I managed to pull myself out of bed around 7:00 a.m. on rally day, still wheezing. At Rupp Arena in downtown Lexington, the line already stretched for hundreds of yards across a parking lot. But now, just three days after Tupelo, I was texting with Rick Frazier and Gale Roberts and Rick Snowden, and though I’d plunked my chair down early in the afternoon of the day before, they’d promised to save my place.
I found a couple of tents at the head of the line, one belonging to Gale, another to Randall Thom. Things were tense. “Man, I was here first, hours before he was, but then he just came in and set up his tent in front of mine like he owned the place,” Roberts said.
Where Thom went, so did controversy. And noise. And chaos, for Thom was running amok, yelling, hooting, riding an electric scooter up and down the parking lot holding a large Trump flag. He was like a 250-pound two-year-old, and he and Gale had almost come to blows over their place in line.
The term “deplorable” was a perfect description of Randall Thom, and the real mystery was why the Secret Service let him get anywhere near the president. After he’d been arrested1 for disorderly conduct at an Elizabeth Warren rally in January 2019, it was revealed that he had been convicted seventy-two times for assorted crimes, including possession and sale of controlled substances, felony theft, check forgery, drunk driving, hit-and-run, driving without a license (eleven times), and failure to pay child support. He had even been charged twice while a U.S. Marine. He had been, by his own admission, “a deep, deep crack addict.”
The story of his dog2 was a classic Trumpian tale of social media hysterics, fantasy, and self-pitying victimization. Thom named the dog, an Alaskan Malamute, Donald Trump, and just as the Democrats hated Donald Trump the president and tried to take him down through the whole Russia hoax, so Thom’s neighbor, a Democrat, hated the dog Donald Trump just because of his name and gunned him down. This, according to the GoFundMe page that raised nearly eight times the $500 goal for Thom as it rocketed around the internet and was shared more than 5,500 times, while Donald Trump the dog “lay shot and bled out and then froze to death all alone in a farmer’s field” as Thom himself was undertaking his civic duty of protesting Amy Klobuchar some three hours away. “Randall is our presidents [sic] greatest supporter and has been to over 40 rallies and [is] the founding member of the world famous Front Row Joes,” read the fund-raising appeal. There was even a YouTube video titled The Murder of Donald Trump.
All this unleashed a blizzard of threats from unhinged Trump supporters, which eventually became too much for the Jackson County, Minnesota, sheriff’s department. It issued a press release3 with the unvarnished truth: “Over about the past 3 years, several neighbors to Mr. Randall Thom have reported 14 prior incidents to law enforcement regarding Mr. Thom’s dogs. They include dogs running at large on a roadway, running at large in a county park, running at large onto neighbor’s private property, biting a person who required medical attention, attacking pet dogs, killing goats, killing chickens, killing turkeys, chasing cattle, and chasing deer. All of these incidents have been reported and investigated by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office. As a result, two Potentially Dangerous Dog Notifications have been served on Mr. Thom regarding two of his dogs. Mr. Thom also currently has pending misdemeanor charges from incidents related to his dogs.’” The sheriff’s department also stated that the neighbor who shot Donald Trump the dog was “legally protecting their livestock on their private property at the time.”
As I wandered the parking lot, partly in an effort just to get away from Randall Thom, I fell into conversation with Ronnie, a forty-two-year-old sheet metal worker from Lexington, who was clean-shaven and preppy looking in his khakis and collared shirt, and wouldn’t give his last name. “My dad was a Democrat, but I never got into politics until Trump. The union took money from our checks and then redistributed it to candidates they endorsed, and they were all on the Democratic side. But I’m voting all Republican. A lot of the guys are starting to see the Democrats are not what they used to be. Democrats used to be for the working man, and I don’t see it anymore. I don’t see any of them talking about unions. They talk about racism and bathrooms but nothing about the working-class people, except for Trump, and he’s saying he’ll bring our jobs back. Right now as a union sheet metal worker you can go anywhere in the country and there are jobs. There is a lot of work out there. The way the Democrats are right now, I can’t vote for them, and it started with Obama—that’s when I started paying attention more—and it just seemed like the Democrats were more worried about trans people in the bathrooms than the working man.
“I love Trump. I went to a rally in Richmond, Kentucky, in 2018 and didn’t get in. We got there at like two p.m. and the lines zigzagged and it was just too full. But this is monumental. I think the American people are starting to wake up. All the racism the Democrats bring up every four years, and I don’t think Trump is a racist. Not at all. He’s doing a lot of good things.”
When I mentioned the GOP’s long opposition to organized labor and systematic effort to pass right-to-work laws, Ronnie nodded. “I don’t support right-to-work laws, but you don’t have to agree with everything the GOP does, and you can only vote one way, and we all support Trump. I wouldn’t vote for another Democrat if you paid me right now.”
The jumbotron was blasting. Lara Trump was looming over us again talking about the “real news.” I got in line in front of the taco truck. “I never watched his TV shows,” a man behind me said, “but he’s a billionaire and have you ever heard of his kids ever getting in trouble? His son and daughter don’t even take a salary! The way Christians are terrorized now. The only people you can make fun of anymore are white guys and Christians. I’m fifty-eight years old and my whole life they’ve been talking about moving the embassy to Jerusalem and he gets in and does it! I have really become enamored of OANN [One America News Network]. It reminds me of CNN twenty years ago. It’s real conservative, but they just tell the news. I still like Fox but I’m glad Shep Smith is gone.”
