention.
“They know we know they lie,”
read one.
“There’s simply no polite way
to tell people they’ve dedicated
their lives to an illusion,” read
another.
“People hold on,” read another.
“This is getting crazier by the
moment. GOD HELP US.”She raised the tents, two
white domes so large that
drivers slowed down as they
passed to see what was going on.
She installed a fire pit. She
draped lights along the tent
ropes, and on a Saturday in May
three days before Georgia’s pri-
maries, she lined the edge of her
yard with signs for Greene and
other candidates trying to follow
in Greene’s footsteps.
“This way! Come on, come on!”
Rubino yelled, waving cars and
people down her gravel driveway
for what she was calling a “Last
Stand Rally for Georgia.”
A bus plastered with Trump’s
face arrived with the emcee for
the evening, a pro-Trump talk
show host who billed himself as
“The Godzilla of Truth.” Another
bus plastered with the name of a
U.S. Senate candidate inched its
way down the driveway. Soon, a
DJ was blasting music. A portable
projection screen was being in-
flated for a showing of the film
“2000 Mules,” a debunked narra-
tive of election fraud purporting
to be a documentary. Rubino
fired up the grill as more candi-
dates arrived.
“Mr. Gordon, hot dog?” she
said to a candidate for attorney
general.
“Mr. Perdue,” she said to the
Trump-endorsed candidate for
governor, reaching her hand out
to David Perdue. “A ngela Rubino.”
As the possible future leaders
of Georgia milled around, she
stood behind the grill, observing
what she had managed to pull off.
“This is our party! This is our
revolution!” the emcee began,
introducing candidates who
spoke in the language of her
social media scrolls about “patri-
ots” and “enemies” and “evil,” and
after that, the emcee said, “I’d like
to introduce Angela.”
She made her way to the micro-
phone and looked out at a crowd
of nearly 100 people.
“Hello everybody and thanks
for coming out,” Rubino said. “I
really don’t like to speak. But I
would like to consider myself the
town crier, I guess.”
She paused for a moment as
people clapped and cheered, then
continued talking about a move-
ment that she believed was bigger
than any one election.
“We will take care of business
ourselves — because we’re tired of
it,” she said, and people clapped
and cheered again.
Three days later, feeling better
and better, she arrived at the
primary night celebration for
Greene. It was a landslide. She
had gotten 70 percent of the vote.
It was a higher percentage than
she received in 2020, and the fact
that other insurgent candidates
were losing only affirmed to Ru-
bino the importance of working
harder.
“A ngela!” someone yelled as
she waded into a crowd inside a
hotel banquet room in downtown
Rome, where she saw many peo-
ple who’d been in her yard a few
days before.
She shook hands. She hugged
people. She took photos. She
paused to give an interview for a
podcast called “Cowboy Logic,”
whose host asked about her work.
“It takes a lot of time, but for
Marjorie, that’s what you do,” said
Rubino.
She got herself a drink and a
slice of pizza, feeling ever more
significant as Greene’s unfolding
victory felt in so many ways like
her own. She settled at t he back of
the room, where video screens
were showing a loop of Greene
giving speeches in Congress, and
soon, the crowd cheered as
Greene herself arrived in the
room.
“Woo!” Rubino yelled.
Greene smiled and told people
that instead of giving an off-the-
cuff speech, she had written one
out for once.
And so in the more careful and
polished manner of a leader on
the rise, she began describing the
America that Rubino believed in
more and more, one at war with
“globalists” and the “democratic
communist agenda” and elites
who “look down on us” and “hate
us.”
She listened as Greene spoke of
an “A merican revival.” She nod-
ded along as Greene said, “It is we
who will set the public agenda for
the next decade.”
“The establishment GOP is
falling in line — they will , and
they want to,” Greene continued,
and in the back of the room, a
woman who climbed into a
dumpster to save America knew
that this was true.
“A nd they have ,” Rubino said,
finishing the thought.cut a girl’s face off and she wore
it?” said Rubino, referring to one
of the fake videos of the type
always coming across her social
media scroll. “I could hardly
watch.”
“We have a problem as a soci-
ety, clearly,” said Smith.
“A nd we’re the weirdos?” said
Rubino.
They arrived in a half-empty
downtown, passing a storefront
church that was screening a film
called “Whose Children Are
They?” that purported to expose
“the hidden agenda in America’s
schools.” They turned into a
neighborhood of patched-up
bungalows.
“I’m guessing it’s that one
where the flag and the signs are,”
said Smith, and they parked in
front of a yellow-sided house with
a rusted picnic table in the yard. A
bearded, ponytailed man wearing
a T-shirt that read “Send Patriots,
not Politicians” stepped outside.
“I just got back from knocking
on doors,” said Robert Watson,
who described himself as an “out-
sider running an insurgency cam-
paign against an establishment
RINO.”
His platform included pushing
for a forensic audit of the 2020
election, expanding gun rights,
and opposing a mental health bill
because it used guidelines of the
World Health Organization,
which he considered to be “god-
less and evil.”
