Eating Donald Trump’s golden shit in San Diego: a preview of the “No Kings” protest
Donald Trump’s golden shit Shutterstock AI generated image
Eating Trump’s Golden Shit in San Diego: Dropping in on a “Hands Off” Rally
On Saturday April 5, 2025, I walked with the marchers in a “Hands Off” rally in downtown San Diego. It was organized by the same groups that are bringing the “No Kings Rally” to cities all over the country on Saturday, October 18 (Indivisible, the ACLU, 50501), which House Speaker Mike Johnson has recently described as a “Hate America, Pro Hamas” gathering:
On the Blue Line Trolley in San Diego, enroute to the downtown “Hands Off” rally on Saturday, April 5, I closed my eyes ever so briefly. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, was standing there behind my eyelids, smiling with arms folded together. He was, in so many words, telling me that protesting the president was fruitless: “YOU WILL DRINK PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S PISS AND ENJOY IT,” he shouted. “YOU WILL EAT HIS GOLDEN SHIT AND LICK HIS ANUS FOR DESSERT.”
I woke up with a start as the Trolley came to a stop at the Civic Center Trolley Station. Looking through the trolley window towards the County Administration Center and I saw a long line of people with picket signs walking south. In cities and towns across the country, 1,200 such demonstrations were simultaneously taking place to protest the Trump administration’s vindictive policies and its cuts to the federal government. I got off the trolley and crossed the Pacific Coast Highway to join the march.
At the corner of West Ash Street and the Pacific Coast Highway, I met a retiree named Diane who was holding a yellow sign that read, “YOU KNOW IT’S BAD WHEN THE INTROVERTS COME OUT.”
I asked her the issue that brought her out to the protest, and she said, “Take your pick, there’s so many.” But after talking a little, Diane and I both agreed that Trump’s apparent drive to ignore the court system was cause for the most concern. She was originally from Westville, Ohio, she told me. “I love visiting my daughters, but otherwise I can’t stand the MAGA politics in the rural areas.” I told her my situation, that I was in San Diego, helping my dad take care of my mom in their house in La Jolla on an indefinite basis, but that I still called the Greater Indianapolis area home.
In the march, which according to the San Diego Police Department was 12,000, I saw quite a few Boomers, but people of color, not so much. At the corner of W. Ash and Kettner Boulevard, I took out my cell phone to take a panoramic photo, a practice I’d been engaging in ever since I got off the trolley. Just as I put my phone back in my backpack, a tall dude wearing an American flag baseball cap, standing there, observing things
“Are you a reporter?” he nodded towards my notebook.
“Freelancer,” I said. “Checking out this ‘Hands Off Rally.’
He looked at me blankly.
“You know, basically, it’s an anti-Trump Rally," I explained.
“Oh, is that what it is.”
“Yeah, I’m just trying to cover it.”
“They must be happy with the way things were before the border was closed,” he said, “with hotels in the area housing migrants when veterans have to sleep in the street.”
“I don’t think that’s the way most protesters see it.”
I asked him his name.
“Johnny,” he said. He was a real estate agent, and he was fine with Trump because he was restoring law and order. “You can't allow somebody to disregard the law,” he told me. “I got a ticket for parking no more than five seconds on the red curb because I was recording criminal activity, but the parking ticket was better served than the crime.”
I nodded, not that I agreed with him, but because I wanted to hear him out.
“So it's good to see that we have Trump in office, doing what he's supposed to do and what he got voted to do,” he said. “And tariffs are great. People are upset about the tariffs, but they're not seeing the long term interest rates for housing just dropped by half a point in the last two days. It makes it more affordable for housing.”
If I had my mind plugged directly into the internet, I would have been able to respond to this by telling him that, as of April 4, the average rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage decreased ever so slightly to 6.64 from 6.65%, where it had been the prior week. The 15-year-fixed rate mortgages also saw a decrease to 5.82% from 5.89% the previous week.
In other words, the dude was exaggerating big time, but I had no way of knowing this, so I just said, “OK.”
But he had more to say about the tariffs: ”People are upset with Wall Street, but if you look at the longer picture, we need some shake up like that, because how do we refinance the national debt with high interest rates?”
This was the first time I heard this particular justification for tariffs. It had, however, been circulating around the right wing mediasphere as of late. I’d just assumed that Trump wanted to fund his tax cuts for billionaires and let everyone else eat shit.
I asked him if he might be concerned, being a real estate agent, whether or not the tariffs might lead to a particular kind of economic calamity. The kind that exempts billionaires.
