I hate to see him go.
Gale’s comment stuck with me as history unfolded. It was wistful, nostalgic for the near present, cognizant of the moment’s fragility and, perhaps, of its inevitable end. Exactly one week after the Hershey rally, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, and six weeks after that, on February 5, he was cleared by the Republican-controlled Senate. The outcome was never in doubt. Instead of checking Trump’s power, the impeachment trial revealed his strength. Emboldened him. “Trump Unleashed1: president moves with a free hand post-impeachment,” read a representative headline in The Hill. The economy was roaring, the stock market pushing toward record-breaking highs. A seventy-eight-year-old socialist from a minor state seemed his likely opponent in the fall. Trump was unstoppable. When a primary eve rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, was announced for February 10, I knew I had to witness the president’s moment of triumph.
But as I flew to Manchester, a minor chord began tolling in the background: the first cases of a “novel” and deadly virus were appearing on American shores after burning through Wuhan, China. Sometime in early February 2020, a prescient observer may have caught sight of the moment the Trump presidency sloshed to its very zenith. History was accelerating.
In Manchester, the temperature was just above freezing, and rain fell on wet, slippery sidewalks, six inches of dirty snow covering the ground. I arrived late, around 10:00 a.m. on rally day, partly because none of the crew were going and mostly because I’d lost my mojo. Hershey had been the apex of my experience. Being at the rail felt like I’d crossed a line. It was too close. Too hot. The comfort I’d felt during all those hours in the balmy parking lot in Florida had given way, post Hershey, to a feeling of depression and deep fatigue, physical and emotional. Getting so near to the altar at the rail made me feel as if I was suffocating and desperate for escape into the open air. I couldn’t fake it anymore, couldn’t hold my tongue when Gale or anyone else said how great Trump was. I had always told them all that I was there to listen, but at some point when we were standing at the rail I’d told Dave Thompson I didn’t believe in Trump’s wall. He’d looked at me with such disbelief and surprise I felt guilty, like I was a fake friend, which in a way I was. After I’d broken into the cold, fresh night air of the Hershey parking lot and sped home that night to my own bed, I’d stopped going, watching it all from the safety of my Washington, D.C., bubble.
Since Hershey, Trump had held five rallies, four of them in the Midwest, and Rick Frazier had been to Toledo and Milwaukee, and he needed a break. An unwinding seemed to be happening. Rick Snowden called to say he was under the weather with a hacking cough and headed south, and hoped to connect in warmer climes. The wave was cresting. Dave Thompson had fallen off the bandwagon; after seven straight rallies his wife complained about the cost and the time away and wanted him home, and “I need to make some money in real estate,” he said. The center struggled to hold. Christine Howard and I had been occasionally texting and emailing about politics, but then I pushed her pretty hard, took issue with some of her assertions, and her communications ceased. Even Randall Thom hadn’t shown up to Manchester. He’d increasingly taken to not even going inside the rallies and, instead, babysitting people’s chairs and tents and umbrellas for ten bucks a pop while they were inside. Though for the Milwaukee rally he’d organized a bus full of Front Row Joes, for which he’d gotten a lot of local press and even a NowThis News video segment. As usual when Thom was interviewed, there was nary a mention of his criminal past.
As for Gale Roberts, he’d run into trouble. Twice over. His legal suit had been dismissed on all counts, the court noting that the whole thing had been filed in the wrong jurisdiction to begin with. Then he texted me photos of a house on Airbnb in Toledo, Ohio, and asked me if I wanted to go in on it. He was flying into Chicago and then hitting up Toledo and Milwaukee. I said I couldn’t make it, and he texted me: “We will have to hook up later. Someday we will go for a horseback ride in the back country . . . perhaps in New Mexico. Oh, I don’t follow common trails on my rides.”
On the seventh of January near midnight, he sent me a photo of him standing alone in his trump tweets matter T-shirt and his Stetson in front of Toledo’s Huntington Center; he was first in line for the rally. Then disaster. As he was about to go inside the next day, the Secret Service stopped him. “They banned me from going into the rally saying I was crazy,” he texted. “Le Cibola. I spent forty-five minutes with an agent. He claimed that I was mentally unstable. I was at a total disadvantage to a nineteen-year veteran in his field. He was simply doing his job, even though he had it so very wrong in many references he made of me being mentally unstable and needing help. He was spot-on about Cibola consuming my life. Indeed it has. No more Trump rallies for me. My wife and daughters are very happy.”