Rubino handed him some
signs, and Smith asked about his
wife, who’d recently quit her job
as a caregiver in a nursing home.
“She’s tore her back up, tore
her knees up,” Watson said.
“She told me she came in one
day and they didn’t even have
wipes,” said Smith. “How can you
not have any wipes, and then you
got chandeliers in the lobby?”
“Corruption,” said Rubino, and
soon they were talking about how
not having wipes was one more
example of powerful elites too
busy advancing their agenda to
care about the elderly poor.
“A nd we’re the radical nuts,”
Watson said.
“Yeah, right,” said Rubino.
“Okay, where are we off to next?”S
he was so busy that she
barely had time to keep up
with all the updates on her
social media scrolls, which came
by the dozens every hour.
“RINOs and Democrats Just
Stole Future Elections in Deep
Red Alaska,” read one.
“It’s war,” read another. “It’s
raging on all fronts. You have
been used by all sides in the
greatest psyops operation ever.”
“The battle is only beginning,”
read one from Greene. “The Com-
munists came after me, but they
were really coming after you.”
She read them all. And then, on
a Sunday when she was supposed
to go to a rally for Greene, she did
something else instead. She
turned off her phone.
She did this sometimes, when-
ever she was feeling over-
whelmed by what she believed
the country was becoming. It was
a warm afternoon, and she decid-
ed to work on the flooring of the
tents. It helped to do something
tangible. She dragged several
sheets of plywood to the area in
her yard she’d already cleared
and began screwing them togeth-
er, thinking about the question
that was always at the bottom of
days like this, one she had beenwrestling with most of her life.
“Sometimes, I’d like to know
what the point is,” she said, driv-
ing in a screw. “The fact that I
can’t figure it out is what bothers
me. Because I need to under-
stand.”
It was a question that had
troubled her since the first time
she ever asked it, which was when
she was 8 years old, sitting in the
back seat of her mother’s car on
the way to religion class.
“The thought just came into
my head,” she said. “I was think-
ing, ‘What are we doing this for?
What are we doing any of this for
if we’re just going to die? You die,
and it’s o ver. So, what’s the point?’
I felt afraid. Afraid to the point of
not wanting to think about that
anymore.”
She had never stopped think-
ing about it, though, and in some
ways, she said, it was the question
that had drawn her into the
movement for Donald Trump,
who was the first politician to
give voice to her private thoughtsabout what America was becom-
ing, which made her feel recog-
nized and even important. She
had never voted before, never felt
herself mattering as a citizen
until Trump came on the scene
along with everything else — the
rallies, the social media, and
eventually, successors such as
Greene.
They were the ones who intro-
duced her to the version of Ameri-
ca she now inhabited, but what
was happening, she realized, was
that the more she believed in it,
the more that all the certainties of
the old America were turning
into suspicions. She no longer
trusted her schooling. She no
longer trusted traditional news.
She no longer trusted election
results. She no longer trusted
courts, or local government, or
state government, or the U.S.
government, or any of the institu-
tions of democracy she once took
for granted. She was no longer
sure America was the country she
once thought it was.“It’s just endless questions,”
she said. “You’d like to have some-
body to trust, something to be
sure of.”
But every question led to an-
other suspicion, she said, and
every suspicion led to another
question, and at times it could all
feel so destabilizing that she was
no longer sure of her own sense of
reality itself, which had so thor-
oughly broken down that she
sometimes had to regain her
bearings by doing what she was
doing now. She picked up a screw
and squeezed it.
“I know I have this screw in my
hand because it’s poking my fin-
ger and hurts,” she said.
She pinched the skin on the
inside of her forearm.
“I am really here,” she said.
She looked at a tree across the
yard.
“I know that’s a tree,” she said,
then stopped herself. “Or at l east I
know that it’s called a tree be-
cause that’s what I was told, but
how do I know it’s not something
else?”
She looked at her garage,
where she was storing the bags of
shreds that she was still planning
to spread out on a long table and
tape back together again, at
which point she believed that she
might better understand this mo-
ment in America. She realized
how absurd this could sound.
“Sometimes I’m like, what if
I’m wrong?” Rubino said. “It
crosses my mind. Then I ask God:
If I’m doing something wrong,
please give me the strength to
figure it out. Because I really
want to understand what the
point is. This can’t be what life is,
that you get up and go to work
and come home. That as humans,
we’re nothing.”
She drove the screw into the
plywood.
“I want people to realize we’re
significant,” she said.
She drove in another screw,
and another and kept working all
afternoon until the floors were
finished. She jumped up and
down to be sure they were secure.PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: A billboard in
Rome, Ga., denounces
Gov. Brian Kemp (R),
who won his reelection
primary despite being
opposed by former
president Donald Trump,
who had endorsed a
Kemp challenger. Kemp
did not support claims by
Trump that he lost the
2020 presidential
election to fraud.ABOVE: Some of the
attendees at a political
rally at the home of
Angela Rubino in
Georgia.BELOW: Rep. Marjorie
Taylor Greene (R-Ga.),
left, with Angela Rubino
at a Greene primary day
victory rally in Rome,
Ga., on May 24.