by Tim Gilmore, 8/20/2016
A little more than half a year after the Trump campaign office set up shop at 2657 Park Street near the intersection of King, in the heart of Riverside Avondale, like your creepy perverted old uncle who parks his van at your curb before dawn one morning, uninvited, it disappeared as quietly and quickly.
The banner that took up most of the storefront, the lighted “All Aboard the Trump Train” sign, and the Trump flag hoisted above the door all vanished overnight.
courtesy The Florida Times-Union
A large note placed on the front door said, “OPPS! Expanding To new location….for Donald J. Trump THANK YOU! NEW Address is coming SOON” [sic]
Is “OPPS!” supposed to be “Oops!”? Does is stand for “Operations”? Is it a reference to the 1991 Naughty by Nature rap? “Yeah, you know me.”
None could tell.
The Trump office had been unpopular in the district from the start. Shortly after the office opened in January, someone defaced Trump’s image in the window, adding a Hitler mustache to his top lip and a swastika to his forehead. People regularly threw objects ranging from a trashcan to a taco at the office, and both events made news. A Bernie Sanders sign was projected onto the building at night from somewhere across the street.
photo by Barry Floore
Elsewhere in Riverside, “Trump” appeared beneath “STOP” on stop signs, and a paste-up of Vladimir Putin’s face with a quote of his praising Trump found its way to a wall in Five Points.
Patsy Butts, the beaches resident who owns the old commercial building and opened the Trump office told me back in February that she had the FBI “posted all around here,” and waved her index finger in a circle above her head.
Trump had already shown himself a sexist, a racist, and a narcissist, but none of that mattered to the Trumpeteers I met inside. He’d recently said he could pull a gun and shoot someone dead in the middle of Manhattan and not lose votes. It didn’t concern them that he was illogical, for what they loved was his anger.
So he rode his anger all the way to becoming the Republican candidate for president in 2016. It would not matter, even to these conservative Southerners, when Trump blatantly disrespected the military. Nor when nude pictures of his wife Melania, would-be First Lady, appeared in The New York Post. Nor when Trump praised Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin. Nor when Trump told a mother at a rally, “Get the baby out of here.”
Trump and Melania at a Playboy event in 2003
It hadn’t bothered them when he’d re-tweeted white supremacist messages and Mussolini quotes. It hadn’t bothered them that he’d told Howard Stern, after Princess Diana’s death, that he “could’ve nailed her.” Nor that he’d said, “It doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
So why did the Riverside Trump office close?
Was it his suggestion that Russia should commit electronic espionage against the United States?
Surely not.
Was it Trump’s disparagement of the Kahns, “Gold Star” military family, or his ridiculing Senator John McCain for being held as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam, saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Or was it Trump’s sinking to all-time historic lows in presidential campaign polling?
Time Magazine cover, art by Edel Rodriguez
Or was it just “Oops!”? Or “OPPS!”?
“You down wit’ O.P.P.?”
Maybe Angela Lannon Wilcox knows. She’s the owner of the Florida Creamery in the Shoppes of Avondale whose online semi-literate Trumpian rant garnered a national boycott in July.
In her statement of support for Trump, Wilcox made such statements as “All the Christians have been wiped out in the middle east, Eurpe is next” and “dumbass LIBERALS […] only care about their twats.” [sic]
