By 3:45 p.m. I was inside the arena with a great seat, just a couple of rows off the floor, right near the stage, and it was a repeat of Minneapolis the week before. The same songs evoking the same big feelings. The same human waves and swaying people holding up their cell phone torchlights and same Village People “YMCA” pantomiming. The very same private security guards. Same bright lights. Same press corral. Even some of the people were the same: down on the floor, pressed against the rail, was Rick Snowden in his suit, smiling, and I caught his beaming eye and he waved. There was Dave Thompson, too, and that loud guy with the black Stetson and the trump tweets matter T-shirt. Somehow, I’d relinked with Christine Howard, and she was sitting next to me. Around 5:00 p.m. Brad Parscale emerged, walked to the podium, and spewed dire warnings about the Democrats doing away with oil and gas and making your heating bill $2,500 a month. “The president is inbound and he’s in a very good mood. You got an hour. The president is on fire tonight. He’s got a lot of good news to share.”
“I’m surprised that the lights are always so bright,” I said to Christine.
“It makes it feel like church,” she said. “There’s a spirit of unity here that you would experience in church.
“You know,” she said, “Hillary Clinton was nasty and arrogant. What she said to the coal miners. These Democrats stand up and say they’re going to eliminate fracking and fossil fuels, but that is people’s livelihoods! People don’t like hearing you’re going to take away their livelihoods, your gun, and then put taxes on your churches next.”
Howard had a point. Elizabeth Warren had recently said that, if elected, she’d ban fracking on day one. And that very week in Texas, Beto O’Rourke said he supported revoking the tax-exempt status of any religious institution that didn’t approve of same-sex marriage, and that he thought military-style assault weapons ought to be banned. To me, fracking was clearly horrible for the environment; no one needed an AR-15 to hunt with or to protect their home; and the state shouldn’t subsidize discrimination. But I could empathize; there were tens of millions of Americans whose lives had been built on the extraction of coal and oil and natural gas, and lots of good, law-abiding citizens loved their guns, and the Catholic Church alone, with its tens of millions of parishioners—never mind the dozens of evangelical Protestant denominations—still hadn’t fully accepted LGBTQ people. You had to be sensitive about threatening people’s jobs or their most cherished beliefs.
The moment Trump came out—during Lee Greenwood’s song and after “Macho Man,” as usual—he seized on those very ideas, and in his telling, it was frightening. The end-times were nigh. Just three minutes and thirty seconds in, he attacked the “radical,” “crazy” Democrats. “At stake in this fight is the survival of American democracy itself and don’t kid yourself, that’s what they want. They are destroying this country, but we will never let it happen. . . .
“They want to indoctrinate our children1 and teach them that America is a sinful, wicked nation.
“They want to disarm law-abiding citizens, they want to take your guns away—”
BOOOO! BOOOO!
“—and they want far-left judges to shred our Constitution.
“They want to tear down symbols of faith and drive Christians and religious believers from the public square. They want to silence your voices on social media and they want the government to censor, muzzle, and shut down conservative voices. If they didn’t hate our country, they wouldn’t be doing this to our country.
“We’re fighting a campaign against leftists, socialists, and globalists who want to return to reckless wars, open borders, rampant crime, and totally disastrous one-way trade deals.”
He was relentless. I thought of Christine Howard’s words about the bright lights and this being church, and I realized Trump was a preacher and this was a fundamentalist revival. The lights and the aesthetics—the same at every rally I’d attend—were potent icons to American churchgoers, but instead of the peril of losing our souls to Satan, the peril was the Democrats, and the demons were the news media, immigrants, and Muslims. “Look at all those cameras,” shouted Trump. “Do you believe it? Look at all those red lights, don’t worry, I won’t say anything bad about your network. Because a lot of times I get ready to do a number on these phony networks. And you know, you see those red lights go off, off, off, off. They don’t want their viewers to see it.”
BOOO! BOOO!
