When Harley-Davidson visited the White House with a handful of their latest models, President Trump wouldn’t throw a leg over any of the motorcycles. Make no mistake though, the sober germaphobe is a presidential biker in a tailored suit.
The clothes are obviously different but the underlying attitudes are undeniably identical. He is the anti-champion of every bearded and tattooed and gray-haired motorcyclist still raging against the invisible man that closed the factories, took the jobs, and supposedly changed the language from English to Spanish when no one was looking. Together, they rebel against the status quo.
One of Hillary Clinton’s few accomplishments during her campaign was correctly identifying this sentiment, albeit unwittingly. She called them deplorables, and they rallied to the label. It wasn’t that they were actually as awful as Clinton said. It was that Trump supporters already felt despised and rejected by supposedly polite society. Hunter S. Thompson identified something similar when reporting on biker gangs in the 1960s for The Nation.
“The Angels don’t like to be called losers, but they have learned to live with it,” Thompson wrote. “’Yeah, I guess I am,” said one. “But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a hell of a scene on the way out.’”
Swap the Hells Angels for the deplorables and the sentiment is the same. Both have been shunned to some degree. Both have a chip on their shoulder for whatever reason. And both act out in proportion to the scorn that has, often unfairly, been heaped on them.
The obvious difference is that Trump supporters don’t look like they could riot and pillage at a moment’s notice. Some will berate an unsuspecting reporter, sure, flipping off cameramen and shouting expletives for primetime. Only occasionally do the lines start to blur like they did on Saturday.
Trump stood in the rain with a pack of soggy, beer-soaked, leather-clad bikers in Bedminster, N.J. Unsurprisingly, the members of “Bikers for Trump” rose to low expectations and the Washington Post was just shocked to discover that the people they prejudged as malcontents and miscreants sported “sexist and other offensive patches.”
One patch on a leather vest read “Terrorist Hunting Permit.” And another announced “this is America. We eat meat, we drink beer and we speak [expletive] English.” But there was a patch in particular that caught Twitter’s eye. As WaPo reported in odd detail:
In other words, the bikers surrounding the president weren’t the sort of people accepted in polite society. They wear offensive patches because — stay with me — they want to offend. Pearl-clutching reporters only contributed to their feelings of marginalization and victimhood giving them more of an excuse to act out. Somehow Trump has been smart enough to direct their rebellion toward his cause and he can’t even ride a motorcycle.
