Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck
‘Could he actually win?’ Dave Eggers at a Donald Trump rally
Is this the most dangerous campaign in history, or a surreal comedy act, playing to a crowd laughing too hard to listen? The US writer spends a day at a presidential rally
The Guardian | 17 June 2016
I
spent five hours at the Donald Trump rally in Sacramento, California, on 1 June. I spoke to and overheard dozens of the rally’s attendees, not as a journalist but as one ticketholder to another – I was dressed in jeans, workboots and wore a Nascar hat – and found every last one of the attendees to be genial, polite and, with a few notable exceptions, their opinions to be within the realm of reasonable. The rally was as peaceful and patriotic as a Fourth of July picnic.
And yet I came away with a host of new questions and concerns. Among them: why is it that the song Trump’s campaign uses to mark his arrival and departure is Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer?” Is it more troubling, or less troubling, knowing that no one in the audience really cares what he says? And could it be that because Trump’s supporters are not all drawn from the lunatic fringe, but in fact represent a broad cross-section of regular people, and far more women than would seem possible or rational, that he could actually win?
***
It was sweltering 95 degrees, the sky blue and sun punishing, when I pulled off the highway and, guided by a well-planned and orderly array of cops and cones and sirens, made my way to a peripheral part of the Sacramento airport, where the Trump rally would be held, in an empty hangar.
It was just before four o’clock in the afternoon, and the rally wouldn’t start until seven, but already the lot was crowded with cars and trucks – not all of them American-made. When I parked, I glanced at the car next to me, and found that a young couple in casual business attire was engaged in casual amorous activity. Seeing my car arrive, the woman straightened her skirt and the man removed his hand from under her bra, but otherwise they continued undeterred.
It was the first, but not the last time, that it was clear that a good portion of the audience saw the rally as not purely a political event, but as something else, too – an entertainment, a curiosity, an opportunity to sell merchandise and refreshments, a chance to do some late-afternoon groping in the parking lot.
Like a lot of comedy, the appeal is in the forbidden delight. We can’t believe someone said that, on stage, to so many
For a year now, I’ve been watching the Trump candidacy the same way the rest of the world and at least half of the American population has – first as a harmless sideshow, then as a worrisome sideshow, then as an increasingly surreal and dangerous sideshow, and finally as a terrifying looming nightmare with echoes of Mussolini, Joseph McCarthy, Kristallnacht and Hitler. News reports and isolated video clips have made Trump’s rallies seem like bacchanalian proto-fascist white power orgies, fuelled by bald racism, pseudo-Nazi salutes and the imminent threat of violence toward any detractors. For months now I’ve believed that Trump’s candidacy was the most dangerous presidential campaign in modern American history. But the reality of a Trump rally, or at least this Trump rally, was about as threatening as a Garth Brooks concert.
Tickets to all Trump rallies are free and are available to anyone; you simply print one from Trump’s website and bring it with you. I chose not to go to the rally as a card-carrying member of the media, given at this point – and this truth was borne out repeatedly over the course of the day – Trump supporters, like Trump himself, are exceedingly distrustful of the media. If I had a notebook or microphone out, asking questions, the answers would be guarded or rehearsed, if anyone spoke to me at all. Instead, I decided I’d stand in line with everyone else, knowing that the six or seven people around me would be my window into at least a small portion of the Trump supporter’s mentality. I took my place at the back of the orderly line.
“See that?” the man in front of me said. He was pointing to a jet’s white trail in the sky above us. “That’s the air force. They’re spraying shit in the sky.”
I’ll call this man Jim. He was about 6ft tall, beer-bellied, and wearing shorts and a yellow T-shirt with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” printed above a rattlesnake. His hair and moustache were rust-coloured, his eyes small and wary.
Over the next 90 minutes, as we stood and occasionally shuffled toward the hangar together, Jim offered his theories on a variety of government and corporate conspiracies. This first one involved the air force releasing a toxic mixture of chemicals into the atmosphere, which he claimed they had been doing for 30 years. “They’re manipulating the weather with technology,” he said, “and they call it climate change. But really they’re changing the climate with technology.” He pointed to a wash of cirrus clouds high in the western sky. “See those fake-ass clouds? They use them to block out the sun. That’s why we don’t have springtime any more.”
=By quoting Jim, I realise I’ve made him sound nuts. But Jim wasn’t all that nuts. His theories were occasionally bizarre, but he expressed them calmly, and to everyone in line he was gregarious and kind. He laughed at appropriate moments. He was friendly and generous, repeatedly buying water for people around him, expressing interest in people, doing normal-people things. Later in this piece, I’ll quote Jim again, and again he’ll sound nuts, but all I can say here is that when you spend 90 minutes next to someone, you can gauge their level of loony, and Jim was merely a low-grade crank – not unlike that certain uncle in any family who’s fun to be around but who holds strange views about, say, water fluoridation.
