One lonely supporter—a reformed Trotskyist with a hard-luck story and a Jan. 6 history—stood outside Manhattan Criminal Court as Donald Trump arrived for the second day of his trial on Monday morning.
It was quite a contrast from the scene a day earlier: about 50 MAGA fans waving flags and a 20-person anti-Trump contingent marching down the street. And even that was probably a letdown for the ex-president who loves crowds, and loves to overestimate them.
Gary Phaneuf, 68, didn’t even have any reporters talking to him, except for The Daily Beast. He stood in a specially designated protest area across from the entrance to 100 Centre Street, wearing a New York baseball cap and carrying a “Trump 2024: Take America Back” banner.
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“People give me 20 bucks for walking around with this,” he said proudly, then added, with a tinge of regret: “I wish I didn't need the money, but that’s a long story.”
Phaneuf entertained himself by cracking jokes at passersby and occasionally leading a one-man chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight for Trump!” and “Tara Reade! Say her name!”—a reference to the woman who claims Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. (Biden denies the allegations.)
“I got pissed off,” Phaneuf said of his motivation for being there on Day 2 of jury selection.
“I was just watching like everyone else until Tish James pulled her stunt with all that money,” he added. “That was highway robbery.”
Donald Trump loves a crowd. He didn’t get one on Tuesday.
Curtis Means-Pool/GettyJames, the New York attorney general, won a $450 million judgment against Trump and his company earlier this year for fraudulently inflating his net worth for personal gain. The facts of the case, and the department charging it, are completely separate from the criminal case underway this week, which was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and accuses Trump of covering up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Why did Phaneuf think that he was the only one who could be bothered to show support on a gloriously sunny day?
“People like to stay in their comfort zone,” he theorized. “And a lot of people are lazy.”
Phaneuf, by his account, is anything but lazy. The Staten Island native said he worked as a history teacher and when that fell through—“It’s a long story, me and the Board of Ed,” he said—any odd job he could find, from shipyards to selling souvenirs on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“You name it, I’ve done it,” he boasted.
But what takes up most of his time these days is protesting. Phaneuf is a fixture in his Staten Island neighborhood, demonstrating against COVID lockdowns and former Mayor Bill De Blasio’s planned closure of Rikers Island.
On Jan. 6, 2021, he was arrested for a curfew violation after he traveled to Washington, D.C., to protest President Joe Biden’s election, which landed him in the pages of The New York Times.
“They’re trying to figure out, ‘Who are the ring leaders?’ so they pointed a finger at me,” he griped. Asked whether he was a ringleader, he smiled conspiratorially and asked: “Was I?”
Phaneuf volunteered that he used to protest just as avidly for the other side. In 2010, he was escorted out of a New York Landmarks Commission hearing for rowdily demonstrating in favor of a proposed mosque being built near Ground Zero; a year later, he was one of five protesters interviewed by The New Yorker about their participation in Occupy Wall Street. In 2014, he marched against the death of Eric Garner at the hands of a Staten Island cop.
And, he admitted sheepishly, he voted for Barack Obama twice.
“I used to be a Trotskyist,” he said with a shrug.
Another Trump supporter, who declined to give his name, arrived as Phaneuf was speaking to The Daily Beast and said he’d seen him get arrested and hauled away from other pro-Trump rallies. It did not seem that such drama was in the cards on Tuesday. By afternoon, as a handful of other protesters trickled in, Phaneuf was still there, napping on a park bench, his “Trump 2024” banner resting beneath him.
