“I often feel like Trump can’t do anything new,” my friend Abby Cunniff remarked Saturday, “and then he does a blowjob on his mic.” Abby knew that I had watched the scene unfold live the previous evening at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum, and wanted the full story. So as a dutiful scholar, I explained that matters were a bit more complicated than what you might see on social media. From the very beginning of his remarks, Trump sounded weak and hoarse, slurring his words and meandering into incoherence more than usual. Stray individuals in the arena’s upper tiers began shouting to raise the volume, and small sections gradually banded together to chant in unison: “Turn it up / turn it up!” Nobody in the lower decks bothered to assist them, as a clueless Trump rattled on about Wisconsin football legend Brett Farve’s big hands and “fingers… like sausages.” At last, Trump gestured to the insurgent balconies with a wave, and said “Thank you very much.” In other words: shut up. Desperation grew, and the chant morphed into “Fix the mic / Fix the mic!” This finally caught Trump’s attention, and he put it all together.
“I was wondering what the hell they were shouting!” Trump mused, pivoting into an extended Borscht Belt diatribe against the microphone and the sound contractor, laced with the familiar promise to refuse payment (this isn’t a joke), and some new material about going backstage to “knock the hell out of people,” part of the increasingly casual invocation of violent fantasies that recently included the murder of Republican political opponent Liz Cheney. The consummate showman, Trump proceeded to milk the microphone bit for the rest of the night, including a fresh grievance about how the stand was too low for a man of his height, forcing him to bend over to speak.
At this point, by all appearances and any reasonable standard of evaluation, the former and possibly future President Donald J. Trump mischievously gazed downward to consider the length of his microphone stand, delivered two playful tugs to its shaft, coquettishly batted his eyes shut, rhythmically plodded his forehead earthward, and pantomimed the act of fellatio for two emphatic pumps. The crowd went wild.
It has been nearly ten years since Donald Trump entered US politics by way of the “golden escalator” at Manhattan’s Trump Tower. In the time since, the scene has been widely invoked as some kind of political metaphor, but it’s unclear exactly what the escalator signifies, or if we need metaphors to understand Donald Trump at all. Maybe there’s some deeper meaning behind the Trump phenomenon waiting to be deciphered, but it’s just as likely that it’s all plain to see and too sad to accept because there’s nothing that can be done about it. Perhaps, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, a racist old pig sucking an imaginary cock in the center of a sports arena as the mass base for fascism in the United States cheers him on is just that: a racist old pig sucking an imaginary cock in the center of a sports arena as the mass base for fascism in the United States cheers him on. But for some reason, as the man himself would say, I still keep drinking the garbage.
This was the fourth Trump rally I’ve attended. I’ve previously written about seeing him in an airplane hangar at a regional airport in central Wisconsin, and a small convention center in an Iowa redevelopment hub. Four years ago this week, on the eve of the 2020 election, I saw Trump on an airfield in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where just a few months prior, some of the most exhilarating and terrifying scenes of the George Floyd Rebellion had unfolded. At a time when conventional wisdom on much of the left held that Trump’s base would rise up and seize power after the election, I stood on a sparsely peopled tarmac as Trump bragged that Melania’s and his recent cases of Covid proved — contrary to media reports — that they still got it on, and interrupted his peregrinations long enough to play a YouTube clip of Joe Biden’s stuttering spliced with Jim Carrey making a series of comedically incoherent noises in the film Liar Liar. I reported to the local comrades that if anyone present was plotting a coup, they did a great job pretending to be a bunch of dumbasses happy to just guffaw at Trump’s raunchy jokes and impatiently shove each other through a muddy cornfield in the dark.
Friday’s event was my first Trump rally in a sporting arena, which, I soon learned, is where he makes the most sense. The scene outside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum set the tone for the evening’s entertainment; while Democrats may dispute Trump’s claims to have created some 7 million jobs as president, nobody can deny that he’s now providing employment for the dozen or so merchants who trail his events selling bootleg merchandise, including some of the only Black men to be found outside the average Trump rally. The latest designs include: “Support Diversity” alongside a row of different sized bullets; a heavily-armed Smoky Bear saying “Only You Can Prevent Socialism”; Trump clutching cats alongside the message “Make Pets Safe Again” in reference to the campaign’s anti-Haitian blood libel; an austere looking Trump standing with open arms outside the White House beneath the bolded pink announcement “Daddy’s Home”; a heavily stylized Western illustration of Trump and Vance in cowboy hats labeled “The Outlaw and the Hillbilly”; and a rendition of Kamala Harris’s face with a line through it, as part of the message “Say No to the Hoe.” There are also the ubiquitous Trump hats, which more attendees than not showed up already wearing, creating a striking visual effect that’s also a bit disconcerting, especially when viewed from the center of it.
