I know Jim Geraghty caught one of these banners in the wild earlier this summer, but a few baseball fans hung up a “Trump or Death” sign at the Yankees game last night.
I think this is an example of the hardest-core Trump supporters not even understanding what made Trump appealing to a winning coalition of voters in the first place. Of course Trump’s rise was intimately connected to the anxieties people felt in 2015 about the migrant waves, the terror attacks across Europe, and the way normal Establishment authorities tried to downplay these dangers (such as the Cologne New Year’s mob attacks on women).
But banners like this are going to alienate independent voters, remind them of Trump’s election denialism leading to January 6 and his general association with extremists.
Trump won, just barely, in 2016 by tapping into less apocalyptic themes, by being funny, and indulging the long-held fantasy of putting a business leader in charge of government. Really, Trump won because the choice wasn’t Trump or Death, but a fate Americans regarded with even more horror: Trump or Hillary.