It was one of his signature lines, repeated at nearly every rally—that the cameras displayed lights only when they were recording. It was a lie and Trump knew it, had been told it wasn’t true—such lights did not exist, and no cameraman would ever shut his machine off midrally if for no other reason than should something happen—an assassination attempt, an off-color remark—history required its capture.
“But no matter how hard [the media] try, they will fail, because the people of Texas and the people of America will never surrender our freedom to those people right there.”
USA! USA! USA! USA!
“We will stand strong for family, faith, God, and for our country. I will never allow the federal government to be used to punish Americans for their religious beliefs, and I will never allow the IRS to be used as a political weapon. . . . The radical left tolerates no dissent, it permits no opposition, it accepts no compromise.
“These people are crazy and it has absolutely no respect for the will of the American people.
“They come after me, but what they’re really doing is they’re coming after the Republican Party, and what they’re really, really doing is they’re coming after . . . you.”
Once again, as in Minneapolis, I felt his strength and his power, even though it was the last thing I wanted to feel. Then he did something he did at every rally, but that hadn’t meant anything to me in Minneapolis. He introduced the members of the Texas GOP delegation. Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn. House Republicans Louie Gohmert, Kay Granger, Randy Weber, John Ratliff, Brian Babbin, Lance Gooden, Ron Wright. There was Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry.
For every name he made a little comment, told a little story.
Randy Webber was “very loyal.”
Brian Babbin “I saw on television last night defending me, brilliantly defending me.”
Ross was “a smart guy, one of the legends of Wall Street.”
Rick Perry, “he was so tough. He was nasty, man—boy, he hit me during the campaign. I said that guy’s ruthless and when it was sort of over, there was nobody more gracious, and I called him, I made him secretary of energy.”
The political leaders of Texas were all there. They had all flown in from Washington, and now he was calling them out, singling them out, praising them—praising their loyalty, especially, and reminding them of his victory over them, his conquest, before twenty-two thousand screaming fans who had waited hours and hours, some of them days, to see him, and only him. They chanted his name and screamed “I LOVE YOU,” and now Trump was dangling these pols in front of his adoring mob. Standing over them, literally, as he called them out from the raised podium and they waved from below. Take away the suits and the expensive haircuts and he might have been a savage Viking warlord in a bearskin standing over defeated subjects whose lives he’d spared. It anointed them even as it threatened, for he who could give his blessing could take it away. At that moment I saw the rallies in an entirely new context. It happened in Kentucky and Mississippi and Florida and Pennsylvania, over hundreds of rallies in one arena after another. Every few days, he would dangle the politicians who could impeach him or threaten him in front of that hungry mob. If you wondered why no senator would challenge him, why no one would speak up, there it was.
What he did with Ted Cruz, though, really explained so much about Trump politically, but also personally. As he did every rally, Trump loved to recall the 2016 election and his resounding victory, maybe the greatest victory ever in American politics, as he liked to say. But in his rambling stories he was anything but rambling, and in Dallas he had a point to make about his former rival. “When I had to compete with Ted Cruz, that was brutal. You know he’s, he was the National Debate Champion, a story I’ve never told. I never did that before, right, I ran for office. All of a sudden, I’m supposed to be debating tomorrow night. I never debated, my whole life has been a debate, but I never debated like with a podium, and this and that. And I hired a debate coach . . . and they give me the first card, Ted Cruz, and it says National Debate Champion from Princeton. Is that right? And then National Debate Champion from Harvard. I said to my wife, First Lady, potentially, I said, my potential First Lady, I got a problem. I said some of these guys are OK, they were only president of the class, almost all of them ran for president of the class, I never did, I like playing baseball better. It’s true. But I said, I said, Melania, and I called Ivanka, I called my kids. I said I got a problem, Ted Cruz was the National Debate—he was the number one guy in college. He was the number one guy in law school. How the hell do I beat a guy that’s good at debating? But we came out okay, Ted. And Ted, Ted was tough, smart as hell and tough, tough, good man, but it is true. The first card I looked at, seriously, was Ted Cruz and he was—he was literally, I mean, National Debate—he was the best in all of college and in law school and he’s a talented guy.”