In the strange July days immediately preceding Joe Biden’s departure from the presidential race and the political ascent of Kamala Harris, the Fiserv Forum hosted MAGA faithful from all over the country for a Republican National Convention that effectively doubled as a coronation for Trump, who was widely believed to be coasting to victory, and basked in four days that showcased a Republican Party remade in his image. Like many privately-owned sporting facilities subsidized by stolen public funds — in this case, upwards of a quarter billion dollars — the arena is situated in a sparsely populated downtown area ringed by restaurants and bars catering largely to out of towners visiting the arena for a night of cutting loose. True to form, Friday’s crowd, which filled roughly three-fourths of the arena’s 18,000 seats, initially seemed to portend electoral doom for Harris in Wisconsin. But when Trump casually inquired who among his flock had ventured north from Illinois, roughly half the audience cheered. Others were “Front Row Joes,” the official term for Trump rally groupies. This strange MAGA aristocracy follows Trump around the country like the Grateful Dead, and vies for seats closest to the stage. They include “Mr. Wall,” who appears nightly in a custom suit patterned after common brick, and “the ladies from North Carolina” who Trump shouted out on Friday, adding: “259 of these they’ve come to. Look at ‘em…. They’re beautiful. I don’t know where the hell their husbands are.”
The Fiserv Forum ordinarily hosts large events like NBA games, WWE wrestling events, rock concerts, and stand-up comedy. I discovered that Trump’s arena show is somewhere in between all of these, and a lot of people there seemed indifferent to whichever it was that they happened to be attending. The flag worship would be familiar enough at any of these, at least the sporting events. Perhaps the only discernible difference was “Trump Will Fix It” and “Make America Great Again” flashing on the venue’s digital screens in place of advertisements for beer and cars, as a ten-foot-tall Trump, photographed waist-up from a low angle, smiled down upon the crowd from the space between screens on the jumbotron.
Alcohol was not served at the arena, but empty beer cans overflowed trash cans and lined the periphery of a large crowd packed in for hours outside, where those hoping for the best seat had gathered since 5am, many later abandoning their tripod chairs alongside pizza boxes as so much single-use garbage. Inside, music blared at an uncomfortable volume as the mostly white crowd cuts loose, joyfully waving Trump signs, vying to appear on the jumbotron, and doing silly little dances in their seats and in the aisles to Trump’s uncanny rally playlist, which fuses the Village People with David Bowie, Ludacris, the Rolling Stones, and, dispensing with all subtlety, James Brown (feat. Luciano Pavoratti) singing “It’s a Man’s World.”
According to the itinerary I received from the Trump campaign, the main parking lot opened at 8am, followed by doors at 4pm, speakers at 6, and Trump himself at 8. Admission is always free of charge, which probably goes a long way to explain the popularity of these things. My friend R, who had come along from Chicago, and I found seats in the lower bowl, about 100 feet away from the podium with a clear view. Soon we were surrounded on all sides by the kind of “huge crowd” Trump is wont to brag about. The programming began more or less on time, featuring an opening prayer, the national anthem, and some words of strength from far-right Hungarian Internet personality Sebastian Gorka, followed by a litany of Wisconsin politicians. During his short remarks, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker declared “The Occupy Movement didn’t begin on Wall Street, it started right here!” I vaguely recalled making the same claim in a speech outside the New School’s 2017 strike and occupation, but apparently, Walker meant it as a bad thing. His predecessor, Tommy Thompson, then declared autumn to be the season when leaves change color, and Democrats change to Republicans. Given that Democrats like Kamala Harris claim to be scarcely distinguishable from Republicans, Thompson asked the crowd, why not just vote for the real thing?
Most speakers made a point to mention President Biden’s latest “gaffe,” a term the legacy media uses for those rare moments when a politician they view favorably says what they’re actually thinking. Following “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s October 27th rally at Madison Square Garden, Biden quipped: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” Sensing a possibility for righteous outrage on par with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” affair, Trump appeared in Green Bay on Wednesday sporting a reflective yellow safety vest, alongside a MAGA branded garbage truck. Meme-savvy MAGA World followed suit, and yellow vests peppered the crowd throughout the Fiserv Forum, while some fans wore trash bags. Later in the night Trump was sure to bring it up. “That’s worse than deplorable!” he quipped, beaming, to a roomful of people he has reportedly called “basement dwellers.”
The first leg of the program ended abruptly at 7pm, and at once the music sounded much louder than before. No announcement was made, but the meaning of this prompt was widely understood; much of the crowd stood up, taking the chance to stretch, visit the bathroom, or try to eke out an edible offering from the overpriced concession stands. It is difficult to understate the volume of this music from this point on. The Fiserv Forum broke out its concert arsenal, looming black monoliths made from dozens of loudspeakers, to augment its ordinary sporting arrangement and produce what the audio designer calls “arena-filling sound.” This was an understatement; as I write this at 6pm the following day, my ears, long beset by shitty music played at irresponsible volumes, are still ringing.
As the waiting game began, festivities continued, for a little while at least. A t-shirt cannon blasted Trump merch into the crowd to the soundtrack of Kid Rock’s 1998 hit “Bawitdaba,” earning the most enthusiastic audience response of the evening so far. As someone hopelessly bored by sports, I can relate to people dragged to these arenas, indifferent to whether there’s a game or a concert or just canned classic rock blaring on the public address system, trapped for long hours and desperate to find something worth liking about a gathering they have been assured is something they should, by all accounts, enjoy. In between swaying unconsciously to the music, gaping at the spectacle of the jumbotron, and searching the legion of faces for anything with any meaning worth holding onto, I asked R, who had come along from Chicago, if the Trump show was more interesting than a basketball game. “I think so,” they replied. “At least I can tell what’s going on.”
One clever addition to Trump’s usual playlist was Pat Benetar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” The July attempt on Trump’s life was a consistent theme throughout the evening’s speeches, including repeated chants of “Fight fight fight!” Images of a bloodied Trump defying his would-be assassin were splashed all over t-shirts throughout the arena, including on children who seemed scarcely out of kindergarten. MAGA merch has long teased ironic images of Trump as an action hero, such as his face superimposed on the muscular body of Sylvester Stallone playing Rambo, and Trump’s would-be assassin did for MAGA what it craves most: making memes real. Of course it further bolster’s Trump’s mystique that the official story around the shooting doesn’t make any sense, and it was almost certainly some shadowy pocket of the deep state trying to take him out. Supposing, on the contrary, that the story of the lone shooter is true, I agree with Trump that Thomas Matthew Crooks probably just heard enough people say that Trump was a fascist who planned to end American democracy, and took a perfectly sensible course of action. Regardless, Trump seems to have achieved the best of both worlds: martyrdom, without the inconvenience of dying.
The music blared as the waiting dragged on, and after an hour, even the most enthusiastic MAGA faithful were slumped into their seats for the long haul. On multiple occasions, small cohorts of Secret Service agents appeared on stage and theatrically scouted out various positions, a new level of security theater that brought much of the crowd to its feet cheering — for a few minutes, at least, before it gradually became clear that nobody was coming out, and everyone meekly returned to their seats in ones and twos. It was almost nine o’clock before there was any action at all, and this was another fake-out: even more politicians would introduce Trump.
Notable among this upper crust was Robert F. Kennedy, who emerged to fervent chants of “Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!” Wasting no time, Kennedy recounted in bitter detail how Democrats fought to keep him off ballots as a third-party candidate, and now litigate to keep him on, ever since he dropped out of the race. He made it clear that being snubbed by the Democratic establishment, despite his royal lineage, was his primary reason for supporting Trump. They make a decidedly strange pair; Kennedy’s animating issues are the poor quality of American food and the destruction of the environment, and as president, Trump boasts about affecting more deregulation than Ronald Reagan himself.
