After hearing that Donald Trump would appear at a federal courthouse in downtown Washington to answer charges filed against him for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Joan Batista made plans to be outside, celebrating what she viewed as the former president’s long overdue comeuppance.
But when she arrived at the E Barrett Prettyman US courthouse, what she saw bothered her. City trucks equipped with snow plows blocked roads, hundreds of police monitored the building’s entrances and reporters from all around the world ringed its perimeter, hoping for a glimpse of the former president.
“It’s a little embarrassing,” Batista, a veteran of many demonstrations in and around the Capitol, told the Guardian. Even though Trump was finally having to answer for his attempts to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, the fact that it had come to this bothered her. So, too, did the fact that despite facing the most serious criminal charges against a former American president in history, Trump appears to remain the most popular man in the Republican party.
“It’s not a regular celebration,” Batista conceded, seated in a plaza outside the courthouse where demonstrators boogied to Enur’s reggae fusion hit Calabria 2008. “It shouldn’t have taken this long, and the special treatment is a little troublesome, because he should be held today.”
The former president’s appearance Thursday under stormy skies and just steps from the Capitol his supporters attacked on January 6 satisfied few of those who turned up to witness it. Road closures and a huge police presence meant his motorcade was mostly out of the crowd’s sight when it arrived, and only a few members of the public made it into the courtroom where Trump entered not guilty pleas to the four charges brought against him by special prosecutor Jack Smith.
There was no sign the former president saw the handful of supporters waving flags reading “TRUMP WON”, nor the demonstrators in prison stripes or the man wearing an inflatable Trump costume with the words “LOSER” written across the front.
“It was also very sad driving through Washington and seeing the filth and the decay, and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” Trump told reporters in brief remarks on the tarmac of the Virginia airport he departed from after his court appearance. “This is not the place that I left.”
It is a place, however, that Trump is strenuously working to return to. He has vowed to press on with his presidential campaign despite his mounting legal troubles, and polls indicate most Republicans are ready to help him get back into the White House.
“It is totally unfair, and that’s why [Smith] indicted him several times and this is another one. It’s just bringing him more and more strength and more popularity,” said Daniel Demoura, as he carried a pole from which several Trump flags flew.
Standing on a traffic island surrounded by a mix of reporters, police and curious tourists, the 32-year-old said it felt like “a circus, because I see a lot of people being crazy, making some weird jokes that doesn’t make sense and people dancing around like if it was a party. But we’re here in a serious way to defend Trump.”
He may have been thinking of Lucas Elek, a law student living in Colorado who happened to be in Washington and headed down to the courthouse for Trump’s appearance wearing a Jar Jar Binks mask and carrying a cardboard sign reading “DONNY DONONO!” Elek said he chose the Star War character in reference to his role in fueling the rise of dictatorship in the films’ universe, and also to keep his face hidden after receiving online abuse from rightwing commenters.
“This is, in some ways, a celebration of our democracy. And you’ve got all of your strait-laced politicos in their seats over there, but I think … they’d be lying if they said it wasn’t a historic moment. And so I think we need to celebrate it,” Elek said in a brief moment when he wasn’t dancing.
Criminal defendants are usually present for their trials, and if that’s the case for Trump, it will mean more business for Stan Sinberg and his Roving Anti-Trump Bandwagon, where pins bearing Smith’s face and slogans like “I am the resistance” could be bought for $4 a piece. Conceived in the wake of Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries in 2016, Sinberg travels to rallies against the now former president, always expecting that the time would arrive when his business would dry up. It hasn’t.
“It was supposed to end on election night 2016. Then he won, then people still wanted them. And then it was supposed to end again, when he lost the election in 2020, and I even put up a sign: ‘happily going out of business sale.’ But he didn’t go away. So I’m still at it,” Sinberg said.
“People say to me … if he wasn’t president, you wouldn’t have a job. It’s ironic, it’s true. But, even so … every morning I would wake up and wish for a headline ‘Trump dead’. And then I’d be out of business but, alright, it’s worth it.”
