“Corrupt. Expensive. Useless. This is our president. Now, traitorous to?” spans the top of the carriage step, in front of the historic stone house, circa 1700, at the corner of John and Crown streets.
The thick strokes are written in indelible black ink.
Three other stone houses, including the Persen House, which Ulster County owns and operates as a museum, grace the other plots on the corner.
Taken together, they constitute the only place in America where pre-Revolutionary War buildings still stand on each corner.
Gerald Celente owns and maintains three of those buildings. Celente is founder of the Kingston-based Trends Journal Institute and publisher of the Trends Journal.
Celente is uncertain how to clean up the graffiti without making it worse. He does not think the graffiti is targeted at him or the historic buildings.
“It is just a moron expressing his anger without concern for what he is destroying,” Celente said Wednesday in his offices in the former Mohican Market on John Street.
But it is bigger than just a matter of mindless expression of a political view, Celente said.
“To me, it is an expression of the divided states of America,” he said, laying on the table a recent issue of the Trends Journal with a cover aimed at that point.
“People have lost respect for others. ‘It is only about me, what I believe. I don’t care about anybody else.’ It’s a free-for-all and a divisiveness we have not seen like anything else in our lifetime,” he said.
Trump supporter Roger Rascoe, chairman of the Ulster County Republican Committee, said he hopes authorities catch and prosecute those who wrote the graffiti to the fullest extent of the law.
For eight years, Rascoe said, he and others like him had disagreed respectfully with then-President Barack Obama and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“It is a shame and disgraceful that folks on the other side do not share the same values we do,” Rascoe said.
Kingston Police Lt. Thierry Crozier said the department is following leads in the case but has made no arrests.
Several instances of the anti-Trump graffiti have been found in the past several weeks.
“If anyone has information about who is doing this, we would greatly appreciate them contacting us,” Crozier said.
“If you care about history, if you care about your city, you should be turning them in.”
- Source, Record Online