At last, the entrance theme for WWE wrestler The Undertaker announced that Trump would soon appear. I’m not exactly sure why, or how, this particular song communicated this message, but everyone understood, and leapt to their feet. Trump was coming, alright, but not before he showed us a campaign commercial for Donald Trump. The more traditional politicians among the evening’s speakers seemed to grasp the futility of rallying the MAGA hard core in this way, and urged attendees to mobilize other people who hadn’t waited all day to see Trump. But the vibe of the evening was far closer to a room full of die-hard Trumpers showing each other Trump signs in between watching campaign videos meant to convince them to vote for Trump. The whole spectacle, in short, existed for its own sake, to assert itself as a piece of reality that need not refer to anything outside of it. Is it surprising, we might say, that political rallies resemble concerts, wrestling matches, sporting events, which all resemble political rallies?
At last, Trump emerged to great fanfare, a glowing little peach-colored speck topped with an improbable yellow coiffure protruding from an oversized blue suit bisected by an overlong red tie. This was the mortal man standing before us, at least. But the jumbotron showed us Trump, who is, after all, a creation of television, and seems about as normal outside of it as Shrek walking down your block. I quickly realize that the Trump mythos is uniquely suited for sports arenas, where, after hours of lining up outside, filing through security, packing yourself into a cramped seat that requires flailing around to stand up every time someone passes by, you end up just watching most of the action on a TV screen. “It’s funny,” remarks Alex DeLarge in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, “how the colors of the real world only seem really real, when you viddy them on the screen.” He would have really loved Trump.
Greil Marcus once described later Elvis Presley, whose music is never far from rotation at Trump rallies, as having “dissolved into the presentation of his myth,” throwing away live performances because there was nothing left to say or do, and being loved all the more for it. “And so he performs from a distance,” Marcus observed, “laughing at his myth, throwing it away only to see it roar back and trap him once again.” Unwavering in their loyalty, Presley’s fans shelled out cash for one mediocre record after another, went to see his wretched films, and suffered through performances where he insisted on making it clear that he wasn’t even trying. But that’s because the music was no longer the point. “Elvis is a man whose task it is to dramatize the fact of his existence,” Marcus concluded, “he does not have to create something new.” It’s difficult to find a more apt comparison to 2024-era Trump than the late King — and here’s hoping we’re in Trump’s 1977.
Once the crowd had settled and allowed him to speak, Trump’s remarks largely fit the pattern he now refers to as “the weave.” As Democrats point to his rambling speeches as evidence of “cognitive decline,” Trump has taken to breaking the fourth wall to explain to his rally goers the genius behind his oratory method. By his own estimation, Trump speeches balance numerous interrelated threads, which he deftly weaves into a tapestry, returning to each topic after it has been enriched by the exposition of the previous one, affecting a nothing short of dialectical synthesis that damn near approaches Hegel’s absolute idea. “You end at the right time,” he sternly instructed the crowd in Milwaukee, “or else you’re rambling.” In practice, of course, he was doing exactly that.
One telling aside occurred when Trump spotted Robert Kennedy in the crowd. An hour earlier, Kennedy recounted asking God to help him end chronic disease in the United States, and claimed that God had sent him Trump as a reply. But Trump soon made it clear with whom Kennedy, a lifelong environmentalist, had really made a deal. “We love Bobby Kennedy,” he remarked. “You know I have a deal with him… I say Bobby, you take care of health, you work on those potatoes and work on those oranges… the only thing you gotta leave alone, Bobby, just leave it alone, is the liquid gold. Cause we’re gonna make a fortune. I don’t want you to tell me I can’t touch it Bobby! The only thing I’ve asked Bobby… please Bobby, don’t tell me it’s a problem, please!” It’s difficult not to wonder what, if anything, was going through Kennedy’s mind, when after weeks of summer weather in the very spot where they now sat, Trump quipped: “They talk about, the ocean will rise in 500 years one eighth of an inch. Who the hell cares?” Anyway, Kennedy ought to know better than to expect any special favors from the Lord. “Did he convert?” my partner May asked when I relayed the story. “God doesn’t talk to Catholics. He only talks to the Pope.”
