A Georgia woman known as “Burnitdown” portends what the Trump movement is becoming at the

It was a Monday night with nobody around. She gripped the side of the metal container and pulled herself up, and as she leaned over the edge and looked inside, she felt a rush of vindication.

“Jesus,” she said to herself, spotting two clear bags full of shredded paper.

She leaned further, balancing herself to keep from pitching in, grabbed the bags and jumped down. She checked her clothes for flecks of rust and bits of trash, and then she drove the bags back to her house, a neat, whitewashed Colonial in a part of America where it had become normal to believe elections were stolen, that evidence of this could be in a dumpster and that retrieving it was a daring act of patriotism.

And that was how Rubino thought of herself as she pulled into her gravel driveway, as a patriot. It was late. There were rips in the bags, so she transferred the shreds to two other bags and stored them in her garage, dreading what she might find inside. “Who knows?” she said, believing anything was possible. “Who knows?” A few days later, she braced herself, opened one of the bags and pulled out a fragment of paper.

She pulled out another one.

“Warrant division,” it read.

“Possession of cocaine.”

She rummaged around and found phone numbers. Partial addresses. Names. She realized she was going to need a large table. Lots of tape. It was going to take a whole team of people to put the pieces back together, and more time than she had to spare at that moment. She had Republican Party meetings to attend where she was calling out “RINOs” — Republicans in name only. School issues to address such as removing library books that were allegedly pornographic. Georgia’s primary elections were coming up, and she had candidates she was trying to help. She closed the bag and stored it away in a corner of the garage next to her son’s soccer goal for later scrutiny. There was so much else to get done.

Six years into the grass-roots movement unleashed by Donald Trump in his first presidential campaign, Angela Rubino is a case study in what that movement is becoming. Suspicious of almost everything, trusting of almost nothing, believing in almost no one other than those who share her unease, she has in many ways become a citizen of a parallel America — not just red America, but another America entirely, one she believes to be awash in domestic enemies, stolen elections, immigrant invaders, sexual predators, the machinations of a global elite and other fresh nightmares revealed by the minute on her social media scrolls. She is known online as “Burnitdown.”

She is also among the people across the country willing to do whatever they can to ensure that the imagined enemies of the United States are defeated in the 2022 midterm elections and beyond. From school boards to state houses to Congress, their goal is to take political territory, and for evidence that this is possible, they look to northwest Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose first-time candidacy two years ago defined the fringe of the Republican Party and who is now running for reelection as one of its standard bearers.

“The representative of the 14th Congressional District of America” is how one local Republican has described Greene, whose district is mostly White, mostly rural and has been long abandoned by national Democrats.

“The smartest district in the U.S.A.” is how Greene has described her followers.

Those followers include Rubino, a married 40-year-old mother of two, a New York transplant who had worked in restaurants and flipped houses for a living and once believed politics was only for the powerful.

In Greene, she did not see what much of America saw — a person willing to do almost anything to keep emotions running high, whether that meant perpetuating lies about election fraud, harassing a victim of a school shooting, speaking at a white nationalist conference or casting fellow citizens who disagree with her as “domestic terrorists.”

Instead, Rubino saw a person like herself: a political outsider who shared the same sense of urgency about the same dystopian America, one that required a popular uprising to save it. To that end, Rubino had so far managed to rally enough people to get the county election board ousted, replacing its members with those who believed that the 2020 election was stolen. She was part of a group called the Domestically Terrorized Moms that was pressing the local school board to get rid of a curriculum they believed to be grooming children for sexual predators.

Now, on a cool Saturday morning a few weeks after she had climbed into the dumpster, she was getting ready to host a gathering of fellow activists to strategize about their next moves. In her front yard, she pounded in two red signs for Greene along with a homemade sign announcing her own initiative.

“Canvas your vote here,” it read, under a red, white and blue circle with the letters W-A-R.

“Come on in!” Rubino yelled as people pulled into her driveway. “Right down here!”

She set out coffee and doughnuts in the bed of a pickup. She hooked up a loudspeaker she’d bought for the occasion. She built a roaring bonfire, and now smoke and Aerosmith were drifting into the blue spring sky.

“Yes, we’ll be here!” she yelled into her cellphone. “Come on out!”

She looked around at the people warming their hands over the fire, ready for action.

There was a military contractor who said he’d been reading a Russian book about CIA-sponsored regime change operations, which he believed included the last U.S. presidential election. There were women who believed public schools were indoctrinating children with left-wing ideology. Retirees who believed the coronavirus was a bioweapon. A mechanic who wore ear buds all day streaming “War Room,” a podcast in which former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon was urging people to take over local Republican parties.

Rubino’s closest collaborator, a woman known online as “TheBaseIsBack,” was also there, setting out a display of custom gun components engraved with “Trump” and the American flag. Now, as people gathered around, she and Rubino began outlining their plans for the coming months, including an online platform they were building where people could record how they voted after casting their official ballots, starting with the November midterms. They had already acquired and uploaded to the platform the voter registration rolls for the entire state of Georgia, envisioning that millions of people would eventually learn to cast their votes on the system, which would generate a tally that could be compared to the state’s official results, and if necessary, challenge them.

They were also planning to start a podcast called “The Dirty Peach” to expose “RINOs” and “criminal politicians.” And, to keep people motivated, they were launching an elaborate online game in which players would earn points by carrying out political actions in real life, the more audacious the better, such as Rubino’s dumpster dive.

“Angela’s a legend,” someone said at the mention of that, and Rubino rolled her eyes.

“Everybody’s waiting for a white horse to come and save us from the chaos,” Rubino said. “But no white horse is coming.”

Rubino’s friend opened her laptop.

“Okay,” she said. “Who wants to practice canvassing their vote?”

People started lining up to record how they’d voted in the 2020 election, while Rubino sloshed some lighter fluid into the bonfire and checked her phone. The guest speaker was on the way. She counted heads again — 22 now — but she wanted more, so she grabbed a couple of people and walked up to the four-lane road in front of her house.

“C’mon! C’mon!’ she yelled, waving her arms at an SUV.

“C’mon people!” she yelled at another car.

“Turn in, turn in!” she yelled, and soon, a mint-green Mercedes-Benz turned in, delivering the guest speaker, a retired IT specialist named Garland Favorito, who’d been traveling the state trying to sustain interest in the false narrative of election fraud.

“This is just the first one,” Rubino said, explaining her plans as Favorito…