Is Trump Right About The Polls?

William Southold | Opinion Columnist |The Southold Report
“Speaking fiction to power one story at a time.”
Veritas Per Ficta!

This doesn’t happen often, but I was checking on an old story today and I ran right into a scoop, I think.

Last year about this time I had reported on finding a unique item on the back shelf of one of those souvenir booths at a 2016 Trump rally in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a novelty item for sure: a Trump-branded rooftop Geiger Counter.

Evidently this “joke item” had picked up a certain cultish Trump-status among his supporters, an inside joke that Trump was going to be a tough talking, take-no-prisoners president like no other, and you had better get ready to be the first one on your block to be in the know, first to make it down into the bomb shelter before you got crowded out. These “true believers” were actually mounting them on their roofs.

When I then checked back in January 2017 with that same entrepreneurial booth operator at his novelty/variety/coffee shop outside of Des Moines right after Trump’s bellicose, populist call for pitchfork wielding change in his Inauguration Address, they were still “sellin’ like hot cakes,” Emmitt Strood told me. “I get calls from all over the country - they love ‘em in Idaho. Minnesota too!”

Same in the fall of that year, when Trump started talking about raining down fire and fury on Little Rocket Man. Mr. Strood assured me sales were really hot. I remember wondering at the time, did his supporters know something others didn’t, or were they taking the whole thing seriously, and we’re looking for some kind of nuclear heads up early warning system?

And I checked back with him again when Trump reassured the nation that the fear of a nuclear war with North Korea has passed, and we could all chillax, he’s got us covered. Those reassuring words were spurring requests to take the Geiger Counters back, exchange them for store credit, Strood told me.

So I called Mr. Strood again this morning, and sure enough he was still in business.

“Mr. Strood, I don’t know if you remember me, but we had talked previously about your selling Trump rooftop Geiger counters . . .

“ Oh, yes.” There was a slight pause, then I heard him shout, “Margaret - they’re back in the damn storeroom somewhere, do I have to do everything myself?” Then, back to the phone, “so how can I help you?”

I explained that I was wondering, given the speculation about possible military conflicts with Iran, if he was still selling the roof mounted Geiger Counters.

“Oh yeah, big run on them suckers now. Can’t keep ‘em in stock.”

“And people were actually putting them on their houses?” I asked.

“Yes, again,” he said. “Keeps my son so busy he had to drop out of school just to run that part of the business.”

“Well, thank you once again, Mr. Strood, for taking my call.”

“No problem,” he said. “Actually, at first I thought you were that Trump guy, asking me about them.”

“There’s a Trump person asking about them?”

“Oh yeah. Mr. Fabrizio, I think. He’s Trump’s pollster or whatnot. Says it’s important information for his poll.”

“Anthony Fabrizio?”

“I don’t know, could be. A big guy.”

“You’ve met him?

“My son has. He goes out with my son when he makes an install, chats with the customers.”

Anthony Fabrizio was Trump’s pollster for his 2016 campaign, and continues to have ties with Trump. If this is the same Fabrizio, and I’m going with that, then perhaps he’s on to something, something that the Democrat’s pollsters have missed.

That’s my scoop, plucked from the old story bin. You never know where you might find them. Trump keeps calling the real polls fake, says his polls tell him he’s winning. From Strood, to Fabrizio, to Trump’s ear? The Democrats might think about upping their polling game.

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