Superfans descend on Windsor to enliven Trump’s festival of nothing | Donald Trump
Never in its long and august history has the No 10 bus from Windsor to Staines (via Datchet and Wraysbury) received a welcome like this. Its passage secured by police escort, its progress followed by the world’s media, the orange single-decker trundles regally up Windsor’s high street, while onlookers crane to get a glimpse of the single pensioner conveyed within. “It’s not him,” one man mutters, a little superfluously.
It was that kind of a day on the banks of the Thames: lots of excitement over very little, a sideshow that felt largely peripheral to the pageantry unfolding within the sealed castle grounds. “I’m afraid nothing’s going to happen, madam,” a police officer informed a woman filming a Facebook Live video from the kerb as he shooed her a safe distance back towards the pavement.
Of course, certain things did happen, albeit nothing of very much consequence in the grand scheme of things. People shouted things at each other. People argued over Gaza. People waved flags and brandished placards. A man in a Maga hat ate a pickled egg from the chip shop and grimaced a little. Television runners shuttled up and down Castle Hill ferrying flat whites to the on-screen talent. Drizzle drizzled.
But mainly Windsor was a sea of people watching other people watch things, simultaneously reassured by their physical proximity to the main event and dismayed by their inability to influence it. “We are ready for anything that will happen on or around the water,” said Sgt Lyn Smith, head of a joint operations marine unit between Thames Valley and Hampshire police. As the presidential party neared Windsor, pretty much the only thing happening near the water was a swan taking a dump.
Of course, this festival of nothing was partly baked into the design, the logical consequence of a state visit whose guiding principle was to avoid any conceivable contact with actual people. While Trump and King Charles inspected the guard, the crowd outside was left entirely to its own devices. Little tip: if you tell a Maga supporter that his huge flag only has 49 stars on it, he’ll still be counting them half an hour later.
Even so, everyone was here and the cameras were running, so how was everyone going to fill their broadcasts? The BBC appeared to spend most of the morning broadcasting aerial shots of the castle. “Our top story today, stone building remains upright.”
“You can see some drops of rain on the camera there, and rain obviously has an impact on flying,” a talking head filibustered on Sky News in an attempt to explain why Trump’s helicopter was yet to take off. Clearly some alternative entertainment was required.
Step forward: the superfans. And they are never in short supply at events like these, drawn like moths to a media pool, obligingly filling hours of dead airtime with their antics. There was a guy dressed from head to toe in UK and US flags. There was a woman with a muzzled alsatian wrapped in a Maga vest. There was a guy who had spent two days painting a picture of Trump as a caveman, carrying King Charles on his back like a baby. There were people outside the Barbour store having blazing rows about the definition of genocide. All found a willing audience among the roving reporters hungry for copy, any copy, any kind of colour.
And you realise how easily what passes for political opinion in this country is shaped by the loudest – and by extension the craziest – people. Why bother to engage in the reasoned and empirical process of unpacking the views of a normal person, teasing out the nuance, interrogating the doubt, when you can simply home in on the guy in a T-shirt that reads “Trump Was Right About Everything” and save yourself the trouble?
Perhaps it is inevitable that any circus will attract a few clowns. But this does also seem to be a quality very specific to Trump: the unerring ability to attract outcasts and misfits wherever he goes. Let’s face it: Trump himself is just a very weird 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 his entire presidency has been a kind of bat signal to the disaffected, the credulous, the conspiracy-curious, the semi-sentient. Outcasts of the world, unite. We gather at Windsor at daybreak. Wear whatever you like.
Royals. Police. Journalists. The Hampshire and Berkshire branches of the Trump fanclub. Was there anyone here remotely normal? “Not in Windsor,” snorted the girl behind the bar of the Horse and Groom. “They’re all too busy shouting at each other.” And perhaps there is something about this place that brings out the cosplay in everyone, a royal seat with a town grudgingly attached, a kind of Potemkin England with its waves of bunting and novelty shops, a reverie to sell the tourists. What sort of reality were we really expecting to encounter here?
Reality does still intrude, if you look hard enough. A little distance from the madding crowd, a couple of local Liberal Democrat councillors were handing out leaflets. Improve our parks and playgrounds. Replace broken streetlights. Deal with “grot spots”, whatever they are. This is the politics that actually affects people’s lives, far closer at any rate than some American president sitting in a horse-drawn carriage that nobody can see. But they’re having a tough time getting the message across. “We’re about caring for people, fixing things, looking after communities,” says Mark Wilson of the Eton and Castle ward. “But that’s not what gets clicks.”
Inside the grounds, men in funny hats were playing brass instruments. The banquet table in St George’s Hall was being laid. Outside, the crowds were dispersing. The No 10 bus was well on its way to Staines (via Datchet and Wraysbury). The woman in the Maga cap had dived into Wagamama to grab some teppanyaki. And it was impossible not to sense the gulf between these worlds, far thicker than a castle wall, worlds briefly adjacent but eternally estranged.
