By dawn the temperature had fallen dramatically, and it was now forty-two degrees with strong, gusty winds. We had all taken breaks during the night, retreating to our hotel rooms or cars, except Thompson, who was still completely swaddled, head to toe, in a sleeping bag in his camp chair. I’d left about 11:30 p.m., Snowden not long after, and now he was freshly showered and shaved and smelling good, with gold cuff links peeking out of his camel-hair overcoat. “I’m a mini Trump,” he said, sipping a cup of coffee. “I ran for Congress once, and that’s enough. I like to tell it like it is too much. And that’s what Trump does. Speaks his mind and in a language that’s not customary for people to hear. I like the fact that when Trump announced, he said one of the things that is wrecking America is political correctness, because it’s making everyone afraid.”
Somehow, we started talking about houses and mortgages—“I’ve had thirteen primary residences,” said Snowden—and Thompson stirred and poked his head out of his sleeping bag and told us about his father, a pastor, who lived in a parsonage for twenty years. “He was fucked,” Thompson said. “He had built up no equity.”
“Oh my God!” said Snowden. “You’re a liberal! Don’t get me started. You’re making me mad! No one made him become a pastor and live for free for twenty years. This cradle-to-grave bullshit is too much. It was his choice!”
There was an uncomfortable silence for a few minutes.
Snowden picked up with the politics again. “First rally I ever went to was Goldwater, September 5, 1964. New York, Labor Day weekend, and that was when the presidential campaigns kicked off in those days. There were twenty thousand that day, and that was two months before the election. But this is different. It’s like nothing else.”
“Jesus was born on September 11,” said Thompson. “The Feast of Trumpets. That was the Gregorian calendar.”
“So what does that equate to today?”
“That date, not everyone would come to that conclusion,” Thompson said. “But a lot of things happened on that date.”
“I went to a Biden rally this summer,” Snowden went on. “I left my house and fifty-five minutes later I was there with ninety-five people. It was in the IBEW Hall and was fifty years to the day after the landing on the moon, July 20, 1969. Look!” He showed pictures of Biden talking to people at cafeteria tables. “I respect him, but it was really kind of pathetic. I mean, look, you call that a rally? He had forty-six years of service in the Senate and I can’t believe his wife let him run for office.”
Another gust of wind. The temperature had fallen another three degrees. We still had thirty-three hours to go until Trump’s speech. At 10:00 a.m. a man wearing a black cowboy hat, Skeches trail shoes, baggy blue jeans, and pulling a big roller suitcase strode into our little circle. I recognized him: the frenetic-looking guy with the iPad and the trump tweets matter T-shirts from Dallas. “Hi!” he said, thrusting out his hand. “Gale Roberts. I’m from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I’m here representing some very wealthy people in Wyoming whose names I cannot reveal.”
“Welcome!” said Snowden. “You’re number seven.”
“I bought a domain name two years ago and I have trump tweets matter and I’m going to every rally. Let’s saddle up! We’re going to have some fun! I love God and I love life!”
“Sadly,” said Snowden in an aside to me, “it’s not like it used to be. People are getting quite aggressive.”
“Why are you coming to the rallies?” Thompson asked Roberts.
“My daughter is twenty-eight years old and she’s never spoken a word. We are all special. I’m here to heal our nation. We need to resist hate, judgment, and get with Jesus. I just want everyone to get along. The guys sponsoring me, they’re not millionaires, but billionaires. Goldman Sachs–type people. Known them for twenty-six years.” He opened his briefcase and started pulling out black trump tweets matter T-shirts, which he handed around, and then all kinds of merchandise, especially beer cozies, that pictured bizarre scenes like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer hanging from a meat hook and Santa wearing his red nose. I didn’t get it. In fact, I didn’t get most of what Gale Roberts did and said, and he said a lot, for weeks and weeks, from rally to rally. He was smart and kind, but everything was a burst of voltage that was hard to contain and even harder to understand. The strangest thing was, I liked him, got to be friends with him; like Snowden he cracked me up. “My other two daughters are liberals and my wife is a liberal and they think I’m screwed up,” he said.