“We can always speculate,” he said, “but we saw how Biden's administration lined their pockets with billions. Look at all the politicians that became multi-millionaires, Nancy Pelosi first and all of her stock trades.”
A protester on an electric-powered wheelchair scooted by, playing the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” from a Bluetooth connected speaker.
“I don’t see how you can compare Musk to Pelosi,” I said, dropping my objectivity as a reporter ever so slightly.
“What has Elon done?” he asked. “Other than show the amount of wrongful money being spent?
“A devil's advocate would have to mention that he shut down USAID, which I thought was a good organization, " I said.
“You think we should pay for Sesame Street in other countries. We should pay for transgender surgery in other countries when we can't even take care of our veterans.”
“Well, again, a devil's advocate would say that that soft power is important. Now that USAID is abandoning HIV prevention in Africa, China is stepping in.”
“I mean, that's a decent argument,” he allowed. “But when you follow the money and you see where that money really goes, is it really being helpful? Is it really doing what it's supposed to be doing, or is it lining the pockets of our current politicians, our current Democrats? I always say numbers don't lie. Follow the money and you see where it goes.”
By this point I thought our conversation could go on forever, like a ping pong game between AI-powered robots.
We chatted a little more about real estate. Then I thanked him for agreeing to be interviewed. We shook hands, and I continued on with the march.
The snake of a protest march continued up West Ash Street where a squat guy in a bullhorn was trying to get people to march in the middle of the street and the people on the sidewalk pretty much ignored him.
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I was thinking that if there was a provocateur trying to get peaceful protesters arrested, isn’t this what he’d try to do? The marchers, not taking the bait, kept to the sidewalk.
There were a lot of twentysomethings in the march. Two of them in front of me, both dudes, were talking about DC comics versus Marvel.
“Like Stan Lee, the Marvel Comic guy, he was very political,” said the one carrying a “No One Voted for Musk” sign. It showed the DOGE leader/Tesla-SpaceX-X CEO giving the Sieg Hiel with his typical defiant expression.
“Okay, what I'm about to say is maybe spurious,” the other said. “But who's the best? The most popular superhero?”
“I think it’s Superman.”
“I mean Marvel Superheros.”
“Spiderman, then.”
I had the inclination, for a brief moment, to barge into the conversation and ask why Musk uses an image of himself dressed up as Iron Man, rather than Spider Man or Superman, as his profile picture on X. But I decided not to.
The protest march slinked past the Social Security office on Front Street. I was wondering if Elon and his DOGE goons had considered wearing Superhero outfits as they walked into the Social Security Administration building in Washington DC. I was wondering if Musk’s superhero name should be something like Senicider, as he’s so dead-set on depriving seniors of their social security checks, Medicaid, and VA care.
We reached Civic Center Plaza, the beginning and endpoint of the “Hands Off” March. On a platform about five feet above the crowd, the base of the green bronze “Bow Wave” sculpture—which looked like a machine-cut slab of glacier—stood a woman posing, more or less, like the Statue of Liberty. She was standing absolutely still in her seafoam dress while sporting a black veil that covered her face. At the same time, various organizers led chants; “1234 Donald Trump has got to go,” followed by “From Palestine to Mexico, the border wall has got to go,” and finally everybody’s favorite, “FUCK DONALD TRUMP.”
This last chant inspired one redheaded woman in a keffiyeh to try to start chanting “But we love you anyway,” meaning Trump, and some people joined her in this chant but they didn’t get very far, as it didn’t reflect the mood of the crowd.
Maybe I had arrived late or missed some speeches—I had arrived after 2:00 p.m. and the rally was slated to end at 3:00 pm—but I didn’t think there was anything more to see. I would have appreciated an inspiring speech or two rather than just mindless chants. After I took another series of panoramic photos, I headed towards the trolley stop. The march was leaving me with an empty feeling. I mean, this was the kind of protest that was supposed to confront the full weight and force of Trumpian autocracy? Fuck me.
I took the trolley to 12th and Imperial. I had been planning to grab a bite in Barrio Logan, but then I caught a view of the magnificent structure of the San Diego Central Library, which features a 140-foot steel-leaved dome, making it a prominent feature of the city’s skyline. I decided to explore it, as I sorta get off on urban architecture. I went all the way up to the 9th floor patio on the top floor where there was a wedding reception taking place. I also explored the Judith Harris Fine Arts Gallery where there was an exhibition of The Drawing Show, an annual exhibition featuring San Diego-Tijuana megaplex artists 25 years running.
