Hand-Scrawled Trump Signs

The messages I see as I drive across the heartland...

I am just back from a trip to help kick off a rural Missourian’s Congressional campaign in southern Missouri. I drove five hours to Rolla, Missouri. While driving on the highway outside of town, I saw two huge billboards with scrawled messages; one about electing Trump, and another with anti-abortion rhetoric. They both seemed to be created by the same person as the penmanship was identical.

I have to tell you that in all of my traveling, and driving hours upon hours across the heartland, I have seen a whole lot of hand-drawn, nearly illegible Trump signs, but I’ve never seen any as big as those billboards in Rolla.

‘Trump’ written on round bales, via Bridge Michigan, by Kelly House. October 29, 2020.

I drive through southwest Iowa often, and it is so peaceful with small rolling hills, tractors, corn and bean fields…and the ever-present Trump signs and flags. But, there is a particularly awful sign about an hour north of me, sitting in front of a farmhouse on what looks like several hundred acres. The sign is probably six or seven feet wide and maybe four feet tall tamped down in the lawn of a white farmhouse, with a perfect grove of evergreen trees planted on the north side to serve as a wind break.

The hand-painted sign says something about “FJB”, but by the way they placed the letters around another phrase, it looks like the farmer wants to do something obscene with the President. It made me laugh the first time I read it, and then it made me sad. I guarantee you, grandpa angrily wrote it out one day after the 2020 election and put it in front of the house to the dismay of grandma. Or, maybe he’s a widower? I can’t imagine grandma going along with it. There are shrubs planted and flower boxes underneath the windows. You don’t pretty up a place only to put out an untidy sign. It doesn’t make sense.

In 2016, I drove past a house where someone took the time to use a push mower to cut the name “Trump” in his yard — well, sort of in the yard’s bank so that you could see it from the highway. He filled the name in with red paint.

It was…something.

The grass grew over in about two weeks, but he couldn’t let all of that work go to waste, so he left the lawn unmown for a month or so while the red paint leached into the rest of his grass and make it look like a large animal was sacrificed in his yard.

I drove by the Trump lawn nearly every day and marveled at the scene as it morphed from obnoxious to unpleasant to revolting.

I have seen handwritten signs proclaiming “sleepy Joe” in rural Missouri, “Trump/Pence” painted on the side of an old semi and left on a farm bordering a highway, and a terrible phrase written on a barn about our Vice President while driving through Kansas, but the thing about the Rolla billboards is just how big they are. 

The billboards are on the highway and the sign’s backgrounds are painted black with the lettering painted in white. It gives prison uniform vibes which was immediately ironic to me, but likely unplanned on the part of the artist. I wish I could have pulled over and taken a picture, but honestly, I wasn’t ready for them and I have thought about them quite a bit since.

How long did it take someone to hand-paint an entire billboard? How much did they pay for the right to scrawl a message to thousands of passersby? How did they get up there in the first place, and then how did they manage to paint at least 8 feet above their head? A ladder on top of a ladder? This had to be so time consuming and so much effort. 

So. Much. Work.

I think about that when I sit down to work every day. I am naturally driven and wake up ready to work on dismantling the GOP – I can’t stand living under the boot of authoritarian Republicans writing laws in my state. I wake up swinging (okay, typing) and those signs remind me to keep at it.

I have to work at least as hard as the fella who decided to hand-paint obscenities in rural Iowa, and doubly as hard as the person who wrote “Trump 2024” in letters three-feet high on a billboard in Rolla, Missouri.

While I won’t be scrawling the names of political candidates on signs or billboards or hay bales for my yard, I will be working to help elect progressive candidates in my state. I work on this every day and I know so many of y’all do too.

We can’t stop. We can’t let Republican-dominated states continue to control our states, and thereby the nation, while we lose our human rights and schools and roads and hospitals.

It’ll take all of us, and I’m so glad to know that so many of you are fighting along with me.

Solidarity, friends.

~Jess