After lunch I drove over to the arena. Seven exhibition tents formed the head of the line. Gale Roberts and Dave Thompson had created a luxe nest: carpets covered the ground and cots lined the sides, and the tents were warmed with propane heaters. Roberts was grilling elk steaks on open flames, and one entire tent was full of ice chests and cases of water and Cokes and paper towels. They weren’t the only ones there: I counted a line of twenty-nine folding chairs in an orderly row, and the line was starting to grow. Rick Frazier had driven thirteen and a half hours from Ohio. Thompson was looking both invigorated and exhausted. He and Gene Huber, the Florida fan who’d been hugged by Trump, had driven right from Lexington to Monroe, Louisiana, for a rally, arriving at midnight and sleeping in the parking lot. Thompson then drove home to Dallas just in time to meet Roberts, who had flown down from Jackson Hole, and then the two of them had driven down in Thompson’s big, growling Suburban. He was on a roll.
Right at this minute they were waiting on “the teens.” Roberts was trying to grow his trump tweets matter brand into a big thing, a trend to be picked up by high school students. He envisioned thousands of them, tens of thousands, all wearing his T-shirts and crowding the rallies, and Trump and his people would notice them and call Roberts out, and somehow in all of this he, Trump, would be alerted to Roberts’s lawsuit and the great injustice done to him—the fact that he’d found the Seven Cities of Cibola—and he, Trump, would then make everything right. The hegemony of the Illuminati and the Vatican would end, and all that gold and money would be returned to the people, and Trump would be reelected, and who knew what else would happen. It wasn’t the craziest thing I heard: in Lexington, Brad Parscale had called out a kid in one of Roberts’s shirts, and Roberts was getting interviewed a lot on local TV. Upon arriving in Bossier City he’d announced to a newscaster that he’d give a free T-shirt to the first one hundred teenagers who could get to the rally, now, early, and kids were coming out of the woodwork. He’d also flown down several of the teenagers he’d met in Lexington, chaperoned by one of their fathers, who seemed bewildered and looked like a deer in headlights. Roberts told me he’d created an LLC and that all the proceeds of the trump tweets matter T-shirts from then on would go to a college fund for the teens. “I’m building a youth movement,” he said. God was also involved somehow in this—that was where Dave Thompson came in—but I wasn’t sure how. Nor was I sure who was paying for it all.
Heavy-looking rain clouds gathered, and a hard wind blew, but we were cozy in our tents. Frazier told me that Randall Thom had sneaked a giant Trump banner into the rally in Lexington and hung it from an upper section. And not only that—all outside banners and signs were banned—he’d then proceeded in his exuberance to send it flying through the air onto the masses below. Which had predictably resulted in the Front Row Joe himself getting kicked out of the rally.
As day turned to night, more and more cars pulled in and more chairs were set down. I wandered the line and found Mike Lee perched on the edge of a cot-tent contraption that had everything, including a heater and a portable television and various pots and pans. “I just live six miles away,” he said. He gave me a look. “That Black mayor in Shreveport wouldn’t let the police and fire help out here.” He seemed disappointed I didn’t express my solidarity with him, and just then Roberts appeared—he was always pacing up and down the lines—and took me aside and asked me not to tell anyone or say anything about the money guys in Jackson Hole who were paying for the teens. Then he said, “I’m not really here for Trump, for the politicians, you know.”
It was all getting to be too much. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Gale, that’s bullshit. This is all bullshit.”
“No,” he said. “Hillary Clinton and the Bushes are the same. Controlled by the same money. The World Bank people. And Trump isn’t. No one thought he’d get elected, see, so how could he be connected?”
The next morning the line stretched back and forth in its corral for hundreds of yards, and at 7:50 the jumbotron barked to life with martial music announcing Trump’s fantastic victory and then a voice saying “Coercion. Domination. Control. The Democrats will take your constitutional rights and replace them with socialism,” which seemed ironic, since at that very moment the president was being impeached for abuse of power in a constitutional process, and then Brad Parscale appeared, complaining about the Democrats banning plastic straws. And it made me think of a line1 from Finchelstein’s book: “For the populists . . . it is the enemy that is against democracy, not them. . . . Populists have argued that they are defending the people from tyranny and dictatorship.”
A woman came down the line and said, “Okay, the boss says move all the chairs into single file.” Frazier and Thompson and I looked at each other. Who? The boss? We’d been to a lot of rallies, this was my fifth, and that didn’t seem right. Then, I couldn’t believe it, I saw her talking to the Black woman from Tupelo—the woman who’d been the victim of racism! Dave Thompson said, “She says she’s CIA and not to take her picture or she’ll be ghosted.” There was a tussle, and security pulled the Black woman out of the line again. Thompson said, “She’s a shill! A plant!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe she’s just a little crazy.”
“No!” he said. “That’s the way it works. It’s psyops. There’s psyops in Washington, too. On every level it’s a war!”
Which is when a couple whose beat-up Winnebago had been parked on the other side of the parking lot showed up. They were biker missionaries, Dave Thompson said, and he’d been praying with them over the past couple of days. Pastor Sean had a long scraggly beard and black jeans and black sweatshirt emblazoned with the Biker’s Prayer, and his wife or girlfriend was dressed in black leggings. Both were chain-smoking, and he was cupping her ass with his hand and she had her hand in his back pocket and they were giggling and rubbing up against each other and I thought they might just start having sex right there.
As the line compressed, tempers flared. “I was here since seven last night!” a woman yelled.
“I was here since Monday!” said Pastor Sean in a not very missionary-like tone.
Someone apparently grabbed the woman, tried to shove her out of the line.
“Where I’m from, a man stands up for a woman,” she said.
“Amen, sister!” said Pastor Sean, exhaling a lungful of smoke.
“Fuck you!” she said.
A woman appeared whom none of us had ever seen before, blond and tan, muscling her way into the front. “I’m supposed to meet my kids here.”
The front of the line had seen it all before, though, and someone called out, “Anyone looking for a mother?”
“NO!” a chorus of shouts rang out, and she was kicked out of the line.
“In Cincinnati once,” Rick Frazier remarked, “a man came up to the front of the line and said he was going to ‘will call.’” Which made us both break into laughter, since there was no such thing.