Nadine Seiler and I have different recollections about the first time we became aware of the other. Mine takes place on January 11, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial. I had been visiting D.C. for a climate crisis protest and had time to kill before my train back to New York. I spotted a group that had unfurled a large black-and-white “Remove Trump” banner on the steps just below Lincoln; when they started to walk toward the White House, I grabbed a corner and walked with them in silent solidarity. Nadine marched beside the banner, carrying her own handmade anti-Trump sign. I didn’t talk to her then, but I never forgot her.

Six months later, when I moved to D.C. in June 2020, I would come to associate Nadine with the fence that had been erected around Lafayette Park to protect Trump’s fragile ego and upside-down Bible from the Black Lives Matter protests. Although she quickly became a near-constant presence on the plaza until the end of January 2021—and is crucial to preserving its oral and visual history going forward—Nadine insists that she has marched into the roles of curator, historian, and prolific protestor the same way most of her life has unfolded: accidentally.

“I’m not that smart,” she tells me several times when we talk in depth on November 1, 2024. “Almost everything is an accident. I’m not a visionary, I’m not a leader-type person. I’m a people watcher. I observe.” As an observer myself, I regret not asking more about her life sooner. But whenever I’ve been lucky enough to spot Nadine over the past four-and-a-half years—whether she’s among a crowd of thousands or standing solo outside of the Supreme Court with one of her signature spray-painted sheet banners—there always seems to be something more pressing to discuss than backstory. When we finally sit down and I ask what motivated her to start protesting Trump in particular, she says it was the third season of The Apprentice.

“The overqualified Black guy won and Trump wanted him to share the prize with a white woman,” Nadine recalls. “That pissed me off immediately and I never watched after that.”

Trump indictment celebration tour, August 8, 2023

Living in Maryland since the early 2000s, she says she was aware of the emergence of the Tea Party and attended rallies in favor of the Affordable Care Act. But she never forgave Trump and still doesn’t understand how anyone with critical thinking skills could support him. “When he came down that escalator I thought ‘America is going to laugh him off the stage,’” she says. “And then he actually got into office and I just couldn’t believe it.”

On January 21, 2017, Nadine says she ended up in the inaugural Women’s March by accident—and she’s been a fixture in activist spaces in D.C. and across the country ever since. “Whatever is going on I’m just there, I find myself in it,” she says. “I’m an all or nothing person, when I get into something I really get into.”

When I ask what inspires her to keep going, what gives her the energy to keep pulling her omnipresent cart (overflowing with signs and telescopic poles, and blasting protest anthems) through the streets, she offers her favorite African proverb as an explanation:

“I am because we are.”

“If someone says to me ‘Thank you for being out here, you give me energy to come out,’ that gives me energy,” Nadine adds. “Nobody asked me. Nobody appointed me. Nobody elected me. But if I can get people to come out and help get us to the goal line, I’ll do it. That motivates me.”

Black Lives Matter

Nadine came to 16th Street NW to protest and people-watch at the end of May 2020, a week before it was symbolically christened Black Lives Matter Plaza. Her work as a home organizer had dried up during the pandemic; she wasn’t getting along with her husband and was uncomfortable being stuck at the home they share outside of the city.

While sitting on a concrete barrier across from St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square, Nadine noticed that signs that had appeared organically on the fence during the protests had begun to fall down and litter the sidewalk. When she overheard people complaining that the area was dirty, she put her organizational skills to work.

“Initially I just pushed it aside, then I started intentionally tending to it,” she says. Soon she was joined by (a good) Karen—who Nadine describes as the fence’s “stage manager”—and a handful of other volunteers who protected and maintained the public space from tourist crowds by day and would-be vandals at night. Using tape, zip ties, and a knitting needle, Nadine’s primary goal was to make the signs harder to destroy.

Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 5, 2020

After a lot of the ephemeral artwork was vandalized by a MAGA group in late 2020, Nadine says she grew frustrated with haphazard art builds periodically held to recreate or replace what had been lost. This is how Nadine remembers first meeting me—I was helping to reattach signs to the fence and she says she didn’t provide me with adequate direction and may have been short with me.

I don’t remember feeling slighted, but she begins our interview with a belated apology and says that the way she treats people matters to her, and things stick with her. Although by any metric she is one of the most friendly and compassionate people I’ve ever met, she insists her giving mindset is largely self-serving.

“I’m an immigrant,” Nadine says. “I’m a Black female and I’m also an atheist. In all those groups we are all marginalized in some way, so I help people because I want people to show up for me if I’m in trouble. If nobody steps up because they think someone else is going to do it, then nobody is going to do it. It has to start somewhere.”

‘Nobody owes me anything’

It wasn’t long before Nadine was not only rehanging, but rearranging the artwork, and organizing fence sections into themes. When a friend from Texas sent her a press photo of the plaza that featured her and the fence, Nadine finally understood the power of the platform for which she had accidentally become a steward.

“First I would spend five minutes cleaning up, and then it was ten minutes and then it was days and then months.” She’d arrive around 10 pm each night and leave at 4 am—although there were plenty of days where I saw her at the fence both day and night—and she rarely took a full day off (in her estimate, she was only absent two days “for rest”).

