It was early December, cold and gray, as I drove out of Washington, D.C., for Hershey, Pennsylvania—my seventh rally in eight weeks. The last two months had been an emotional whipsaw, from my existential loneliness and dread in Minneapolis to a kind of euphoria that began rising in Tupelo and peaked at my sixth rally in Sunrise, Florida. There it had been warm and sunny, with snowy egrets on the hedgerows under blue skies, and the parking lot was full of familiar faces who’d come together from all over the country for this orgiastic ritual that ended in what Canetti called “the discharge,” which was when Trump came out and spoke. There was a kind of rhythm to it, a coming together and breaking apart and coming together, and by the time of the Florida rally I felt excited to be rejoining the show, comfortable with my part in it.
In Florida Randall Thom gathered everyone together in the parking lot. “Shhhh,” he said. “Shhhh, this is totally quiet. Secret. No one can say anything. The cops don’t want us here, and when they come and tell us to move, say NO! We don’t have to move. We don’t go anywhere! Don’t let the word out or there will be chaos.” Everyone looked a little bewildered by this, but then we fanned out into the glorious day and wiled away the hours in the sunshine watching Thom dance ecstatically around the parking lot in his socks, waving a giant Trump flag attached to a fishing pole. Time was suspended. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. “Visiting” is the way my mother described that sort of lengthy sitting and talking with people. Richard Snowden was still off the circuit—he’d taken some time off for a cruise and moved to New York—but the rest of the crew was there. This was the best part of a Trump rally, just being there, talking and gossiping with friends, and it called to mind a description I’d once read about a traditional but contemporary Lakota sweat lodge: “As I sat around with some others1 who had come for the sweat, we told jokes and caught up on the news. No one was in a hurry or concerned that the leader had not arrived. Nor was anyone anxious to start the fire or remove the rocks left in the lodge from the last sweat.” So much of ritual—and a Trump rally was most definitely a ritual—was simply social. A church baptism. A Balinese tooth filing. A funeral. The ceremonies themselves brought meaning to important life events, but the thing that always stood out for me was the community. The ritual of a Trump rally was social bonding for people who’d lost that in so many other ways.
Also, I just liked listening to nutty Gale Roberts.
He had been born and raised in Baggs, Wyoming, a town with one traffic light and four hundred citizens smack in the oil field. His father owned three pulling rigs—a smaller, more mobile version of a drilling rig. He had never met a Black person until he was in his twenties, and like the rest of his family he’d worked in the oil fields. “I ran piping to the ground. I was a driller. Worm guy, making the bite, a chain hand, who throws the chain to the driller. A lot of wildcatting, where you don’t know where the oil is or if you’ll hit at all.” He had a twin brother who looked exactly like him and owned “twenty muscle cars and nine houses” and was the vice president and general manager of KLX Energy Services, a huge oil field service company. “I said to my brother, ‘You going to give something to someone who doesn’t have anything? Help someone?’ He didn’t like that. We’ve never really been close. Like we see through different lenses.” His severely disabled daughter had dozens of seizures every night, and someone had to stay up with her, hold her, comfort her, whenever that happened. “She doesn’t know if it’s night or day, so if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she could be ready to play, laugh, and she’s such a beautiful soul, the purest soul you’ve ever seen.”
That night the Sunrise Police, as Thom had warned, kicked everyone out. Thom went berserk, ever the victim. “This is the fucking government trying to push us down,” he yelled, kicking an ice chest. “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll go to jail. But it’ll be a hell of a story. Kicking us out for what? I’m the only one with balls. Big fucking deal, you get locked up. The cops are trying to hurt Trump. I’ve been in jail before. I won’t bend over and lick their ass.” But he was talking to himself, a toddler having a tantrum, and we all dispersed, leaving him to fend for himself.
The next day it was more sun and a band and dancing as Rick Frazier and Gale Roberts tried to convince me to stand at the rail with them when we got inside. I wanted to. I knew I needed to, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it. I’d say maybe and then we’d rush inside and I’d chicken out. Florida was no different. When the doors opened we ran up the stairs like migrating wildebeests, but I took a seat with Frazier.
But heading to Hershey two weeks later, I realized I was reaching my limit. So much of it had been the challenge of crossing over, of becoming a part of the show, and I’d done that. On the one hand it was so weird it made me laugh—or maybe laughter had been the only way to deal with it. But on the other, it was deeply depressing. It was now December, and witness after witness had come forward under subpoena and testified under oath to Trump’s attempted extortion of the president of Ukraine, and none of it caused a dent in GOP support. The people that really mattered were refusing to honor their subpoenas, and no one in the GOP or the Justice Department cared. It was a foregone conclusion that Trump would be impeached by the House and the Senate would call no witnesses. People like Senator Marsha Blackburn were calling Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—a man who’d devoted his adult life to serving his country, who’d fought and been wounded for it—a traitor, merely for honoring a subpoena.
The rallies were a front-row seat to its origins, to why that was happening. Week after week Trump stood in front of tens of thousands of people nastier and more mendacious, lashing out and dangling those senators and congresspersons before his mobs, and I felt increasingly like a participant in a rising autocracy. It was happening, in Minneapolis and Dallas and Tupelo and Lexington and Sunrise, week in and week out. I’d grown fond of my buddies, and at any rally you could shake the hand of Brad Parscale or that of many Trumpian sycophants, from Matt Gaetz to Mitch McConnell to Corey Lewandowski, and they were all so nice and friendly and smiley. But niceness had nothing to do with it. In March 19332 the British journalist Gareth Jones found himself in an airplane with Goebbels and Hitler and their Storm Trooper guards “with silver skull and cross-bones embellished” on their black uniforms, and “they could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot Nazi myself.” Trump talked about the Constitution constantly in his speeches, about upholding it and how the Democrats were trying to destroy it, but Adolf Hitler stood before Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, and swore to uphold the constitution and to respect the rights of the president and to maintain parliamentary rule. Just fifty-two days later he took complete power. “In the former Austrian vagabond3 the conservative classes thought they had found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their goals,” writes William Shirer in his monumental work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And yet “the one-party totalitarian4 State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance.”
The danger was real. I was running out of curiosity and patience. Still, for all of my deep-dive rally going, there was that one thing I still hadn’t done: endure a rally at the rail, the very front row. I always told Rick and Gale and even myself that it was because after so many hours (and sometimes days and nights) on the line, the thought of standing for hours more seemed just too exhausting. Why stand at the rail if you could sit in a padded seat? They both had great views. But there was something else, a deeper reason: to sit in a seat, even the closest ones to the stage, was to still feel like a spectator. An observer. Not just of Trump himself, but the entire spectacle. It made me feel detached, as if I was only watching from afar—which was what every journalist in the press corral did. That separation gave you moral coverage, a distance. But to stand at the rail was to blur that line between observer and participant, and that was something I feared. But as I drove up to Hershey Rick Frazier was adamant. “You have to do it, Carl,” he texted. “You haven’t really experienced a rally until you’ve been at the rail.”
“Okay,” I replied. “I’m in.”