It was a long afternoon by myself. The cold rain fell. I was way back in line and the jumbotron was yammering and I didn’t even have a chair. Most of it was the same spiel, but in a few new segments Trump was increasingly talking about Black people and minorities and now the loop featured an additional parade of people of color on the screen talking about how great he was, as if the campaign itself was becoming totally unmoored from any semblance of reality. By 2:30 I was inside and I had a momentary sense of returning to something, something that I’d actually missed over the past six weeks. A place of celebration. Happiness. Enthusiasm. Elation. Passion. Energy. A show. A circus. The Stones were cranking out—“don’t play with me ’cause you’re playing with fire!”—and people were dressed in their outrageous costumes of red, white, and blue, and a white guy with a huge red afro and a red MAGA cap on his head, the big tufts of red hair sticking out on either side making him look like Bozo the Clown, was frenetically dancing on the floor. The heartbeat of “MAGA nation” was still strong. To be here, together, spoke to people’s deep urge and need to win, to be acknowledged and touched, to be close to power, to taste and feel and see their own democracy, their own tribal leader.
Gale Roberts’s statement at the end of the Hershey rally, that he was sad to see him go, felt sharp to me. As crazy as Roberts seemed, he represented so much of the America I’d been traveling through, a man frustrated and thwarted, a good man, in a world that felt outside of his control at every turn. He felt it at Walmart and Dollar General and the death of local retail; he felt it at changing notions of his own masculinity and ideas about a man’s work; he felt it in the dilution of God in American life and the hollowing out of so many institutions from which he’d gained sustenance. He felt it at the meritocracy that he claimed to love but that thwarted his own ambition when others, men and women of strange countries and a rainbow of colors, proved more qualified than he. In one way or another nearly all of the people at Trump’s rallies did, and they hated to see him go because while they were there and he was there, in front of them, he was speaking to them, telling them it would all be okay with such assurance, such certainty, in such easy-to-understand, black-and-white terms. He acknowledged them. Acknowledged their pain, their confusion, their vertigo. He gave voice to them.
They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else. When I listened to Trump fans talk about “them” and “they”—how “they” wanted something for nothing nowadays—the subtext, the code, was lazy people of color and immigrants who wanted everything for free. Yet we were supposed to have sympathy for white men who weren’t changing with the times. They wanted to work, didn’t want handouts, were hungry for the meritocracy, in their parlance. But that was bullshit. They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated Black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when Black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment. They pined for a time when billions of Indians and Chinese, Brazilians and Indonesians—the whole rest of the world—were living in abject poverty with scant education and Americans and Europeans were the only people who designed things and built them.
But the world wasn’t like that anymore. China was no longer peasants in Mao suits harvesting night soil, but hundreds of millions of hypereducated, focused people living in vast cities of steel and glass. Ditto Mumbai and Saigon and Jakarta and Bangkok. Men like James Mayhall and Gale Roberts and Rick Frazier had stiff competition; now they were the peasants. I liked to imagine the shocking slap of taking them through Shanghai or Gurgaon near Delhi or for a ride on Bangkok’s sleek Skytrain.
If they wanted urban Black people to lift themselves out of the ghetto by their clichéd American bootstraps, why couldn’t they do the same? Instead of just watching their towns get destroyed by highway bypasses and chain stores, they should have stood up and done something about it. They should have finished high school and they should have found some way to further their education. They should have thought a little harder and more clearly about their Unions and voting for Republicans who wanted to break them, and they should have understood that the Affordable Care Act was a step toward giving them more access to health care. They should have voted against people who promised to lower their taxes and weakened the public institutions—the schools, the libraries, the infrastructure, the preparedness for pandemics—that made their lives better and offered them a social safety net. They should have read the damn newspaper every day. If they could afford cable TV, they could afford a digital subscription to a newspaper and keep up with the news. The real news. The truth. And they should have been offended and even insulted listening to people like Rush Limbaugh. There was really no excuse for the way millions of people had lost their basic critical-thinking skills and couldn’t separate the fake from the real.
But they hadn’t, and they hadn’t known any better and now they could feel the effects, a malaise, and when that big man in his blue suit stood up and said he alone could fix it, they bought it all.
As I sat there watching Bozo dance and thought about Gale Roberts and Rick and all the guys like him, I figured that if I had sympathy for immigrants and struggling people of color, I could muster sympathy for the struggling whites, too.
