Republican US presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s campaign bus was attracting funny looks. On its side was the by now all-too-familiar last name of the billionaire businessman. Somewhere inside the castle-shaped hotel next door, Trump was holding court, as hundreds of people awaited another rally of bombast and branding.
Except, in the parking lot, the white block letters on the bus had been split up by a period, so it read: T.RUMP.
Trump’s famous slogan, cribbed from former US president Ronald Reagan, had been playfully re-imagined to read: #MAKE FRUIT PUNCH GREAT AGAIN!
Then there was the driver, who was standing atop the bus, wearing a neon yellow windbreaker and swinging a golf club into a New Hampshire weekend afternoon.
The bus that once ferried Trump across Iowa is now a mobile art installation run by a group of Philadelphia-based artists, who would prefer the real-estate mogul stick to golf courses and skyscrapers, rather than come here with a win in his sails and momentum on the campaign trail days before the New Hampshire presidential primary.
Hence the trick: Before one stumbles upon the electric Kool-Aid acid test ride for these Trumpian times, the bus looks like it still might actually shuttle Trump from stop to stop.
“People come over and they are all excited, and they do not even read that it says MAKE FRUIT PUNCH GREAT AGAIN,” said Mary Mihelic, an artist who is part of the anti-Trump bus project. “They are just totally taking pictures and then you will hear someone say: ‘Honey, it is a gag. It is a gag’ and we just crack up.”
The tweaked slogan was inspired by a comment Trump made after the first Republican debate last year, when he appeared to suggest that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had asked challenging questions because she was menstruating.
At some of their own faux-campaign stops, the artists hand out red fruit punch for people to throw at the bus.
In Nashua, the artists displayed Trump yard signs covered in black fabric made to resemble a burqa, a reference to his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US if he were elected.
On the back of the bus, the artists wrote Trump’s actual motto — “Make America Great Again” — in Arabic. They also added stickers that read #womentrumpTrump and Hasta La Vista Donny, recalling comments the candidate has made about women and Mexicans.
Inside, the bus is littered with small remnants of Trump’s travels around Iowa: decks of cards, campaign bumper stickers and buttons. The artists tore out the seats in the back of the bus to create a space for voters to engage in political debates.
Trump had leased the bus for the summer and, as part of the agreement, wrapped it in his campaign logo. When the campaign no longer needed the bus, the owner hoped to cash in on Trump’s enduring popularity and placed it on Craigslist for US$15,000.
The t.Rutt team paid US$14,000 for the 1981-model bus with 1 million miles on the odometer. It requires a rock to park on an incline and does not top 96kph.
When they bought Trump’s old ride, the artists found an extra feature inside.
“The bus used to be used as a party bus and the Trump campaign leased it from them, but they never removed the stripper pole,” Mihelic said. “So we are kind of using that as kind of a metaphor for Trump.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS