Stormy Daniels

UGCR

For The Washington Post

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

Contributor

The Washington Post

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Children holding hands

ONE TIME USE FOR OP-CARNEY KIDS 

FEDERALISTGALA

Four Dalmatian Puppy

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

Israel Palestinians Campus Protests

US-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-EDUCATION-CONFLICT

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-SMITH-HIGHER-ED

Former U.S. President Trump's criminal trial on charges of falsifying business records continues in New York

POOL

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Came home the other night, flicked on the kitchen lights and found <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> standing there. Just about needed the defib.

Not the actual Trump. A life-size, stand-up, full-color cardboard Trump. Blue suit, double thumbs-up, grinning at me. Turns out pulling the Don bomb <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/17/youngkin-virginia-governor-prank/" target=_blank>is a thing</a>. Someone Don-bombed my buddy with it, so my buddy Don-bombed me with it. He said now I had to Don-bomb somebody else with it.

So I decided to Don-bomb the entire town.

I wanted to try a social experiment. I wanted to see how people respond to Trump when no one’s around. Because I don’t think this election is about <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Joe Biden</a> vs. Trump. I think it’s about Trump and only Trump, the most space-swallowing, ulcer-inducing, fire-starting colossus this country has ever seen.

I live in Sedona, Ariz., which is about <a href="https://www.redrocknews.com/2021/01/12/see-how-the-verde-valley-voted-in-2020/" target=_blank>as politically purple</a> as a town can get. People are either vortex-worshiping or riding around in 4x4s with a gun rack in the window. We call it “Crystals and Pistols.”

I started by standing Trump up in front of the Safeway, right under the No Loitering sign. I sat in my Jeep 20 feet away and pretended to work on my phone.

Rick Reilly

The first guy to come along wore a speckled-gray ponytail, a sweat-stained ball cap and a black T-shirt. He looked about 50. He stared at the cutout, saw me and said, “Can I use that for target practice?”

Some people smirked at him. Some smiled. But 10 minutes into the experiment, a scowling Safeway employee snatched him and started back inside. I had to jump out of the Jeep and give chase. “Sir? Sir, that’s actually mine. It’s a social experiment.”

He shot me a sour look and handed it over: “We can’t have … <i>that</i> … on the property.”

I took it and left. I did <i>not</i> like the feeling of saving Trump from the compactor.

Next, I set him up in front of the town’s sole McDonald’s, reputedly the only one in the world <a href="https://www.abc15.com/news/state/there-is-a-mcdonalds-with-blue-arches-in-arizona" target=_blank>with blue arches</a> instead of yellow. (It’s a Sedona thing.) People trying to take photos of its blueness were not happy to see Trump in the shot. “You’re going to have to edit that out,” a woman said to her daughter.

I took His Orangeness up a mountain to one of Sedona’s scenic overlooks. It was dusk, and the setting sun was turning the magnificent red rocks purple. I positioned him facing the dozens of tourists taking in the view. A balding, 60-ish guy had his wife take his picture standing beside Cardboard Don, duplicating the double thumbs-up move.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, beaming. “Just posted it to Instagram!”

A couple of minutes later, a younger guy in a ski hat came over and said, “Can I push him off the cliff?”

I heard somebody yell in my direction, “That thing wrecks the view!”

An ex-military man with a crewcut told me he admires Trump. “That surprises me,” I said. “Didn’t he fake an injury to get out of being in the military?”

“Well,” the guy said, “yes and no.”

“And didn’t he call fallen World War II soldiers ‘suckers’?”

One 40-ish woman from Germany saw the cutout and faked putting a finger down her throat — the universal ralphing sign.

A guy wearing an AR-15 T-shirt said he’d voted for Trump in the Arizona primary, which prompted his two junior-high-school-looking kids to boo him. “They hate Trump,” the gun dad said. “Hopefully, they’ll learn. But when they’re 18, I’m going to drive them to the polls to vote, either way.”

One guy flipped Trump off. Another went up and hugged him. A woman of about 40, an Illinois librarian, said, “Why would you bring him here?”

“Well,” I said. “Trump lost to Biden in Arizona by only about 11,000 votes, so this state really matters. I wanted to see what people said about him.”

“Well,” she said, “I honestly don’t think he lost last time.”

“Really?” I said, gently. “Didn’t they adjudicate that in court over and over, and he lost every time?”

“And didn’t every state recount change nothing?”

People kept coming by to rave or rant about Trump while we stared at him. I made it 60-40, Trump beating Biden, but I noticed something. The Bidens were all-in on Biden, while some of the Trumps wished they had another option.

“I don’t really want to vote for Trump,” the librarian admitted. “But I can’t vote for Biden. … I just wish Trump wouldn’t talk the way he does. I like his policies but I hate the way he behaves. Why can’t he just shut up?”

That’s when it hit me. I loathe Trump and yet I liked some of these Trumpers. I realized that for eight years, I’ve been lumping Trumpers in with Trump, as though they also flame-throw lies and start insurrections. But these were just plain, nice Americans with kids and Hondas and lawns. They just don’t realize yet that they’ve been Don-bombed themselves — by a BS artist I’ve known for 40 years.

As I was heading home, a gully washer hit. Both Trump and I got soaked on the way to the door, and I dropped him as I fumbled with the key. He was flat on his face in the mud, in the rain. While I savored that image for a moment, I realized: This social experiment needed one last stop.

I put Cardboard Don in a dumpster, with his shoulders and head sticking up, grinning. Passers-by either laughed or shook their heads or ignored him, but no one saved him. Everyone just left him behind.

This November, I recommend you do exactly that, too.

So Help Me Golf: Why We Love the Game

University of Colorado

Rick Reilly, a Washington Post contributing columnist, is a sportswriter, screenwriter, author and speaker. He is a member of the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame and was voted National Sportswriter of the Year 11 times. He wrote for Sports Illustrated and appeared on ESPN. The most recent of his 15 books is "So Help Me Golf."

washpost

Pranking Sedona, Ariz., with a Donald Trump cardboard cutout

the-washington-post

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Sign up for Democracy, Refreshed, a newsletter series on how to renovate the republic.

Opinion Columns

Opinion Columnists

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.

Opinion I Don-bombed Sedona with a Trump cardboard cutout