Trump MAGA store "ethnographic" trip

A fleeting piece of political and cultural Americana captured in photographs

I still have a dozen “poverty photo walks” to process and post from my summer in the UK, but in the meantime I would like to offer you a very different “visual essay”. Passing through Lenoir, TN on a congested Interstate 40 a few days ago, we needed to get gas anyhow and take a rest break. There were giant signs to the Trump store, and after a little navigational hesitation and deviation we managed to locate the entrance. I asked the store assistant if I could take photos, and she graciously said yes. I offer this visual reportage on an “as is” basis — it is up to the viewer to provide the commentary and make sense of it as modern anthropology.

You can get a contrasting view on the store here. There are even more radical critiques available. All I can say is that I did buy a hat — a souvenir of this moment. I have a sense of what is coming (namely the exposure of decades of election fraud), so the significance of this is not about a man, but a longing for truly representative government. What strikes me is that this sort of place is ripe for dispassionate analysis as a social and cultural phenomenon, not a geopolitical one. Maybe these images will be useful to future scholars of this most unusual era.

Country living in North Carolina