By 10:00 a.m. the jumbotron was beginning its third loop, and besides Lara Trump we were subjected to Eric Trump and Don Junior and Jared Kushner and Ivanka, like a royal family, the Hapsburgs or the Romanovs perhaps, or maybe the Corleones, when I heard Parscale say how much a “sacrifice” the job was “for the entire Trump family.” The audacity! I had to get up and walk and ran into a kindly looking man in black jeans and a U.S.A. T-shirt, and we perched on a wall under the giant screen. Frank was from Iran, he told me, originally a lawyer and lately a schoolteacher, and when I told him I was a writer he said, “I’ve written a book!,” which he whipped out and handed to me. I opened the slim paperback and started reading and quickly realized it was nonsensical. Something about the blood and the hole in the bottom of the body and how pooping was best done with no pants. There was a chapter about turning our seven-day weeks into eight-day weeks, and after listening to so much bullshit, I lost myself and all sense of kindness and empathy. I handed back the book and looked him in the eye and said, “This is total and complete bullshit. I have no idea what you are talking about. It’s gobbledygook.”
He smiled, one of those of-course-you-think-that-you-narrow-minded-idiot smiles, and tried to explain. The toxins in the blood and something about the bones and I said, “Who says? Who told you that?”
“Scientists,” he said.
“No!” I said, feeling hot, flushed, angry. “No scientists have ever said that. None. And you? What do you know?”
“I have thought a lot about it,” he said, and started opining about life coming from rocks and the nine phases of something else and if you put two rocks on the ground and then put bricks on top of them there will be life there.
“What? That’s not true! That’s not where life comes from! This country needs facts! Science. The Enlightenment!” I raged and I just couldn’t stand it anymore and jumped off the wall and stormed off, my heart pounding in my chest. It was so crazy I wanted to scream. Science and reason had revolutionized our lives and our understandings of the universe and our place within in. We didn’t burn witches any more or torture heretics on racks or believe in necromancy or phrenology; genetics proved we were all descendants from Homo sapiens who came out of Africa. Yet people all over America were being induced by cynical politicians and talk-show hosts and Fox News to return to the Middle Ages, to medieval thought, as if the last six hundred years hadn’t even taken place. What was the difference between a twenty-first-century American who believed in the Tribulation and that global warming was a hoax and a fifteenth-century priest who proclaimed that Joan of Arc was possessed by the devil? Nothing. There was no difference at all.
I ran into Christine Howard in line at the taco food truck just outside the corral. She was about my age, and she seemed open and bright-eyed and calm, wearing ripped blue jeans and a pink Women for Trump sweatshirt. She had driven down from Allen, and she’d lived all over the United States, including Washington, D.C. Even more interesting, she loved to travel, had been to India and Haiti. She dreamed about retiring to a houseboat on the Sacramento River delta in California. “For a really long time, conservative voices have been squelched,” she said. “We’re told we’re racists and that we hate Islam. So much divisiveness. When Obama came into office there was so much hope, but I’m fifty-eight years old and I’ve never seen so much racial division. That was heartbreaking to me. I think there are forces and people that want us divided. All these people at the rallies—they feel like they’re in a place they can have their voice and have fun without getting beaten up, and that’s why the rallies are so big. Here I see I’m not alone, that I’m not the only person who thinks this way.
“I was a registered Democrat until 2010. I worked for Barack Obama and I was so disgusted by his first term and oh my God. When he talked about hope and change and he’d be transparent, but nothing was transparent. He apologized for America. Of course we knew where Osama bin Laden was; how many six-foot five-inch guys are walking around Pakistan and Islamabad? I think Bush knew where he was, too. Now I’m a registered Republican. I’m from California and my grandfather was a Kennedy Democrat, but if he was alive today he’d be a Republican. The Democratic Party today, I don’t recognize it. All I see is socialism.”
The idea of Obama being divisive notwithstanding, Howard seemed more normal and more informed than most others I’d met, and I said that what amazed me was the number of deep conspiracy believers I’d talked to. She nodded and laughed and then said, “Well, I don’t know ninety-nine people who have committed suicide, do you?” which I didn’t get at first, until I realized she was referring to Hillary Clinton and theories that she and her husband had presided over Vince Foster’s death, among many others. I thought she was joking, but then she said: “Have you heard about JFK Junior? They say he was going to run for the Senate in New York, so she bombed his plane. I don’t know about that, but I believe she’d kill to win. Absolutely. Want me to send you my file on Vince Foster? She and Podesta make me sick. That film of Podesta in the tunnels is sick.”