A holy father in his own right, Trump is well aware that he commands a series of rituals that cohere a community around his rallies. Ellen Willis argues that the crowds at rock concerts and other mass events are collective experiments in how to negotiate individuality and collectivity, and that we can therefore interpret mass events like the Trump rally as a kind of dress rehearsal for a society formed by their participants. MAGA cohesion is quite deliberate. Acting as the de facto leaders of the rabble, the Front Row Joes initiated standing ovations throughout his speech, as Trump returned to such rival staples as collectively jeering the reporters huddled together in a pen on the floor. Beginning before dawn, the entire day was an increasingly elaborate ritual that defines an American subculture that is as distinct as it is — despite a decade of normalization — still quite strange.
The most interesting feature of the MAGA community I could discern was impossible to ignore: the widespread acceptance of the indignities of going to see Trump. As Lou Reed once sang: “He’s never early, he’s always late / First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.” Famously enough, Donald Trump owns a private jet and keeps meetings all over the world. It’s difficult to make sense of the gaping lull between the first array of speakers and the final appearance of the Don, which I have experienced at all four Trump rallies I’ve attended, and nowhere else. It seems, more than anything, to be a naked expression of power. Trump is big, and his followers are small. You wait because Trump says wait, and you enter into the MAGA community from this premise. And in case you need reminding, the dramaturgy of Trump palace intrigue is chock full of sniveling pretenders to power like Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci, and Nikki Haley, whose forced public indignities serve as cautionary tales for all who would question the big man.
MAGA is a social world modeled on the thuggery of the Sopranos, and it’s no coincidence that Trump cut his teeth working closely with the concrete industry in the tri-state area. A particularly telling moment came when Trump asked the veterans in the crowd to identify themselves. There were shockingly few; this gathering was a far cry from the “blue collar Trump voter” of 2016 lore. And when Trump asked how many times rally goers had seen him, and received some staggering numbers, the whole affair began to seem more like a niche middle-class subculture, whose anti-liberalism comes not from a proletarian animus toward elites, but the jealous middle-class resentment of “globalists” rooted in the desire for highly localized patriarchal autocracy. And who better than Trump, king of the cockroach capitalists, to lead the charge?
When Trump first appeared, a young man seated behind me shouted “That’s my dad!” It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to discern the deep transference that many in MAGA World displace onto Trump, led of course by his own validation-starved sons, who are themselves flanked by scores of lesser lights seeming to crave nothing as much as a subtle nod from the Father. One can easily image that Mr. Wall, who has heard Trump’s stump speech literally hundreds of times, sits in the front row each night consumed by no other thought than whether, or when, Trump will toss him the rare delight of recognition, which becomes all the more dear the more it is withheld. Even those lucky Trump barnacles who receive a coveted pat on the head often have to take it with a dose of ridicule. On Friday, for instance, Trump called special attention to Sebastian Gorka, thanking him for his support, before roasting him for having to stand in the VIP area because someone had taken his chair. Gorka, Trump said, was willing to go out and declare Trump was innocent — before he even knew what Trump was being accused of! Trump then led some 12,000 people in uproarious laughter at Gorka’s expense, performing a model of social organization that cannot imagine the end of a sadistic hierarchy populated by blustering bullies and groveling little worms.
At the same time, Trump makes it all seem fun; as the strange scene of the mic stand blowjob demonstrates, Trump is adept at binding his audience in a pact defined by mutual transgression. When I saw him speak to a half-full Iowa convention hall last year, Trump expressed regret that the “thousands of people outside” could not get in. Looking around the room, I couldn’t imagine that anyone present, who had milled around for hours in front of a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that clearly revealed virtually nobody outside, believed this to be true. But telling the truth, Trump demonstrates to his flock, is for suckers, who include just about anybody doing anything for any other reason than getting rich. And when Trump says bad words, or hints at a romantic life torn from the letters to Penthouse, he lets you in on a dirty little secret, as even the most devout follower can imagine themselves in his shoes, or as one of his conquests, and amid this collective sinning, everyone is forgiven. After all, Trump was sent by God. At one point on Friday, Trump grew tired of dealing with the microphone issue, and plainly declared “I’ll make you a deal: pretend you’re listening to it perfectly and I’ll come back and do another one.” The crowd went wild. Some minutes later, the technical matter seemed to have been resolved. Trump asked: “Does that sound better? Good, now I don’t have to come back.”
