Hop on the Long Island Rail Road in Penn Station and head out of Manhattan, along the Island’s north shore, and you’ll land in Ronkonkoma, the station serving communities like Setauket and Port Jefferson in Suffolk County.
As hinterland, it puts the leaf in leafy suburb. The landscape is reminiscent a thousand TV sitcoms: well-kept frame houses, comfortable and roomy, sit well back from the road in quiet suburban culs de sac. All that’s missing is the white picket fence, but who needs fences in a neighbourhood this friendly?
The gentle hills are thickly wooded, and you see the odd deer treading carefully between the trees as you roll down to where Bennetts Road meets Route 25A meet near the bagel shop and pharmacy.
You can also see a weekly demonstration between those for and against former President Donald Trump at that crossroads, with plenty of support for the latter camp.
The Democratic heartland of Manhattan might be a short train journey away, but out on Long Island feels like the heart of MAGA country. I got a lift from Ronkonkoma Station and the man driving the car, knowing why I was in town, said he was disappointed for me as we headed for the demonstration.
“I was going to bring you past one of the houses which has a Fuck Biden flag, but they’d taken it down when I drove past earlier. It was probably too near the school.”
The weekly protest and counter-protest at the crossroads is a long-running soap opera. It began when opponents of the Iraq War congregated there twenty years ago, opposed by those supporting the US troops in that conflict.
Since then the protests have experienced considerable mission creep, absorbing all the flashpoints we now associate with modern culture conflicts. Ukraine flags, rainbow banners, Israel flags — or in one case, a half-Israel, half-US flag — all flutter on one side or the other along with the Stars and Stripes, which both sides wave. (No Union Jacks, though the British royal family, oddly, is among the MAGA passions. Donald Trump is critical of Meghan Markle and is therefore on the side of the royals in this theatre of the culture wars. Suffice to say ideological consistency is the least of our worries.)
The protests are mostly flag-waving. The MAGA side has music, of the loud country variety — though most assuredly none from the late lamented Kris Kristofferson, given his liberal tendencies — and a truck emblazoned with various pro-Trump slogans.
The opposing sides keep to their own zones and at this stage know each other by name. If you spend two decades facing the same people once a week some familiarity is bound to creep in. The anger is largely displayed by the passing motorists: a middle finger or an extra-loud beep as they pass.
After an hour or so the protestors pack up the flags and leave: it’s Saturday, so there’s plenty to do. Next weekend it’ll start all over again.
AFTER Setauket we headed down to Port Jefferson on the shore. It was warm, so a cone at the Frigate ice cream shop would have been welcome, but the enormous banner across the front of the building was a little off-putting: IN TRUMP WE TRUST.
Across to Starbucks to get caffeinated ahead of the visit to the MAGA store in Ronkonkoma.
This was the focal point of the trip, and originally there was a plan. To sidle up to the owner and shoot the breeze in a you’re-an-awful-man-fleecing-people tone; to take a we’re-all-in-on-the-joke approach, a touch of isn’t-this-gas-altogether.
The plan didn’t survive its first contact with the reality of MAGA.
The store is tucked into a corner of a nondescript industrial park, with a banner on the roof and flags outside on the grass. We pulled up and entered a small room stocked with a variety of posters and flags but didn’t get much of a chance to examine the merchandise.
When we were there we were screened accidentally from the cashier by an earnest, grandmotherly type inquiring with great seriousness about the new stock because it was late, it was supposed to be there already, and I was in earlier this week … we carried on through the next door, on into the literal inner sanctum.
This room felt like being injected directly into a MAGA diehard’s cerebral cortex. A slew of messages, slogans, demands, and phrases on a variety of surfaces assaulted the senses, many with red, blue, and white flashing or a Stars and Stripes in the background. Or in the foreground. In the MAGA world there is no middle ground).
The t-shirt messaging consisted of variations on a theme: I Like My Presidents Like My Guns, 40 and 45; Grazed And Unphased (sic); President Trump Will Not Be Stopped; MAGA Island; and The Teflon Don.
The last was my favourite. It linked Trump overtly to the original John Gotti, a convicted murderer, extortionist, gangster and general racketeer with no irony whatsoever.