The centerpiece of the exhibit was a stop motion video by Hugo Crosthwaite depicting clay vessels drawn with human faces. These vessels were in a perpetual state of movement, moving in a line as if down a city street, moving in and out of the box they came from. And then at the end of the short film, the San Ysidro Border Crossing, the gateway to Tijuana, flashes on screen before dissolving into the image of one of his depicted subjects.
I’d recently seen an exhibit of Crosthwaite’s work. Titled Tijuacolor, it showed at the Bread and Salt Gallery in Barrio Logan, and consisted of a selection of large-scale paintings that treated life on the border. One, “La Línea,” was a multipanel painting depicting the pedestrian line at the Port of Entry in Tijuana, waiting to enter the US. I found that painting, which showcased a broad section of humanity in various states of somnambulance, to be surreal, dark, and playful. I found it so striking partly because I’ve waited in that line myself a number of times.
I walked out into the soft San Diego sunlight again. Crossing the 9th floor patio, I found the Special Collections Room, and walked inside. I found a rare book collection, a collection focused specifically on California, and a map collection. I browsed the rare books shelves which featured a display of the complete works of L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz. First editions all of them. I checked out the card catalogue for the collection, which was not quite a relic of the 20th century, since it was still in use, according to the librarian behind the counter.
“Since much of our collection was inaccessible to the public, we encourage patrons to look through it, to help them find what they’re looking for,” he said.
I looked through the Se - Sp drawer and the cards fell into place. The card facing me was for an article titled “Fray Junipero Serra” by Francisco Palou, published in Overland Monthly.
Serra was the first president of the California mission system, and he founded the first nine missions along the California coast in the late 1700s. He also frequently engaged in various acts of “corporal mortification” including whipping himself, presumably to put the ixnay on his sexual urges, according to reliable sources.
I thought then of the librarians, archivists, coders, and data specialists who, instead of masturbating or self-flagellating, are frantically working to recover data from federal websites of agencies deleted or drastically curtailed by Trump, such as the CDC, before it can be destroyed. I thought, then, that these are the true saints.
It was time to go. I wanted to shake the library’s hand, as if this were possible, for leaving me inspired, if only for a moment.
I took the trolley to the Old Town Transit Center and walked to the stop for the northbound 30 Bus. As I stood there, a long-haired guy who looked like he could be Dennis Quaid’s younger brother started rummaging through the adjacent garbage can. He started pulling out aluminum cans and plastic bottles. He was mumbling to himself about Donald Trump and running for president.
I had a dollar to spare, so I gave it to him.
“God bless you,” he said.
A moment of silence passed as he arranged the plastic bottles in his shopping cart. “I heard there was a big protest downtown,” he said.
“I was there,” I said.
“What did you think of it?”
“Just that protests don’t seem to be very effective against Trump.”
“Well that's what I was thinking,” he said, “while out on my recycling run. You know, I find good stuff to eat in the cans around here too, so it’s, like, a twofer. I have no problem eating day-old chicken.”
“How do you know it’s not three days old?”
“Well, usually the food here’s pretty fresh,” he said.
At that moment my bus came around the corner.
“Good luck to you,” I said.
“My name’s Richard,” he said.
“Dan.” We bumped fists.
“Vote for me in the next election,” he said.
Considering the obvious alternative, I didn’t give it a second thought. “Of course,” I said.
I turned towards the bus then, as he went off to wherever he was going, mumbling about politics.
On the way back to La Jolla, on the 30 Bus, I scrolled through my Facebook feed and saw an item about Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) deputies entering the Peace Corps administration building on Friday, April 4. As a former Peace Corps volunteer (Niger '92-'94) I had dreaded this day for a while. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw Stephen Miller again. He was wearing his evil smile and laughing at me. A rim of golden shit glistened around his mouth.
He looked like a character out of the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, one of the most violent and sadistic movies ever made, based on one of the most violent and sadistic novels ever written, The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage by the Marquis de Sade. Both book and film describe, or depict, numerous acts of torture, sexual abuse, and shit-eating, forced upon teenage boys and girls by sophisticated libertines. The film, set in the Nazi-occupied Italian region of Salò during the closing days of World War II, shows unflinchingly how absolute power corrupts absolutely, leading to dehumanization and abuse.
We are all living that movie now.
Panoramic collage of “Hands Off” protest in San Diego on April 4, 2025