Jim had strange views about water fluoridation. Because it was 95 degrees and sunny, and because we were standing in a shadeless parking lot in the height of the afternoon, vendors selling bottled water were doing a brisk business. When one approached us, pulling his wares in a red wagon, Jim asked if the water had come from Nestlé. The vendor looked at one of the bottles he was selling and seemed relieved that they weren’t Nestlé. Jim bought two.
“Don’t buy Nestlé shit, it’s got fluoride in it,” Jim said to me, handing me a bottle.
I tried to pay, but Jim wouldn’t have it. I asked him why Nestlé would put fluoride in their bottled water.
“Trying to dumb us down so we don’t vote for Trump,” he said, only half-joking. “Do you know history? Hitler started it.”
I asked why Hitler had put fluoride in the water. I had no idea how long we’d be in line, so there was time to kill.
“To dumb down the people,” Jim said. “Make them lethargic.” Now Jim looked into the sky again, at the trails of the passing jets. “Then they spray the shit in the sky. Double whammy. They’re actually spraying that with our air force. I wish they were still serving their country, but … ” He sighed and took a pull on his fluoride-free H20.
In the background, the soundtrack was provided by a man named Kraig Moss, a very kind and gentle older man with a guitar and a terrible story to tell. He was dressed like a cowboy, in jeans, boots, a denim vest and a worn-out hat, and had planted a small sound system on the lot, connected to a microphone. Moss has followed Trump’s rallies around the country, playing songs he has written, all of them available on a CD he was selling called Donald Trump for President.
“My name is Kraig Moss,” he said into the microphone, talking over a recording of one of his songs, “Trump Train”. “I’m from Oswego, New York. I wrote this song and many others that are on this CD. On 6 January 2014 I lost my son to a heroin-fentanyl overdose. That was in Oswego. And I talk to the kids about the ongoing heroin epidemic. How available it is. And how important it is to stay away. I’m supporting myself out here. I’m not independently wealthy. I don’t get any help from the campaign. I just come to get the folks riled up. Talk to ’em, play a little music, and then on to the next rally. I been to 33 of ’em.”
I bought two CDs from Kraig and I gave one to Jim. The songs were country songs, with titles including “Save Our Nation”, “Americans Will Win”, “Trump Chant Short” and “Trump Chant Long”.
In front of me and Jim was a family of three. The mother, who I’ll call Belinda, was black-haired, about 40, diminutive and youthful looking, wearing a white tank top, huge black sunglasses and a pink baseball hat. Her daughter, a taller, younger version of herself, was dressed much the same, while her son, who was much taller, well over 6ft, wore a tank top and a straight-brimmed baseball cap. They were quiet much of the time, the teenagers politely enduring the more or less incessant monologuing of Jim and another soapboxer, who I’ll call Ron.
More so than any other attendee I encountered at the rally, Ron embodied the Trump voter we have come to expect. He was middle-aged and white. He wore a white Trump T-shirt, crisp and new, tucked into blue jeans that looked like they’d been ironed that morning. He wore workboots and mirrored sunglasses and was fit for his age, with the bearing of a gym teacher or ex-Marine.
Ron preferred to stand a few yards off the orderly line, like a general inspecting his troops. With his arms crossed in front of him, facing the back of the line, at first I thought he was from the Trump campaign, tasked with examining the attendees and ferreting out spies. But soon enough it was clear he was just a man who liked an audience, and for much of the next hour, whenever Jim wasn’t talking about chem trails and fluoridation, Ron held court, facing Jim, Belinda, her kids and me, as if we were paying customers he was obligated to entertain and educate.
“Have you read his books?” Ron asked Belinda, meaning the many books with Trump’s name on them, ghostwritten by others.
Belinda shook her head, no. “I just follow him on Twitter,” she said.
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“I read his books years ago and always loved the guy,” Ron said. “I always wished he would run. His books are all easy reads. Simple English. Read them and you’ll say ‘Holy guacamole, this guy had a crystal ball!’ He predicted everything – 9/11, everything. Guy’s a freaking genius. He had a 159 IQ when he graduated from college. Imagine what it is now!”
OK. Now, by quoting Ron, I’ve made him out to sound like a lunatic, too. But Ron was not really a lunatic. Ron was likable and sympathetic, given how desperate he was to have a handful of people listen to him talk about his two heroes: Donald J Trump and Ronald Reagan. In his mind, the two men were equally great, cut from the same iconic cloth. Over the course of an hour, I heard Ron tell three different versions of the story of meeting Reagan. The story went something like this:
“Ronald Reagan. I met Ronald Reagan. When I was a kid I was in the Cub Scouts? I was one of a few kids who got to meet him. This was in San Jose. All the Scouts had gathered, and everyone wanted to meet him. All my friends had gone up there to meet him, but I didn’t care to. So, later in the day, my parents said, ‘You gotta go meet this guy. He could be the president one day.’ So I went up, and he had this huge head. And he just sat there and asked me all these questions. He was real interested in me. Just a nice guy. And he had huge hands, too.”
