Now, at last, it looked like Trump might lose, so Woodall set his new flag on the dining room table and waited. When the election was called for Joe Biden, “I said, ‘Time for my flag to go up,’” Woodall told me by phone, a couple of weeks later. He sent me a photo of the flag, still hanging beside his garage, his own Dodge Ram pickup in the foreground.
Across the country, in their cautious euphoria after the election, foes of Trump have been embracing the flag in similar ways: unfurling it in front of their homes, waving it in the streets, or simply looking at it differently. The day Biden gave his victory speech, Nancy La Vigne, executive director of the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing, took out the flag she always flies on holidays and hung it outside her home in liberal Bethesda, Maryland. La Vigne meant the act as “an expression of pride in how the system of democracy actually works.” But as the hours went by and she noticed more and more flags around her neighborhood, she realized she was seeing something broader: A spontaneous reclaiming of a symbol that, in the Trump years, had come to represent only one side.
But the election, like the flag, doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Where Trump’s opponents see a triumph of democracy, his fiercest supporters see something different; fueled by right-wing media, they’re still complaining about fraud, coups and stolen elections. And that unwillingness to unite over the basics of democracy—to acknowledge that, whether you like the results or not, the system works—is unlikely to disappear when Joe Biden takes office. Trump’s rebranding of the flag as a wholly partisan statement has been, in a sense, a triumph in marketing. And a good marketing campaign is hard to undo.