Few things say “America” more than a big old Mack Truck, blunt-nosed and lumbering like its bulldog emblem. A warrior vehicle, it supplied British troops on the Western Front in World War I and Allied forces in The Great Antifascist War a/k/a World War II.

Founded in Brooklyn in 1900, the Mack Truck company moved to Allentown PA in 1905 and spent the following decades there tracing the typical Rust Belt corporate industrial arc: good times through the '60s and into the '70s, relocation to the “business-friendly” American South in 1987 and ultimately, acquisition by foreigners — in the case of Mack Trucks, by socialist-adjacent French manufacturer Renault in 1990 and, in 2001, by socialist-adjacent Swedish multinational Volvo.

Here in Ulster County, one vintage Mack has been transformed into a roadside MAGA monument, a totem of Trump and Trump-related images and symbols and cryptic slogans, devotedly curated and applied, cared for and fussed over, regularly updated and enhanced. As a canvas or an installation, it bursts with obsessive intensity, echoing the social, economic and historical cacophony (and resulting grievances) of Rust Belt America and American empire in decline — the fodder MAGA feeds on.

An artist friend suggested that, in a bizarro way the piece (politics aside) wouldn't be out of place at Burning Man: For the welded metal, the “Mad Max aesthetic,” the idea of “freedom as Burn it all down.”

On a recent visit to the MAGA Mack's location, on Route 32 just south of Kingston, one day after the failed assassination attempt on Trump's life, the monument's creator was adding a bandage to the ear of the image of Trump that occupies the driver's side portion of the truck's windshield, Melania's image on the passenger side. “Good thing you liberals can't shoot straight,” he said, not particularly seriously.

Robert Wern, who goes by “Bobby” and owns Bobby's Hobby's, the auto dealership where the monument stands, scoffed at the idea that his work qualifies as art. He was a difficult interview, alternately prickly and jocular, failing to return multiple phone calls and unwilling to discuss his personal history. He did say he's been in the military, but not when or where, and that he's an Ulster native but without any detail. He agreed to have this story told although, he said, “I have no interest in it.”

The Kingston Wire stopped by to speak with Bobby over the course of several days and, despite extreme political disagreements and his resistance to viewing the Mack as art, we managed to keep things civil. He made his case with a touch of wit, in fact, characterizing the truck as “a dilapidated antique being graffitied by somebody who belongs in a re-education camp.”

The reactions from passing vehicles has been largely favorable, he said, despite the region's increasingly left-tending politics. “A few give me the finger,” he said. “But other than that, everybody went beep, beep. If you haven't noticed, yeah, things are changing.”

For an expert opinion on Bobby's MAGA Mack, Kingston Wire reached out to Bard College art history Professor Susan Aberth, who specializes in Surrealism as well as outsider and visionary art.

“There's a really long history of yard art that uses signage,” Aberth said. “Often it's religious, not political, but it can be, it could be like this. It's usually working-class people using their lawn or their private property to express themselves and their ideas. Just the choice of the Mack Truck, it's all actually very thoughtful. The ultimate strong truck bulldozing his enemies.”

“Like it or not,” she continued, “this is a piece of folk art, and whether the liberal art establishment likes the message or not, this is still folk art, just like evangelical Christian art in the South — that's folk art, whether you believe in it or not.”