Above all, the MAGA community is defined by those excluded from it. If the music, dorky dancing, schlocky jokes, and postmodern post-irony of the Trump spectacle can seem gossamer, blowjobs and all, the core of MAGA is a clear line drawn around who deserves to be treated as a human being. And as Trump shifted gears from his shock jock comedy to a sustained discussion of US immigration policy, I felt a bit like someone who’d been guiltily chuckling along with Don Rickles act, until his followers began to stand up and throw the Roman salute. “Send them back!” someone shouted, to cheers, “Send them back!” came a rejoinder. Conjuring the worst fears and anxieties of an uncertain world wracked by crisis, Trump plumbed the darkest psychic recesses of American settler colonialism, in which the colonizer is rapt by fantasizes of receiving their just desserts, to cast his largely Euro-American followers as the victims of the occupation of a hostile foreign army. “The day I take the oath of office,” Trump boomed, “the migrant invasion is over and the restoration of our country begins.” Trump similarly portended his victory as “Liberation day,” to occasion “the largest deportation in American history” and freedom for “cities and towns [that] have been conquered.” Whether or not Trump understands what he is doing, he has cut to the darkest parts of the American psyche, and grafted onto it a politics that could easily lead to unapologetic genocide.
A particularly foul moment came when Trump aired a lengthy video describing in detail the sexual assault and murder of a young Texas woman by two undocumented Venezuelan migrants. The production quality was exploitative even by the most despicable standards of the true crime genre, and gradually transformed from a grieving mother’s account of a very recent family tragedy into a campaign commercial for Donald Trump. Having whipped the crowd into a near lynch mob, Trump then called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen, and received a booming ovation. This proposal — which calls to mind his 1989 advertisement in the New York Times calling for the execution of the (since exonerated) Central Park Five for the alleged rape of a white woman — offers to legally codify an assumption that binds MAGA together: the lives of Americans (cis and white, but there’s some room for negotiation here, depending on the poll numbers) are simply worth more than those of others, especially non-white people in the global south. This was the most consistent message to emerge from Trump’s ninety-minute “weave,” and it consistently received the most vociferous response from the crowd.
Of course, the video’s invocation of sexual violence, and Trump’s own emphasis on protecting women, seemed odd given that the master of ceremonies himself has bragged about perpetrating sexual assault, is widely accused of it, and has been found legally liable for engaging in it. Add this to the misogynistic shirts, Trump’s consistently sexist language about his opponents, and one supporter who spent much of the rally shouting “Fire the bitch,” “Fire ‘Kamel Toe,’” and finally, just: “Bitch!” Of course, it’s not exactly a logical contradiction that white men consider themselves entitled to make free use of women’s bodies, while simultaneously treating men of color as a threat against them, nor is it difficult to imagine why trans people, a recurring bogeyman throughout the night, pose such a threat to patriarchy by destabilizing its supposedly natural basis. But on a more basic level, I tried to imagine being a woman seated near the man yelling “Bitch!” over and over, to laughter and cheers, as the rapist on stage professed his devotion to keeping women safe. Is this a sustainable political community? How much longer will the women of MAGA put up with this? As we walked out of the arena, R asked me how many men in that room I thought had committed rape in their lives. Slightly above average, at least, I replied — especially as the seats got closer to the stage.
For whatever it’s worth, having followed this stupid spectacle far too closely for the past year, I’m confident that Kamala Harris will win tomorrow. I believe that most polls have been adjusted to overcorrect for undercounting Trump voters in 2016 and 2020. More simply, Trump’s 2016 victory was a kind of electoral perfect storm enabled by the element of surprise, and since losing in 2020 to a candidate whose two primary qualifications were having a pulse and not being Donald Trump, his preferred MAGA candidates have lost more often than not. Beginning in 2016 but accelerating dramatically during his term in office, Trump organized much of the US ruling class against him, which in this transitory moment between national and transnational capital, is no mean feat. Meanwhile, Trump’s much-vaunted base — which is probably about half of the Republican voters who constitute about half of the about half of American adults who vote — is an incredibly vocal minority, over-representing a middle-class white population that is shrinking relative to the rest of the USA. This doesn’t mean that Trump can’t win new supporters in Latino and Black communities, as he seems to have done in small numbers. But there is a real limit to the number of Americans who support Trump, and it seems to have been already reached. And while Trump is already positioning himself to challenge an electoral defeat, his supporters can make a lot of noise, cause some damage on the local level, and build networks of anti-system opposition that will likely thrive under a President Harris. But if MAGA couldn’t seize power with their guy already in the White House, I can’t picture them pulling it off when he’s stuck down in Mar-a-Lago.