“I really think the only news opinion show is Brett Baier,” said the woman standing next to him. “I mean if they just reported the facts, we wouldn’t have to be here. And I’ve gotten so sick of people not knowing their history. Did you know Susan B. Anthony, the woman who got us the vote, she was pro-life!”
The doors opened at 2:00 p.m., and we front-liners sprinted in, which was ridiculous because the arena held twenty thousand people and even if you were the five hundredth person through the doors you had first pick of anywhere. Dave Thompson and Gale Roberts and Randall Thom and Rick Snowden staked out their place at the front rail, but I wanted a seat; standing there at the front just seemed like too much to me, for too many hours. Rick Frazier said he’d sit, too, and we took seats right off the floor near the stage. “The payoff for me of being at the rallies is being so close to the leader of the free world,” Frazier said. “It’s amazing to think that anyone from St. Marys, Ohio, has been in the same room as the president seventeen times. That is actually pretty amazing if you think about it. Until Trump, I’m not sure it was possible for a regular dude like me to do that.” The more time I spent with him, the more I liked him. He was a blue-blood, blue-collar union man. His grandfather had worked on the railroad and his father as a machinist at Goodyear—Frazier had been a second-generation Goodyear/Continental Tire employee. He’d been mostly raised by his grandparents in Kentucky and then gotten his union card right out of high school after a pipe-fitting apprenticeship. He’d been married, divorced, was still friends with his ex and her husband, had a couple of grown kids who were doing well. Unlike so many of the superfans, he wasn’t a desperate, aggrieved victim and he wasn’t selling anything and he was curious—after a discussion about the Washington Post and New York Times, he reported back to me that he’d been reading the Post and “it wasn’t too bad.” For him the Trump rallies were social, a thing that took him out of Ohio and into the larger world, and there was something so earnest and kind about him that people responded. “My intentions are to enjoy my retirement, and this is fun for me,” he said. “It has brought me together with people from all around the country. I’m in it for the fun and I’m also in it to meet the president at some point. What American kid grew up not wanting that, regardless of the politics?” Indeed, he was gradually working his way up the food chain—friends of a sort with Brad Parscale and Christl Mahfouz, who was in charge of Trump merchandise, and Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s campaign press secretary. On the floor at the rallies they knew him and acknowledged him and posed for pics with him, all of which felt like a pretty big deal to a retired guy from a small town who really didn’t have much else to do. When a rally came to Toledo, he served as an official usher and wore a formal, blue pin-striped suit and was given VIP tix. He was also insightful, texting me, for instance, an update on “crazy” Randall Thom: “It seems in his world he can’t catch a break. He seems to cause a self-induced imaginary frenzy wherever he goes.”
“I’m a walkaway Democrat,” he said. “Only recently have we been able to say don’t spend our money on candidates we don’t support. Old days the union would take our dues money and give it to Democrats and the last few years we’ve had a chance to get out of that, though of course the International throws money wherever they want it. I voted for Bill Clinton and I liked him. But we were entrenched union and that’s what good union people did.”
The arena was going mad with anticipation and desire when Lee Greenwood finally came blasting through the speakers at 7:15 p.m. And then it went even madder, louder, if such a thing was possible, when Lee Greenwood himself, in the flesh, stepped onstage, and then Trump emerged and wow it was personal, a love fest, with Greenwood belting out his emotional ode to America as Trump in his blue suit and red tie and blond wispy hair, tight little fists pumping, reveled in the love. It didn’t take long for him to get going, either: “The far left wants to change our traditions4, our culture, our heroes,” he said. “The Democrats are trying to tear our country apart. First they engineered the Russia hoax. Then the Mueller scam. These people are crazy. And last week the Democrats voted to nullify the votes of sixty-three million people.” The Washington Post was “disgusting” and “when we hang it up after five years or maybe nine or thirteen or seventeen or if I still have the strength, twenty-one years . . .” He trailed off and let those years sink in, then smirked. “See, now they’re going crazy,” he said, pointing to the press corral. “See, I told you he was a dictator!” he said in a sneering falsetto. “That disgusting newspaper. Like witches!” Suddenly there was a tussle in the stands. Apparently a protester had yelled something, but I hadn’t seen it or heard it, and Trump barked “Get ’em out! Eject ’em! But be gentle, I don’t want to get sued. He’s going home to Mommy,” he said as the protester was surrounded and hustled out by security.
He did his power thing, calling the GOP delegation on stage one by one, dangling them like puppets before the savage and roaring crowd. McConnell looked small and old; he stumbled for a second on a step as he mounted the podium under the big man’s hard gaze. The words tumbled out: “Thank you, Mr. President, for making America great again!”
“President Trump has great courage,” slavered Rand Paul. “He faces down the fake media every day. I say to my colleagues, if Shifty Schiff can’t bring the whistleblower or Hunter Biden in, then every Republican in Congress should take a walk and say this is a farce!”
“Wow, that was excellent!” Trump said, stepping back up to the mic. “Thank you! Great job! He’s a warrior.”
“TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” the crowd roared.
It was November 4, 2019, just a few weeks before the Senate would vote on whether or not to convict Trump, and if you doubted the outcome all you had to do was be there, here, right inside Trump’s pressure cooker. Mitch McConnell, the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate, was completely Trumped, as dominated by his master as if he were naked and on his knees.