If you thought today’s pop quiz would be the last you’d hear about the Cormac McCarthiest presidential candidate of all-time, think again. Yesterday we spotted a mystery man plastering the above image over a doorframe right next to New Museum. After he climbed down from his ladder and got ready to make like a rat and copulate with Ted Cruz scamper off, we had a word with him about the latest of many, many, many, many creative attempts to bring down the Donald.
The artist didn’t want to give his name or even a pseudonym— after all, he doesn’t know what would happen if he got caught up in the city’s war against graffiti. “I’d like to think they just give you a fine, but it depends on if the cop likes Donald Trump or not,” he said. “My concern is that they do.”
(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
So far, he has put up an estimated 20 or so posters on walls and inside of phone-booth advertising windows in the East Village, where he lives— strategically “not the best” neighborhood, he admits, since he’s preaching to the choir. (Plans for a Times Square operation are in the works.)
When the idea originally came to him in the shower, the tagline wasn’t “LOSER,” but “LOCALS ONLY,” a reference from the artist’s West Coast upbringing: “Trump is kind of a ‘locals only’ guy— he’s kind of one of those hooligan surfer kind of guys that I grew up with, so I just thought it was funny.”
So, if not Trump, who’s his favorite candidate? “I love Bernie, like we all do— just because I really like Larry David, and they seem to be the same person.”