Nobody asked her, but plenty of people were thankful for her service, including a Library of Congress employee who showed up nearly every morning to document the ever-evolving installation.

When the fence finally came down, Nadine took it upon herself to rent a storage unit and preserve what she could. There have since been several exhibitions around the country—including most recently at D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library—and Nadine hopes her story will get the attention of an institution interested in preserving the now-historic artifacts that most people were content to throw away.

She’s currently still paying the storage costs herself while she works on forming a foundation and securing funding to properly maintain the increasingly-fragile artwork. “I take on stuff that nobody asks me to do,” she says. “That’s why I always say nobody owes me anything because anything I do, I decide to do it on my own. But if I die tomorrow, no one else knows how it all came together and how it’s all connected.”

Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 7, 2020

A colonized mind

Nadine was born at 10:30 p.m. on May 11, 1965, in Port of Spain General Hospital in Trinidad. She says she grew up in an “uber-dysfunctional family,” and would find out later in life that her older brother’s conception was the result of a rape. Her father—a Black man with blue eyes—forced himself on her then-17-year-old mother, a Black woman whose Black mother was prone to making racially-disparaging remarks to her children and grandchildren.

Nadine now sees her difficult childhood as a result of two overlapping issues: the “colonized mind,” which she says is still common in countries like Trinidad (they gained their independence from Britain in 1962, but the consequences still ripple across generations), and her mother’s lack of options and bodily autonomy.

“It wasn’t easy,” Nadine says, choking back tears. “It wasn’t easy with people around you constantly telling you you’re not good enough—we were too dark, or had the wrong hair, or a too-broad nose—as a kid you’re taking it all in and you don’t know it, but then you encounter it again out in society. I felt like a burden.”

Although her father was “horribly abusive” to everyone, Nadine’s mother (whom she now refers to as her “incubator”) had nowhere to run to so she stayed in the relationship—and ended up having two more children, which only made the situation worse for everybody.

“She was resentful, so I don’t fault her for wanting to get out,” Nadine says. “It wasn’t malicious, but she largely left us to fend for ourselves.”

Nadine cites this neglect as her personal connection to the pro-choice movement. At 59 years old, she says she may be too old to have children of her own, but she’ll never stop being angry with the dismal circumstances that led to her birth—even if it means entertaining the thought that she might never have been born at all.

“If my incubator had a choice, my life would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t be here, but who cares? If she had access to abortion, she wouldn’t have wrecked the psyche of three other people. The repercussions [of her lack of choice] are still being felt today.”

‘America or bust’

Nadine describes her maternal grandmother as “a religious zealot who believed in a lot of nonsense,” including that the end of the world was imminent. As a result or this conditioning, Nadine grew up apathetic and aimless, thinking ‘Ok, if the world is coming to an end, what’s the point of doing anything?’”

She left her father’s house shortly after turning 18; months later, when he tried to bring her home by force—violently confronting her on a public street—she was rescued by a group of men whose unwanted advances she had rebuffed moments before. By the time she was in her early 20s, Nadine realized that “while the world may be coming to an end at some point, it’s not ending right now,” and she scrambled to find a purpose.

Nadine dressed as an illegal immigrant for Halloween, November 1, 2024

She got a coveted office job for the Trinidad government, but quickly realized it was a dead end. “The people who worked there had been there 20 years and they would boast about being there 20 years,” Nadine says. “But they were doing the same damn thing and I’m thinking to myself ‘Ain’t no goddamn way I will be here after 20 years.’”

Because her father worked for an airline, Nadine traveled to the U.S. frequently as a kid, flying free until she turned 18—but even if it hadn’t felt familiar, Nadine says there was never any question that she would end up in the U.S., a common aspiration among Trinidadians. “When I set my sights on getting an education, it was America or bust.”

She saved money, gave away everything she owned (keeping only some personal letters and a few dresses), secured a visa, arranged to stay with a cousin in New Jersey, and entered the U.S. on October 31, 1987. She was 22 years old. “I had no back up plan if they didn’t let me through,” Nadine says, insisting that she wasn’t scared of the journey because she had no other options.

“Did I come prepared? No,” she says.

“They’re eating the pets,” November 1, 2024

2nd class citizen

Although her life in the U.S. has been anything but easy, Nadine insists she’s been very lucky. “I don’t have financial luck—I have never been able to win money or anything like that—but I have luck with circumstance.” But the obstacles she’s overcome suggest that more than luck is at play—and Nadine is clearly smarter than she admits.

She’s been consistently working since she was a teenager; her first job after she came to the U.S. was pulling plastic off of jackets ahead of the steamer at a Members Only factory. When she was transferred to the mending department, an older coworker would pass the workday by telling Nadine all of her personal problems and occasionally crying.

She was hired to be a home aid to an elderly woman and moved from majority-Black neighborhoods to white ones and back again with the help of newspaper ads in which she began to solicit opportunities instead of simply going whichever way the wind blew her. A job at a furniture store led to a meet-cute with her first husband: he was a customer and she thought he was so attractive she faked a bathroom break just to get a better look at him.