But Trump beat him. Destroyed him. Cruz was forced to stand below him in his own state as Trump told the story, had to smile and wave and laugh it off and be good-natured about it. It was deliberate humiliation. There was no other word for it. Trump was just a neophyte, not a politician, had never debated, and yet he’d destroyed the Princeton or was it Harvard debate champion, and he could and would do it again in a heartbeat to anyone who got in his way. “The autocrat’s only true subject2 is the man who will let himself be killed by him,” writes Elias Canetti in his brilliant Crowds and Power. “This is the final proof of obedience and it is always the same.”
Listening to Trump eviscerate Cruz caused a shock of recognition. I had been reading Canetti, and there it was, as if he’d been right next to me at the rally, as if he’d met and studied Trump himself. “The moment of survival3 is the moment of power. . . . This moment of confronting the man he has killed fills the survivor with a special kind of strength. There is nothing that can be compared with it, and there is no moment which more demands repetition.”
Whether it was beating Cruz or Hillary Clinton or firing John Kelly or John Bolton or Rex Tillerson, Trump was engaged in a constant battle, killing anyone who opposed him, one after another. He raised himself up by standing on the carcasses of his defeated enemies.
“The satisfaction in survival,”4 writes Canetti, “which is a kind of pleasure, can become a dangerous and insatiable passion. It feeds on its occasions. The larger and more frequent the heaps of dead which a survivor confronts, the stronger and more insistent becomes his need for them. . . .
“The sense of this danger5 is always alert in a ruler. . . . He needs executions from time to time and, the more his fears increase, the more he needs them. His most dependable, one might say his truest, subjects are those he has sent to their deaths. For, from every execution for which he is responsible, some strength accrues to him . . . with each survival he grows stronger.”
As I watched Trump lord it over Cruz and all the others he had vanquished since descending that escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, it became clear that his insecurity was so deep that if he wasn’t fighting and winning, killing, he was nothing. He would be powerless in his own eyes. It was only through constant insult and struggle and victory that he defined himself to himself.
“The old, that is those men6 who are still alive after the lapse of a certain number of years,” writes Canetti, “enjoy great authority. . . . Not only do the old know more, having gained experience in a great variety of situations, but the fact that they are still alive shows that they have proved themselves. To emerge unscathed from all the dangers of war, hunting and accident they must have been lucky; and with every escape their prestige will have grown. . . . The old are not only alive, but are still alive.”
But Trump had never experienced the dangers of war, not real war with bombs going off and real dead bodies of people who might even be real friends. He had never been poor, never built a business up from scratch without his father’s millions. He had never been faithful to a wife. He had cheated at everything, from his taxes to all three of his marriages. And the worst part of it was, he hadn’t even necessarily won the presidency on his own. He had cheated at that, too, with the help of Michael Cohen to hide his infidelities. And gnawing at every waking moment, at every mention of Robert Mueller, was the knowledge, deep inside him, that he might not even have been president without help from Moscow—and even then had lost the popular vote. So he wasn’t like that warrior who had survived by the heads he’d taken in many difficult battles or the wise counsel he’d displayed. He was a fraud, a fake, and he knew it, would always know it—you can never hide from yourself; those rivers run deep and forever—and it explained why he hated people like Jeff Bezos and John McCain with such a passion. They were genuine. Authentic. A self-made billionaire, a real “very stable genius” (at least in business), and a real war hero who could fly a jet fighter and endure years of torture in service to his country. But Donald Trump was a cheat and he knew that, and so the man who had achieved it all by subterfuge needed everyone else to have cheated, too. It explained why Barack Obama wasn’t American and Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi were corrupt. He was only real if they cheated just as he had, and he knew it.
That was his whole problem. He was so empty that surviving once was never enough. Victory was a momentary high before it all drained out of him. He had to kill and kill again and again to survive; survival was everything. The only thing. Which was why he was so dangerous, and why he would stop at nothing—had to stop at nothing—to keep killing and surviving.