You can’t make this stuff up — or can you?
Bombs are serious business. The infamous Unabomber killed three people and injured several others before his 17-year spree ended in 1995.
But if anyone was going to translate Donald Trump’s hate speech into action, it could not have been a more cartoonish figure than the Florida man authorities arrested on Friday.
Cesar Sayoc, 56, was an out-of-luck catering and dry-cleaning business owner with a lengthy criminal record. He reportedly also worked as a stripper, which dovetails rather awkwardly with the president’s predilection for sex workers.
There is little about Sayoc that doesn’t paint him as the perfect caricature of a Trumpian MAGA (Make America Great Again) bomber.
First and foremost, none of the 14 bombs he sent to prominent Democrats and Trump critics actually went off. The FBI insists they were all real bombs, but the triggering mechanism remains a mystery. It couldn’t have been a mercury switch, since the packages would have been jostled around in the mail system. A timer seems implausible — how can you predict when it will arrive? Authorities are not saying much.
It’s tempting to think the bomber simply neglected to include the one thing that makes bombs do what they’re supposed to do: explode. If that’s not a metaphor for Trump’s presidency, I don’t know what is.
Then there are the misspellings. All of the packages had the return address of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, except recipients would have to believe the Florida Democrat left the “c” out of her last name. The suspect also harboured a disdain for double consonants, writing John “Brenan” instead of “Brennan” and lopping an “l” off Hillary Clinton’s first name. (Brennan, a former intelligence chief, is actually a panelist on MSNBC, not CNN. Two other words, Sawgrass and Florida, are also misspelled on that envelope.)
Here’s the clincher, though. Sayoc was broke and had been living with his parents, until his parents kicked him out. So he was living in his van (white, of course). And the back and side windows of that van were festooned from top to bottom with pro-Trump, anti-Democrat, anti-media stickers. It was literally a mobile social media unit, And when he awoke each morning, he wasn’t able to look out on the real world because his view was blocked by a wall of childish memes.
This man was living the dream. Or rather, living in a dream.
CNN — one of his targets — has footage of him holding up a “CNN sucks” sign at a Trump rally.
Imagine being a reporter at that rally and trying your best not to stereotype that guy. No, you tell yourself I will not assume he’s down and out, living in his parents’ basement, or in a white van. Nope, that’s just my own bias. He’s probably an ordinary, working-class citizen, a mild-mannered family man just wanting to be heard. He’s not really a thug and a loser, is he?
Guess again.
This should be a clarion call. It’s time for Americans stop trying to “understand” the mindset of the average Trump supporter. We know the mindset, and it is pure mindlessness.
There’s more than one Cesar Sayoc showing up at these hate fests, getting whipped into fits of rage at imaginary demons and willing to take up arms against internal enemies. The problem is, they aren’t all klutzes like the first guy was. The next MAGA bomb might actually detonate.
And that could herald a civil war.