“Plaid shirt guy,” the teenager expelled from a rally for making puzzled expressions in the background while Donald Trump ranted, is a 17-year-old named Tyler Linfesty.
Either a Republican himself or an apolitical kid who thought it would be neat to get that close to a living President, he was certainly not a protester, or a Democratic plant. By his lights, he was being polite enough. He applied to attend the rally. He said that his plans were to clap for the things he agreed with and not clap for the things he didn’t agree with, a reasonable and even commendable position.
Cast as what amounted to extra, he was seated over the President’s right shoulder, where he was visible, twitching and reacting with occasional confusion, throughout.
His reaction to being pulled from his seat in the middle of the speech, and being questioned by the Secret Service for ten minutes, was a shrug and the opinion, (I paraphrase), “They were nice enough.”
We are not talking about a massive reservoir of ideological passion, here.
It would be a mistake to conflate this with being an idiot. Tyler’s academic interest is Physics. It is his unassuming nature, and his inherent modesty, that keeps him from realizing that his country has insulted the shit out of him.
His sin was not being photogenic. His sin was not being wildly enthusiastic. His sin was not looking like what Trump’s people think a Trump supporter should look like, except by virtue of being white.
These are small sins compared to those of the man he sat behind.
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