Ron, all these years later, was still moved by, flabbergasted by, the attention Reagan paid to him as a boy. It was frankly touching. More touching still was the visible pleasure Ron displayed in finding out that Belinda was Mexican-American, a fact she offered after a group of protesters walked by yelling “Trump’s a fascist!” One of them was waving a Mexican flag.
“I’m Latina,” Belinda told Ron. “My mother’s from Mexico.” She explained that people are confused about Trump’s attitudes toward Mexico, and that he has more support among Latinos than assumed. She and her mother, she said, were in favour of the wall.
“My friend is Mexican, too,” Ron explained to Belinda and to everyone nearby. “He’s got his citizenship, and he worked on Obama’s campaign in Chicago. Knocking on doors in 10-degree weather. And now he’s on the Trump train. And I got another friend, he’s Muslim, from Afghanistan. I work with him every day because his auto place is next to my business. I get his deliveries for him, and he gets mine. He’s going for Trump, too, and he’s Muslim. So don’t believe the media.”
I should pause here and provide some context. Trump, of course, has promised to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, a project that experts estimate would cost $25bn – though Trump has insisted that he will make Mexico pay for it. At the time of this rally, Trump had recently asserted that Judge Gonzalo Curiel, assigned to a class-action lawsuit against him and Trump University, should be disqualified from the case given his Mexican heritage (Curiel was born in Indiana). Facing a quick backlash, Trump did what he does so brilliantly: he doubled down, stating that he would face prejudicial treatment from a Muslim judge, too. This pair of assertions provoked widespread outrage, including a rebuke from Republican leader Paul Ryan, who called the statements “racist” – a rare use of the word within GOP ranks.
But among our little clique, the discussion of Trump’s non-racist nature continued.
“They say Trump’s a racist and a hater,” Ron said. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Forty years you guys love this guy, and now you say he’s all these things? It don’t add up.”
Trump could say the wall should be built on the Canadian border, and no one would blink
As we’d been waiting, about 500 more people had arrived to stand in line behind us. Vendors moved up and down the line, selling Trump T-shirts, buttons and towels. And all the while, the scene was exceedingly calm. It might have been the heat. It might have been the fluoridation Jim was talking about. But the attendees could have easily been confused with people in line for a Disney ride or a holiday sale at Walmart. They were amiable, polite, dressed in red, white and blue shorts and tank tops and sandals, and surprisingly diverse.
Yes, they were generally white, but there were also African-Americans and plenty of Latinos. A startling number of Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and South Asian-Americans. There were the expected Harley-Davidson riders in black vests, but there were also a remarkable number of people with disabilities. There were families, professional types, veterans and one Filipino-American navy officer in full dress whites. It was not the homogenous sea of angry white men that one might have expected. Instead, it appeared to be a skewed but not wholly unrepresentative cross-section of the people of northern California.
Which made some interactions with the protesters feel odd. The demonstrators had every reason to denounce Trump’s past statements, but there seemed to be a wide gulf between the extreme things Trump has said and the more moderate views of the people who came out to this rally. One young man walked by with a bullhorn, followed by a handful of photographers and videographers.
“Trump supporters are assholes and idiots,” the young man hissed.
“Don’t take the bait,” Jim said to Belinda. The young man with the bullhorn repeated his assessment for the next half an hour as he made his way through the parking lot.
“You come up with that all by yourself?” Jim yelled after him.
The line moved on. As we got closer to the hangar, the merchandise tables became more frequent and their purveyors more surprising. A woman speaking heavily accented English and wearing a Service Employees International Union cap sold bright green Trump T-shirts. An older African-American couple were stationed at a table featuring a dozen different Trump shirts, hats and buttons.
“You guys look like Trump voters!” Jim said to them. They laughed and nodded, and asked him if he wanted to buy anything. The T-shirts were $20.
***
When, at about five o’clock, the hangar was finally opened, the line moved swiftly. A few dozen police officers in riot gear stood outside the entrance and manned the metal detectors inside. Large cameras weren’t allowed. No thermoses or breakable water containers were allowed. Posters and banners were not permitted. Trump operatives in well-tailored suits buzzed near the security area, ostensibly looking for security risks and simple troublemakers. Others handed out “Veterans for Trump” placards.
Once we passed through the metal detectors, we were free to move throughout the hangar. The hangar door faced west, and the early evening sun streamed through, casting everything and everyone in silhouette. The crowd milled cheerfully, as they would before a country fair or an outdoor concert, which in many ways the scene resembled. Speakers were set up near the hangar door, a