Superfans descend on Windsor to enliven Trump’s festival of nothing | Donald Trump

NStill in its long and August history, bus n ° 10 from Windsor at Staines (via Datchet and Wraysbury) received a welcome like this. His passage secure by the police escort, his progress followed by the world’s media, the bridges with a single orange bridge have been in place of the High Street Street in Windsor, while the Crane spectators to have an overview of the single retiree transmitted inside. “It is not him,” mumbles a man, a little superfluous.

It was this kind of day on the shores of the Thames: a lot of excitement on very little, a sit down show that felt largely peripheral to the realization of the ceremonial in the terrains of the sealed castle. “I fear that nothing happens, Madame,” said a policeman a woman spinning a live Facebook video from the sidewalk when he made her a safety distance to the sidewalk.

Of course, some things did Arrive, but nothing of any consequence in the great scheme of things. People have shouted against each other. People argued on Gaza. People praised the flags and brandished signs. A man in a Maga hat ate a marinated egg from the Chips store and has grimacted a little. The television runners commut from top to bottom of Castle Hill by transporting flat whites to talent on the screen. Water water.

But mainly Windsor was a sea of ​​people who looked at other people to look at things, reassured simultaneously by their physical proximity to the main event and dismayed by their inability to influence it. “We are ready for everything that will happen on or around the water,” said SGT Lyn Smith, head of a joint marine unit between the police of Thames Valley and the Hampshire. While the presidential party was approaching Windsor, the only thing that happens near the water was a swan that took a dumping ground.

Of course, this festival of nothing was partially cooked in the design, the logical consequence of a state visit whose guiding principle was to avoid any imaginable contact with real people. While Trump and King Charles inspected the guard, the crowd outside was completely left to herself. Small: if you tell a supporter of Maga that his huge flag has only 49 stars on it, he will always have them half an hour later.

Even so everyone was there and the cameras operated, so how was everyone going to fill their shows? The BBC seemed to spend most of the morning to broadcast aerial photos of the castle. “Our best floor today, stone construction remains standing.”

“You can see a few drops of rain on the camera there, and the rain obviously has an impact on the flight,” said Sky News to try to explain why Trump’s helicopter had to take off. It is clear that alternative entertainment was necessary.

Not at the front: the superfans. And they are never in shortage during events like these, drawn like butterflies in a media swimming pool, necessarily filling hours of time of died antenna with their antics. There was a guy dressed from head to toe in the United Kingdom and American flags. There was a woman with an Alsatian muzzled wrapped in a Maga vest. There was a guy who had spent two days painting an image of Trump as a cave man, carrying King Charles on his back like a baby. There were people outside the Barbour store having flamboyant lines on the definition of genocide. All of them found a volunteer audience among itinerant journalists eager for copying, any copy, of any type of color.

And you realize how easily for political opinion in this country is shaped by the noisiest people – and by the wildest extension -. Why take the trouble to engage in the reasoned and empirical process of unpacking the views of a normal person, teasing the nuance, questioning doubt, when you can simply enter the guy in a t-shirt that reads “Trump was right on everything” and save you?

It may be inevitable that any circus attracts some clowns. But that also seems to be a very specific quality to Trump: the infallible ability to attract outlines and unsuitables wherever it goes. Let’s face it: Trump himself is just a very bizarre guy, the kind of specimen you imagine would result from an unfortunate nuclear accident involving a large block of orange cheese. And in a sense, all his presidency was a kind of bat signal for the dissatisfied, the gullible, the curious plot, the semi-designed. Parias of the world, unite. We meet in Windsor in Daybreak. Wear what you want.

ROYALS. Police. Journalists. The branches of the Hampshire and Berkshire of the Trump Fanclub. Was there someone here normal? “Not in Windsor”, sniff the girl behind the horse and groom bar. “They are too busy screaming with each other.” And perhaps there is something in this place that highlights the cosplay throughout the world, a royal seat with a contained city, a sort of England Potemkin with its waves of brunt goals and novelty, a reverie to sell tourists. What kind of reality do we really expect to meet here?

Reality is still introduced, if you look strong enough. A short distance from the crazy crowd, some local liberal democratic advisers gave leaflets. Improve our parks and playgrounds. Replace the broken lampposts. Treat “Grot spots”, whatever they are. It is politics that really affects people’s lives, much closer than some American presidents seated in a carriage pulled by horses that no one can see. But they find it difficult to get the message across. “We are taking care of people, repairing things, taking care of communities,” said Mark Wilson in the Eton and Castle district. “But that’s not what gets clicks.”

Inside the field, men in fun hats played brass instruments. The St George’s Hall banquet table was during the bridge. Outside, the crowd dispersed. Bus No. 10 was on the right track (via Datyt and Wraysbury). The woman in Maga’s hood had plunged into Wagamama to grasp Teppanyaki. And it was impossible not to detect the Gulf between these worlds, much thicker than a castle wall, the briefly adjacent but eternally distant worlds.