On Those Ubiquitous Trump Flags and Road Signs

Funny how my perspective changed along with my good news day.

A far cry from Trump World. I can’t explain how much I need this.

The 67-mile drive from Petoskey to Traverse City Michigan along US 31 should have been pleasant enough for me to forget how far I had to go for another doctor’s appointment I thought seemed silly, knowing it would be just another Q&A that could well have been done via teleconference.

This time it was to see a rheumatologist, a specialist with, oddly, no counterpart in my new town chock full of specialists. I didn’t even know what a rheumatologist did. I thought it had to do with arthritis, which is quite different from arteritis, which is what I have. (I wrote about my adventures with giant cell arteritis —a fun name for TA—here and here, as it was happening.)

I of course didn’t think I needed this appointment—I never do—but I was glad I went. For two reasons.

Reason Number One: I decided on a whim to go the day before my next-morning appointment so I could stay at one of Traverse City’s beachfront hotels and get my water fix. I miss being right by the water! I miss it much, much more than I thought I would, though I should have known. I lived in our waterfront cottage on Drummond Island for 30 years and never tired of the views or of the experiences.

Now, since Ed died more than two years ago and our cottage decided to decline as well, my life has changed. I live in an apartment in a pleasant and peaceful enough setting, but where I no longer see sunrises or sunsets or open water. From my ‘hollow’ I see grass and trees. I wish I could say it’s enough. I’m finding it’s probably not.

I need vistas.

But on to Reason Number Two: I thought this appointment would be a waste of time, but it wasn’t. Besides reassuring me that the root cause of my TA wasn’t polymyalgia rheumatica (Where the rheumatology comes in), this doctor eased my fears about TA being a dangerous auto-immune disease that might still take me down. Chances are nothing more will happen once I’m off of the steroid regimen. (In about a year, with gradually decreasing dosages until I’m down to nothing.)

I told her about the docs I had initially encountered and how giddy they were about having finally seen a case they’d only heard about before, and she had to laugh. She sees at least one a week! The assurance that what I have isn’t some freakish rarity may alone have been worth the trip. (There is a slim chance of a reoccurrence years down the road, but remember, I’m 87. And an incorrigible optimist.)

One wiggle in my plans: I hadn’t been to Traverse City in years, so I was looking forward to seeing the downtown and the bay front again. Well…roadwork cut that notion short. I ended up having to take a long detour south of the city and around the airport to get to where I was going, since those roads to the pretty, touristy spots were totally blocked. I mean totally. Nobody was getting though. The parts I had to drive through could have been anywhere, with chain stores, strip malls, fast food clones and the like.

But that’s not why I’m writing today. I’m writing this because I’m home now and I can’t get over how many Trump signs I passed along that bucolic miles-long route. They were everywhere. HUGE signs. Expensive signs. In front of homes and businesses, a constant buzzkill as I drove down there and then back the next day.

Granted, there were some signs for Kamala and Michigan Dems, and some of them were huge, as well, but the Trump/Republican signs overwhelmed. A few of them seemed cryptic: “VOTE REPUBLICAN. YOU KNOW WHY”.

Well, no, I don’t, but really, I’m fine. No need to explain.

On the drive down I grew more and more miffed with each flag, with each sign, but that was before I knew for sure I was going to be okay. On the way back, when things seemed to have improved and I was at ease, I looked at those same signs and came away with this singular thought:

How embarrassing.

Yes, at first I was angry. How dare they ruin what should have been a lovely drive through small towns and woods and farmlands. Those peeks at Lake Michigan were enchanting. The rains stopped, the clouds parted, blue skies appeared, yet those damned Trump signs were like the worst kind of blight. I couldn’t close my eyes to them, now could I? I was driving.

But then I had to laugh. I mean, what a waste! Will those signs make any of us who wouldn’t be voting for Trump change our minds? Will they reinforce the resolve of those who choose to ignore Trump’s blatant criminality and vote for him anyway? Nope. They’ll do neither of those things. (Notice I’m not saying the same about the Dem signs. Are they more effective? In some sense they are. They show that we’re here, that we’re excited, that we’re not going back. We talk about them. We report where we’ve seen them. We thank those folks brave enough to put them out. We shouldn’t have to, but we do.)

But Trump signs are a cliche now. After all these years of constant, ubiquitous curbside advertising, they’ve been rendered meaningless. They’re ordinary and ho-hum. They seem pathetic now, given what a loser Trump has become.

And It didn’t get past me that there were several clusters of GOP signs without a single Trump sign. That had to be on purpose.

But the rest…poor things! They’re supporting someone the entire civilized world despises and they’re proud of it.

Their hero thinks there’s a big faucet up in Canada Gavin Newsom won’t ask Canada to turn on to help poor California with their water woes. And did you catch the thing about Smelt…?

He thinks women will believe him when he professes his love for us, promising to protect us and keep us safe IN AN ALL CAPS Truth Social message Margaret Atwood must wish she’d thought of first. We laugh at how stupid he is, thinking we women are buying that shit when we never have and never will.

He professes his love and admiration for dictators who kill their own and make billions off of their country’s misery. He claims they love him back, apparently not understanding it’s because they want him to win in order to make it easier for them to plunder and pillage, and when he loses they’ll drop him like a hot potato. Kamala will eat them for breakfast and they know it. They’re big liars, too, only Trump doesn’t want to see it, and that, in the eyes of those of us who know how these guys operate, makes Trump quite the public buffoon.

He’s still talking about that cognitive test he aced. The one with the clock hands and the animals and the five-word memory quiz. “It was hard!” says the man who wants to be president again after botching his last attempt so badly there are no other presidents listed under his name as the ‘worst president in history’ category.

He thinks he’s going to take this election from us and he doesn’t even have to win to do it. He’s literally telling potential voters not to bother to hand in their ballots. Project 25, that manifesto he says he knows nothing about, outlines all the ways democracy will die under Trump and the Republicans, including the election process, and honestly, were you not as surprised as I was that they were dumb enough to put it all out there before they got around to noticing it could be used as ammunition against them?

They fed us their plans as if, when we saw them, we’d either be bedazzled or terrified into submission. Instead, we’re using them as reasons to work harder to defeat once and for all that wholly un-American Orange Phenomenon.

And it’s working for us.

For US.

Those signs along the road are advertisements for a man who is SO DONE. A reminder of how clueless the sign-posters are about how bad he really is, how much he’s F’d up everything he’d hoped to accomplish. They seem pathetic now—howls in the wind rather than calls to action. Raggedy, fluttery cries for help:

Please help us put this totally unfit and hilariously inept pretend actor back into the office he left after being impeached twice, losing so bigly he had to save face by pretending he’d won, thus causing a riot on our Capitol where people were killed and innocents were injured and congressfolk ran for their lives and the vice president was threatened with a noose and the halls of congress were vandalized and those sacred walls were smeared with actual, icky human feces. Oh, and can we just ignore those 34 indictments and the fact that Our Guy is now a convicted felon protected against most of his crimes by a corrupt lifetime-appointed Supreme Court majority brought on board by one Donald J. Trump himself? And so what if he wants to be a dictator? He and he alone should be a dictator.

This is what the people who pound those signs into the ground want. It’s embarrassing, especially in the face of Trump’s inevitable, inglorious end.

And it will end, one way or another.

Losers and suckers hang those signs. We don’t need to be afraid of them, or even think of them in any other light, but it never hurts to laugh at them as we pass by.

I’ve done it now and let me tell you, it’s a trip.

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