“This is my fourth rally in a month,” said Snowden. “I’m going to double it this year, try for a hundred and fifty.”
Since I was number six and Roberts was number seven, we were sitting close, and he turned to me. “My life is wild,” he said. “I found the Seven Cities of Cibola. Look it up. Rivers of gold. One room alone has over fourteen thousand square feet of gold. Gold bars.”
“Do you have it?” I said.
“Oh no,” he said. “I’m not touching it. It’s for humanity.”
In late morning security forced us to move to the other side of the arena, to a large parking lot where the jumbotron and zigzagging fencing were going up. The wind was now biting, and as we lined our chairs along a chain-link fence Gale Roberts threw up the first tent. Rick Frazier, from St. Marys, Ohio, number three in line, was excited; he’d been exchanging texts with a television producer from the CBC. “She’s coming in from Memphis and should be here soon,” he said. Just then up walked a reporter and cameraman from the local TV station. “Hey! You guys here for the rally? I want to talk to you. I love the president. My daughter will be here, she’s twenty-seven, a conservative Christian, and she should be on Fox News. Who wants to do a quick interview? Not all the media is on the other side!” Snowden jumped up and started his spiel: “I’m from Las Vegas and this is my fifty-eighth rally and . . .”
I hunkered down in my chair. It got colder. I paced. I sat in my car with the heat blasting to get warm as the hours ticked by. At 2:00 p.m. someone proposed lunch. Snowden said he knew a place, and we piled into two cars and a few minutes later he, Gale Roberts, Dave Thompson, Rick Frazer, Rich Hardings, and I were sitting around a table in a bar with exposed brick walls. We were an odd-looking bunch, by any measure—Snowden in his suit and tie and gold cuff links; Roberts in his big black Stetson; Thompson in his custom god wins baseball hat and zip-up fleece; Rick and Rich from Ohio in full MAGA regalia, hats, and sweatshirts. “I always scope out the best places,” said Snowden. “This is nice, right?”
“Well aren’t you lovely,” said Roberts, when the waitress appeared, dressed, since it was Halloween, as a princess-genie with over-kohled eyes, a gold loop in her pierced lip, and a certain I’ve-heard-it-all-before fatigue. “See, I can say that,” he said, “because it comes from my heart and not my lips.”
Dave was sitting next to me, and I asked him why he was going to so many rallies. “Honestly,” he said, “I haven’t been doing much.” He told me how he’d been exhausted, so tired he could barely function, and how Trump rallies had reinvigorated him. “I lived outside of Los Angeles, in Santa Monica, and by 2005 I was forty-three years old and I had nine houses and franchises and everything was really good. Like I was living the dream. Three kids and a wife, and it’s funny because I was talking to God and kind of taking inventory and I said I sometimes wonder if I value the Earth, this world, too much, and I prayed that he would talk to me and show me if that was true.
“And then boom, the recession hit and the bankruptcies came and it was too much for me. . . .” I was listening to him, looking into his eyes, and I saw them start to water. His voice quavered and there was a slight, awkward pause. “It’s not sad,” he said, “just emotional and humbling. But the bottom line is that we had nothing.” Their homes were repossessed, and without a penny they did a kind of reverse Beverly Hillbillies, moving from Santa Monica to a doublewide trailer on a relative’s property in Arkansas. “We spent three years there. It was good. My boys got outside and learned to hunt, though it was hard on my daughter, who was the oldest and liked nice things.” When his wife eventually got a job at the University of Texas near Dallas, they moved there, and now Thompson was trying to start up the real estate business again, but it was tough. “I’m just burned out or something.”
Thompson took a bite out of his French fries, and I turned to Roberts and asked him what he did for work back in Wyoming. I didn’t understand his answer, and I asked again. He said, well, he and his wife did whatever they could. “Some carpentry. Some elk hunting guiding.” Something about marketing—it was always hard to get a straight answer out of him—and he segued right into the Seven Cities of Cibola again. “Fourteen thousand square feet of gold. I’ve seen it. I’ve stood on it. But I didn’t take a gram. The billionaires. The corruption. Look.” He flicked a finger across his iPad and showed me Google-like satellite map images of the earth marked with gold, geometric shapes and zigzagging orange pathways, none of which made any sense to me. “These are all the tunnels. These squares and shapes are gold deposits hidden by the Indians; see, there are these volcanic tubes, and the lava took the gold to the bottom.”
