The Trump inflatable chicken, dubbed Donny, was the mascot at the Tax March in April. (Photo by jl22205)

The Trump inflatable chicken, dubbed Donny, was the mascot at the Tax March in April. (Photo by jl22205)

Update: Chicago activist Taran Brar was behind the stunt. He secured a permit and placed it strategically after months of planning.

Original:

The Trump chicken is back—gilded hair atop a cartoonishly inflated body and all—hanging out near the White House this afternoon. Who put it there and exactly why remain open questions, but it’s delighting and worrying the Twitter-sphere in equal measure nonetheless.

The Trump chicken last made an appearance in D.C. (that we know of) before and during the Tax March in April as an attention-grabbing mascot.

Local organizer Anna Chu, a member of the executive planning committee, explained the backstory:

DCist: Can you please explain the Trump chicken?

AC: A couple of the local marches somehow found these big inflatable white chickens with gold hairdos online and decided that they were fantastic and ordered a whole bunch of chickens with the pretext that Trump is too chicken to release his taxes. San Francisco was the earliest one. They shared their chickens with other organizers and the idea just caught on, everybody loved it, and now I forget how many chickens we have—let me look. There’s a chain about how many chickens there are … I’m not even joking, where’s the chicken email?

There we go. There are around a dozen marches with chickens, but there are more chickens because some cities have more than one. I think someone has a 13-foot chicken, San Francisco has quite a few chickens.

[Danelle Morton explains exactly how she turned a rooster commissioned for a Chinese real estate firm into the march’s mascot in this Slate article]

DCist: Is it meant to be an anthropomorphized Trump, or is it its own character? Does it have a gender or a name?

AC: We’ve just been calling it the Trump chicken, and it has Trump’s hairdo. We have not discussed the gender of the chicken, that has not come up. We’ve just been referring to as ‘the chicken.’
[Another organizer says that the chicken has an official name: Donny]

DCist: But is it more like a character, or is it meant to be Trump in chicken form?

AC: I think it is more like Trump in chicken form…wow, this is a very philosophical
question. I think a lot of people gravitated toward it because there is a humorous aspect. But it is in the form of a chicken, and it has some Trump-like aspects, particularly its hair.

DCist: It seems to be really grabbing people’s attention. I assume that was the point?

AC: This lends itself to so many issues: transparency, openness in government, accountability, and we are also heading into tax reform. We have no idea who he is working for, how he is going to benefit himself. What if all of a sudden they decide to really push forward some pro-real estate industry tax cuts and he sees a huge upside to that … we don’t know. If it takes a Trump chicken to bring awareness to that, then we will have the Trump chicken.

DCist: Do you think Trump is bothered by the chicken?

AC: I don’t have those types of relationship in the West Wing, but he’s not known for having particularly thick skin so it would be funny to see how he would react. People really love the idea of the chicken for multiple things, but if it gets him to react and take the issue seriously and remind him that we care, we are watching it’s not going away…I guess we should order more chickens.

We’ve reached out to Tax March organizers, but the official Tax March Chicken Twitter account (what, you didn’t think that would exist?) hasn’t taken credit for today’s protest.

While organizers found the original inflatable chickens for $400 on Alibaba, they have since proliferated. One can currently be purchased on eBay for $499.99, so really pretty much anyone could be behind today’s show of tomfowlery.

Filed Under: chicken, inflatable trump chicken, protest, trump, white house,