Strange things are happening. I had an earlier post in which I suggested that Donald Trump could win the presidency if he has a large number of closet supporters – that is, supporters who do not want other people to know that they support Trump. For some, they may wish to keep their support a secret because they don’t want to be thought of as intolerant which is how many media organizations portray Trump and some of his supporters. That is not an issue in the voting booth. There, no one knows who received your vote.

Yesterday, in a bathroom stall at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan I saw some surprising graffiti. It was correctly spelled and read,

“Obama Hilary Sanders
Socialist anti-American
Communist
Send all socialists to
Cuba and Venezuela”

This strikes me as strange and prompts a few questions.
1. Who typically vandalizes bathroom stalls with graffiti?
2. Who visits museums like the Museum of Natural History?
3. What is the demographic makeup of those who believe that the current president and the top two democratic candidates to replace him are socialists and communists?
4. Who would express those beliefs in the anonymous format of bathroom stall graffiti instead of via some online format?

1. Believe it or not, there have been multiple studies on bathroom gravity. Men are more prolific than women at bathroom poetry, and in general, men use the space to exaggerate their manhood and women are more likely to write insults and knock others down. In this way, the museum graffiti did not follow the norm. It was an attack written in a male bathroom stall. As far as demographics, most bathroom stall graffiti is perpetrated by high school students and they are more likely to have brought the marker with them for when nature calls.

2. Students of all ages visit the museum along with their adult chaperones. There are plenty of tourists – many with their families. Looking at this demographic doesn’t really clarify the picture much.

3. There are some strong emotions being stirred up by this U.S. presidential election and the wording of the graffiti shows how powerfully the perpetrator feels about the situation. It could be a middle-aged man on vacation with his family or a chaperone for his kid’s school trip. It could be a student who absorbs and regurgitates the opinions he hears at home or on very conservative broadcast media. It could be a museum employee who just happened to have a permanent marker in his pocket and took the opportunity to express his views.

4. It’s probably safe to assume that the person who would use the bathroom stall instead of online forums is either a middle-age or older man who’s not as comfortable with social media, or someone who believes that the federal government monitors the internet to the point where he would be found out. Alternatively, the bathroom stall may be just one of his outlets and he is also active spreading his message online.

So what does this graffiti tell us? A man feels very strongly that democrats do not serve the people – as their bumper stickers state – but are in fact anti-American and should be deported. This person holds an extremely conservative ideology. This man also decided that he needed to share this ideology with other men in a way that kept his identity secret. The message is not the norm for bathroom stall graffiti, so it likely means that the perpetrator is not the typical bathroom stall vandal – i.e., a student. He brought a marker with him, so this was a premeditated act and there are probably other similarly defaced bathrooms around New York City.

I think that the graffiti is the product of a very angry middle-aged man who subscribes to the views of extremely conservative television and radio programming, but doesn’t want to share his views publicly. It’s possible, of course, that the bathroom stall is just one outlet for this man, and he is not shy about spreading his ideology, but I don’t think so. Let’s not forget that the graffiti was correctly spelled. To me, that suggests that the bathroom stall was chosen for anonymity and that this man is not actively spreading his beliefs in a way that would lead to his unmasking.

Let’s assume that he does not want to be identified as a believer of these extreme views. If so, he is part of that group which I call Trump’s closet supporters. The characteristics that identify this group are:
1. Middle-age men and women;
2. Angry (the condition at which that anger is directed doesn’t matter as long as it can be directed toward democrats);
3. Secretive (they don’t want others to know their views).

Truly strange things are happening in this election campaign, and Donald Trump could be our next president if he has a large number of closet supporters. It certainly isn’t a boring election season.