After a New York jury returned a historic guilty verdict against former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday, many Americans chose to rally around the flag. The upside-down flag.
Social media overflowed on Thursday afternoon with images of Old Glory hung with the stars on the bottom, posted by elected Republicans, right-wing activists and regular Americans upset by the news that a former president was now a felon.
The upside-down flag traditionally indicates distress and, on occasion, has been used as a sign of protest. The right to display a U.S. flag in that manner was even upheld by a Supreme Court decision in 1974.
But after The New York Times revealed two weeks ago that an inverted flag flew outside Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s home in the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the symbol has gained traction on the right — and Thursday’s verdict seemingly pushed it into the center of the conservative mainstream.
Just six minutes after the jury in Manhattan found the former president guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted an image of the upside-down flag on social media. The post had been viewed more than 1.8 million times in a matter of hours.
That same picture was soon posted on Telegram by Ali Alexander, one of the primary organizers of the campaign to convince voters that the 2020 election had been rigged, along with the caption “No one is coming to save us.” Guy Benson, a Fox News contributor, posted one too.
The response was not limited to public figures, and many lower-profile Americans were posting photographs of actual flipped flags suspended from poles outside their homes. The accompanying text generally pointed to the flag serving as an act of protest against the verdict, the American justice system, President Biden and the so-called Deep State.
The inverted stars-and-bars was not the only protest banner proliferating online after the jury’s conviction. Many people loyal to Mr. Trump took to social media on Thursday to say that they had adopted the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a Revolutionary War era symbol referring to a phrase by the philosopher John Locke.
Also known as the Pine Tree Flag, the once obscure pennant came to fresh attention last week when it was also revealed that Mr. Alito had raised it above his New Jersey vacation home in 2023. Now, dozens of vendors on Amazon are offering the green-and-white flag for as little as $9.