Your reporter failed abjectly in his duty to investigate whether these were relics from the godhead or something else entirely. This was because a) the container bore a close resemblance to the container of flaxseed I open every morning to supplement my porridge and, as noted, it was a very warm day.
But b) I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.
The room suddenly felt very small indeed and I became overpoweringly conscious that there was only one exit, out beyond the man at the cash register. A couple of other customers left ahead of us, glancing back over their shoulders.
My colleague clearly picked up on the vibe. We both nodded at the door and stole out to the car park doing our level best not to draw attention to ourselves. As we left a family came in the door against us, and the mother asked the son what he wanted.
“Everything,” he said, gazing around him.
In order to prove that I had indeed been in the MAGA store I stood next to the flags outside. We were getting ready to leave when a low-slung sports car, windows tinted black, roared into the car park and pulled up nearby.
We left.
As we did so, my driver confirmed that he had been struck by the same realisation as I had while contemplating the Fuck Your Feelings Generation t-shirts.
“It only occurred to me inside there that introducing yourself as a journalist would be bad enough, but introducing yourself a journalist with a foreign accent mightn’t have been a good idea. At all.”
SOME readers may remember the 1992 US presidential election, which generated one of the perennial political quotes: it’s the economy, stupid. Coined by Democratic strategist James Carville, its pungent message brings it all back home, suggesting people are motivated to vote by what they have in their pockets.
On those grounds the Democrats are streets ahead. US unemployment is just over 4%. The stock market is flourishing. Irish readers may roll their eyes at such broad macroeconomic brushstrokes, but consider this: Reuters reported only last month that gas (petrol) prices in the US were to fall below $3 a gallon for the first time in over three years. Just in time for a presidential election.
Why is the Harris-Trump race still so close, then?
The disinformation helps, certainly. When hurricanes ravaged the east coast of the US recently Donald Trump lied about the the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) efforts to help those affected.
The falsehoods spread by Trump included allegations that President Biden had “abandoned” the affected states; they were so egregious that even Republicans like Governor George Kemp of Georgia clarified publicly that they were getting all the help they needed from the Biden administration.
For another angle on the power of disinformation it’s worth going back to the crossroads where those Setauket protests take place.
It’s an obvious spot for such demonstrations, given the scattering of local businesses at the intersection which draw in the population naturally.
On one of the quadrants created by the crossroads the land climbs upwards to a bank and a coffee shop, with a CVS pharmacy beyond them again: the last is overlooked by large trees as the hill behind reverts to woodland.
A hundred yards uphill from the Setauket crossroads you take a right off the main road and follow a nondescript service route to what seems like a large business campus, though there are no signs or directions visible.
This is the home of Renaissance Technologies, a multibillion dollar hedge fund founded by the late computer whiz Jim Simons, a former academic who led the way in applying algorithms to stock market analysis. As we all know now, algorithmic analysis can have malign results in certain fields, but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Simons’ success generated a personal worth well over $21 billion — before he passed away last May he donated half a billion dollars to Stony Brook, the college where he once taught.
In 2017, Bloomberg reported that Simons had urged co-chief executive Paul Mercer to step down because he felt the latter’s activities were damaging the firm.
Mercer was well known for backing conservative causes. He supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and backed former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News site.
Breitbart’s track record is one of stoking fear and hatred through content which ranges from racist to misogynist; false information and misleading conspiracy theories are its stock in trade.
That wasn’t Mercer’s only involvement in online disinformation: he helped to fund Cambridge Analytica, the notorious organisation which harvested the private data of Facebook users in an effort to manipulate elections in America and elsewhere.
Here are two wings of the MAGA movement, closely aligned on an obscure crossroads in suburban New York, working for Trump in separate ways.
The visibility of the roadside protesters contrasts with Mercer’s activities behind the scenes, yet the sites Mercer supports help drive those protesters ever deeper into the world of conspiracies and conflicts.
The fact that that stand of trees behind the CVS shielded Mercer from seeing the real-life results of his investments just seems a little on the nose, the clumsy invention of a harried novelist, but the geography helps disprove Carville’s dictum.
In the Trump world, factors such as economic indicators, never mind fitness for office, are immaterial. The personality — The Teflon Don! Grazed but Unphased! — is all that matters to the cult.
Carville should in fact revisit his one-liner. The most important factor in the forthcoming presidential election is not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupid economy.