I had wanted to pierce the inner sanctum of the most fervent Trump supporters, and now that I had, it seemed like a joke, a parody, a skit from Saturday Night Live—not just Roberts, but the whole thing, all of us itinerant camp followers, a traveling circus sideshow. In a way they all seemed too extreme to represent a good cross-section of Trump’s supporters. But that wasn’t true. They were only slightly exaggerated versions of archetypes I came across repeatedly. Thompson and Roberts had experienced profound loss. The financial collapse took everything from Thompson—his job, his fortune, his houses, all gone—and then in a final turn of the screw, his wife was the one lifting them up again, which meant he’d suffered complete emasculation. Roberts and his wife had refused since their daughter’s birth to institutionalize her, and they bore what must have been a punishing, never-ending task, no matter how filled with love it was. And he, too, I would learn, had lost a small fortune to hustlers, and was twin to a brother who was a millionaire. They had grievances, resentments, were desperately flailing about like drowning men for a savior. Snowden, on the other hand, was just a classic Goldwater Republican who wanted to be free to make money through whatever means necessary; he had never voted for a Democrat and never would, and he loved politics like sport. Rick and Rich from Ohio were just blue-collar guys who’d prospered, but who saw their aging, rusting town hollowed out by Walmart, and recognized in the accompanying highway bypass the sun setting on their whole world. They’d glommed on to Trump’s disingenuous support of working men and women, and who could fault them for wanting to win, win, win again and bask in the glory days of American manufacturing? And all of them loved the social aspect of the rallies, the sitting here at lunch with new friends and new purpose. Me, I went with it; there was nothing else to do but nod yes and enjoy the company.
Snowden grabbed the check. With the prospect of another night out in the cold looming, Rich Hardings and I drove to Walmart for some warmer clothes. Hardings, sixty-eight, was a retired union pipefitter and lifelong Democrat who’d spent forty-five years in the St. Marys, Ohio, Goodyear plant. “Well, first it was Goodyear and then Continental Tire bought it out. Were maybe twenty-six hundred when I started there and now, I don’t know, maybe four to six hundred total.” Trump blamed so much of the nation’s shrinking industrial jobs on globalism and China, but Hardings succinctly articulated a much less spoken truth. “There used to be so many small parts to make a big part, but now there are just fewer parts, so it takes a lot fewer people.” The union, he said, “always told us to vote for the Democrats, so we voted for the Democrats. But what did they do for us?”
Just before dusk the line had grown to forty or so under the cover of wall-less festival tents, and an hour after that it had reached fifty, winding along the fence and into the parking lot behind us. A vendor of MAGA gear arrived and dragged out a grill and started cooking hot dogs, which he handed out to anyone who wanted one, and three women in insulated, camouflage-colored coveralls huddled under blankets and drank martinis. I saw Gene Huber talking into his phone, live to his fans on Periscope. “When you’re online with these people for hours upon hours, it’s like we’ve known each other for a long time, like forever!”
I overheard a woman standing in a tent talking to a TV camera and reporter: “The rallies is not for us,” she said. “It’s to connect him to us. ’Cause Washington is not a fun place to be, is it? I can honestly tell you, I have never loved a president the way I love him. I love this man. It’s deep. Heartfelt. I would fight you for him. He is standing up for us, which is something no other politician has ever done. They stand up and lie to our faces. They promise you all this stuff they’re gonna do when they get in office, and they don’t do it. And my love isn’t about the economy. It’s cleaning up the swamp. Cleaning up the corruption that has gone on in our government for so long.”