Over the course of their contentious, years-long coupling, his carelessness got her suddenly evicted from an apartment and he cheated on her constantly. Their marriage may have been unstable but it was Nadine’s final hurdle to clear in her path to citizenship.

When I ask how long they were together, she says: “He started being a dog from day one—but I liked him and the sex was good. My relationship was genuine, but his needs superseded mine.” She got her green card, applied to be a citizen, and became one as soon as she was able. “I’m all good now,” she says. “Until Trump gets back in office and declares that I’m illegal, which could happen.”

And her first husband? “He was a dog and I couldn't put up with it any longer so I moved on.”

Decolonizing the mind

Although she insists she used to be really, really shy (and still detests banal small talk), it’s almost impossible not to notice Nadine wherever she sets her sights on attracting attention.

She doesn't approach or preach to people and prefers to let the curious come to her. She’s always willing to have a constructive conversation based in reality, but it’s not always been easy for her to recognize at first when she’s being purposely trolled. She cites a recent incident outside of the White House, when someone approached her and seemed to inquire earnestly about Project 2025. They asked her how they could find out more information and balked when she suggested Google.

“He says to me ‘... And I'm supposed to believe Google?’ I ended the conversation. We’re being coddled in this world where everybody’s opinion is supposedly on par—and it’s not. I won’t be a part of it. I will not hesitate to tell you if you ask a stupid question.”

She may be quick to tell it like it is, but that applies to praise as well as criticism. Nadine credits her third—and current—husband for breaking her out of the generational trauma bubble where she had been taught explicitly and implicitly by family members and society alike that “white is right.”

Before she was cognizant of her own bias, she admits to looking for—and elevating white men—above all others. “Fortunately for me, I found an asshole,” she says, showcasing her seemingly inexhaustible ability to make lemonade out of the lemons life keeps throwing at her.

She says she’s thankful that she met her “idiotic” husband and not a different white man who put her on a pedestal and treated her well enough to validate the damaging racial hierarchies she worked so hard to free herself from.

“Now everybody is just somebody who happens to be white, happens to be Black, happens to be East Indian, Asian, be whatever, and I'm dealing with you on that level—how you treat me is how I treat you,” Nadine says.

Going home

Lately, Nadine says that it’s begun to feel like her big American Dream might end up being a bust afterall: The world hasn’t ended (yet) but she’s found herself thinking about leaving the U.S.—even if she’s not quite sure where she would go next. She still has family in Trinidad, but she doesn’t think her decolonized mind would survive long there; she’s looked into Canada and Australia, but there are too many hoops to jump through.

Conversely, the stubborn part of her (she is a Taurus, after all) says “If I leave, they win. Right? Because it’s me that they want to go—a Black atheist immigrant—and if I leave, I'm giving them the win. So the stubborn part of me doesn’t want to go.”

Right now, she’s more concerned with where she’s going to spend election night. Earlier in the month, she told me she was trying to arrange a reunion of sorts at the new fence that encircles Lafayette Park in anticipation of election turmoil. But while we’re having our conversation on the grounds of the Capitol, a man walks by and recognizes her. He says he has a Howard University connection—does she want to spend Election Night at the Harris campaign party? She makes no commitments (“I prefer to be outside because I already made my banner,” she tells me), but gives him her phone number and seems pleased with the serendipity of it all. “See?” she says as she saves his contact. “I have situational luck.”

During the 2020 election, Nadine was holding court at the fence like she had done for so much of the six months preceding; only this time, she was surrounded by a crowd that grew larger and more energetic as they anxiously waited for several days to ensure every vote was counted.

In a photo I took on November 7—after the Biden/Harris victory was reported—Nadine sits on a step ladder and leans against the artwork-covered fence. A large black-and-white sign looms above her. It says “You’re fired” (an Apprentice reference), but in my closely-cropped photo I read it as “tired,” because that’s how her blue-lined eyes look to me. She’s wearing a t-shirt that she designed in her signature cartoonish style; on the back it says “Flush the turd on November 3rd.” Each day that passed without results, she crossed out the date and wrote in a new one.

This time around, she’s not sure what she’ll do or where she’ll go if Trump secures a second term, but she is sure what she won’t be doing: protesting.

“If he wins, I’m not protesting again,” she says with conviction. “That’s my hard line. You had the whole of 2017, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, ‘22, ‘23, and now until November 5th, 2024, and you let him get back in there? No. I’m done. It would be hard. It would be very hard. But I’m done.”

When I agree that she has more than earned a break after the countless hours she has spent reminding passersby why immigrants like her have always made America so great, she is quick to clarify that she’s not looking for accolades—and admits that her not-quite-infinite well of patience may finally be drying up.

“I have done so much to get people’s attention,” she says. “We are the majority of this country. America has had enough time. Is America willing to let people die again and again and still claim to be ‘pro-life?’ No. No. I want her to win, I want to be wrong. I so want to be wrong.”

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Nadine Seiler hopes she’s wrong