While some might cheer a Harris victory as deliverance from the greater evil, and they very well might be right, it is difficult to ignore both the complete inadequacy of Democrats to address the crises they inherit, and the attendant contours of a future strain of Trumpism within their own base. How different, for instance, is MAGA’s belief in the supremacy of American lives from the bipartisan consensus around border security and the necessity of foreign intervention in the name of US strength and prosperity? Who among the Democrats disputes that a country ought to be run like a business, and that the health of “the market” is the truth test by which all policy stands or fails? And how different are the liberals presently hounding Arabs and leftists to set aside their “purity politics” (opposition to genocide in Palestine) from MAGA insisting that we can have a beautiful America if only we tear the fabric of humanity along the country’s southern border? What’s the difference between Zionism and “America First?” MAGA runs deeper than just Trump and his minions; in many ways, it’s just patriotism (a nice word for nationalism) taken to its logical conclusion. All the mindless flag waving and pathetic chants of “USA!” at this year’s Democratic National Convention showed how quickly a gathering of Democrats can turn into a Trump rally. And it’s likely that another decade or so of automation and outsourcing in the industries that employ Harris’s base, including just about any job you can currently do from home, will strip away the liberal niceties of that movement very quickly and reveal the racism, settler colonialism, and national chauvinism that structure most American institutions, including the woke ones.
Trump concluded his remarks at the Fiserv Forum by invoking a popular theme of recent rallies: he didn’t have to be there at all. “I could have those waves just smacking me in the face,” he waxed, “beautiful salt water waves all over the place, I got waves all over the place, lots of places with lots of waves… probably more than anybody. But if I had my choice, I’d rather be here, with a broken down shit microphone in Wisconsin.” Of course, Trump desperately needed to be right there in Milwaukee — if he loses this election, which he probably will, he could very well go to prison.
By contrast, I didn’t have to be there; in fact, I only caught this memorable declaration on YouTube, safely back at home. As Trump rambled on into his second hour about Latino gangs and the brown menace facing pretty white girls, and the warm, friendly people around me were whipped into an ugly frenzy, I had begun to lose my stomach. I’d previously seen people cheering for Trump saying all kinds of awful things, but there was something different about the sheer enormity of this setting, the sea of matching red hats, the gigantic Trump on the jumbotron, and MAGA slogans splashed on electronic screens throughout the arena, that seamlessly bridged the banal rituals of an ordinary American friday night into to a mass spectacle I can only describe as fascist. The scariest part was, it really didn’t take much to get there. And Donald Trump can only take so much blame; the potential was already there waiting, and is all around us in America, every day.
R tapped me and whispered that I could stay as long as I wanted, but they’d be outside. The look on their face expressed something I was feeling too. By that point, I’d spent about fifteen minutes watching the famous trickle that accompanies the second half of Trump’s speeches, and recalled Rosa Luxemberg’s dictum: “When the people march, we march.” So I bade farewell to the angry little peach orb and left him to ramble on, convinced that I had learned all I could from attending Trump rallies.
After all, how can he possibly do anything new?
Postscript 11/13: Well, there goes my career as a political Nostradamus. In my defense, Trump in fact received roughly the same amount of votes last week as he did in 2020. What I failed to anticipate was the cratering of support for the Democrats, to the tune of some 12 million voters. Simply not being Trump, which was Joe Biden’s only virtue, is no longer enough. What does this all mean? On the eve of the election, I spoke for almost two hours with a friend, the inimitable Boston musician Rob Lind, whose insights into the dark heart of American society run deep. “I think we both have enough wisdom,” Rob concluded, “to admit that we don’t know what the fuck is going on.” For now, I’ll be leaving it there.