“I keep talking about how we should all get along,” Gale Roberts said to me. “Some talk it, I live it.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You just showed us beer cozies with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer hanging on a meat hook!” He laughed and then segued into the Seven Cities of Cibola again. “I thought that anyone could do anything and bring justice in this country, so I filed a pro se case in New Mexico,” he said. “The gold is up on Black Mesa near Española.” I was trying my best to follow along as he took out his iPad. “Look,” he said. “Cibola is well documented. The enslaved Indians got ingots for the Illuminati in the 1800s. You can’t take an object unless you’re an archaeologist with a Ph.D., then you can take it on behalf of people and put it in a “museum” in your house. The landowner and archaeologists turned on us and I couldn’t understand why. I thought I could do it pro se, but found out if you’re a billionaire you can do anything in this country. Okay, here’s the chamber before—see, it’s filled with gold bars and then after, after the billionaire emptied it. Twenty billion in gold and he stole it and it’s a national disgrace. It’s not a life I wanted to live, but here I am. Look,” he said, thumbing through iPad pics and showing me a jumble of rocks on a hillside, one of which was vaguely pyramidical with a tuft of grass at its base. “This is the eye. You know, the all-seeing eye, the one that’s on the dollar bill. The Illuminati put all this back in there in the 1800s. Okay, look: Cortez came and enslaved the Indians and made them mine for gold for three hundred fifty years for the Jesuits. Twenty percent went to the Vatican.”
At some point Roberts got distracted, and Snowden and I snuck off to the best restaurant in Tupelo. Over a filet and glass of good red I told him the story of growing up liberal in D.C.; of seeing Kennedy’s caisson and Shriver’s concession speech, of my one disastrous date with the daughter of Oklahoma congressman and noted playboy Ted Risenhoover. I didn’t actually say I was a liberal, just that my parents had been, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He was so in love with American politics, with its pomp and pageantry and arcana, and had such command over dates, that an intimate dinner with the mayor of the line was an unexpected pleasure.
After dinner I went back to my room and Googled Gale Roberts. There he was, in a well-tailored brown suit, blue tie, and white shirt, looking completely sane and respectable, posing next to his wheelchair-bound daughter, Sydney, at a press conference against cuts in funding for disability programs in Wyoming back in 2013. And there he was at Trump rallies in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware, in 2016 wearing his black Stetson, a black T-shirt with Hillary Clinton’s famous quote, at this point what does it really matter, and, most impressively, dragging a long “tail” of black cloth printed with “Hillary’s Tail of LIES.” He had, it turned out, been doing odd stunts as far back as 2006. According to a press release,1 “A fly-fishing cowboy from Jackson Hole, Wyoming is preparing a trek across America with a sculpture of the Constitution and the American Bald Eagle. Drift boat in tow, this country boy is headed for Washington DC. ‘When I get to New York City I’m going to float down the Hudson River into New York Bay and around Liberty Island,’ Roberts said.”
And I found two newspaper2 stories that more clearly summed up the story Roberts was so desperately trying to tell me. In short, apparently Roberts had been a professional fly-fishing and horseback guide looking for gold in Arizona when he had been contracted by a group of treasure hunters, some of whom (or most of whom) appeared to be a dubious group of grifters, to locate vaults of buried gold and treasure on the New Mexico property of one Richard Cook. Roberts had agreed to a joint venture with them, investing some $120,000 of his own money. Gold and treasure had been found in one of the vaults, according to Roberts, but then in a series of conspiracies had been excavated and spirited away in secret to prevent him from receiving his share. Roberts had gone after Cook, displaying “increasingly adamant, bizarre behavior,” according to court documents, which led Cook to file a restraining order against Roberts, which had been granted by the judge. “I am crazy—I’ll own up to that,” Roberts told the Santa Fe New Mexican, admitting that his letter to Cook had been “intense.” In 2018 Roberts filed a pro se suit—that is, he did it without a lawyer—against Cook, his estate, and pretty much everyone who’d been involved in the gold hunt. He was still awaiting resolution. None of which, I realized, was particularly clarifying, but at least I knew Gale Roberts was his real name and that he did indeed have a disabled daughter and believed he’d found gold on Black Mesa. Still, the central question—was Gale Roberts insane or just a little wacky?—went unanswered.
I burrowed under my covers, hoping for a few hours of sleep to steel myself for another day.