Still, the worst blame I reserved for Trump and the people around him, the people who were lying to them and misleading them. At 7:00 p.m., unusually on time, Lee Greenwood gushed forth and there Trump was. Again. The Senate had just found him not guilty and he was lighter than I’d ever seen him. Joyous. And more dangerous than ever. For right there in seats just a few rows below me sat his court. Mike Pence. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. Steve Scalise. Mark Meadows. Kevin McCarthy. Matt Gaetz. Tom Emmer. Matt and Mercedes Schlapp. Corey Lewandowski. The whole down-ballot New Hampshire GOP leadership. Across the floor stood Ivanka and Jared, Don Junior and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Why were they all here? What purpose did congressmen from Minnesota and Florida have for being at a Trump rally in New Hampshire? This was just another rally. Trump called each of them out2 before the roaring mob (who kept chanting “FORTY-SIX! FORTY-SIX! FORTY-SIX!” for Don Junior), blessed them, anointed them, thanked “my” senators and congressmen for being his “warriors.” It was so obvious. No stretch at all to think of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s account of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s reign and his court, which always had to be with Selassie, toadying to him.
Each one approached the throne in turn,3 emotionally stirred, bowing submissively, listening to the Emperor’s decision. Each would kiss the hand of his benefactor and retreat from the presence without turning his back, bowing all the time. The Emperor supervised even the lowliest assignment, because the source of power was not the state or any institution, but most personally His Benevolent Highness. How important a rule that was! A special human bond, constrained by the rules of hierarchy, but a bond nevertheless, was born from this moment spent with the Emperor, when he announced the assignment and gave his blessing, from which bond came the single principle by which His Majesty guided himself when raising people or casting them down: the principle of loyalty.
Trump wasn’t like Hitler, who planned, even in the 1920s, to take over the German state and destroy the Weimar Republic’s democracy. But what was occurring at the rallies showed Trump’s narcissism and his urgent need to rule, which ultimately differed little from any other autocrat who’d risen to power. He had to win, had to have complete loyalty. He had no choice but to kill everyone else and survive over a battlefield of the dead, and all of those sycophants on the stage were letting him. They had submitted and they would keep submitting, and if nothing got in his way, he would keep winning, winning, winning, until the whole system, the whole structure of American law and culture and politics was his to wield, his to control. It couldn’t be any other way. There was no other option. Trump didn’t believe in moral goodness or a higher God or the Constitution or democracy. If he wasn’t kept in check, Trump would destroy America because he couldn’t stop himself.
After Trump and the crowd chanted out his last line about winning, in unison, and Mick Jagger broke into “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” we streamed out into the cold. I crunched across snow to my $40 parking space and took big gulps of air. I was free. Done. Not only free for the night, but sure that I would go to no more rallies. I had been to Hades, to Mordor, had looked darkness in the eye, and I’d seen enough. In literature and myth all was a struggle between good and evil, between darkness and light. In the foundational myth of Christianity itself Adam and Eve had bitten into that gleaming apple. Humans had fallen from grace, lost their innocence, but they’d also gained something, too: the power of free will. The power to make choices between right and wrong.
The orthodox idea of American exceptionalism was closely bound with that story; an idea that America and Americans had been chosen by God. The first Americans had been sent by Him to the New World to create a new kind of society, a City on a Hill, a place that was incorruptible. A nation that would stand as a beacon to the rest of humanity as a place that always chose wisely. Freedom. Liberty. Morality. The rule of law. The Constitution. Righteousness. It wasn’t the old world of European kings and queens and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. It wasn’t the small-thinking, nationalist, and racist Europe of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. It wasn’t the self-dealing and corruption of Salassie or Mobutu’s Congo or Marcos’s Philippines or Malaysia’s Najib Razak. It surely wasn’t the murderous totalitarianism of Stalin’s Russia or oligarchical mafia state of Putin or the autocratic populism of South America’s Peron.
There had always been deep tension between that ideal and reality, of course, nowhere more than in America’s unforgivable history of slavery and racism. But as the novel coronavirus spread death4 throughout America and Trump denied reality, holding five more rallies until forced to suspend them after March 2 in Charlotte, North Carolina (“The United States is, right now, ranked by far No. 1 in the world for preparedness,” he assured the crowd that night, eighty-six days before 100,000 Americans would be dead), I finally awoke to a realization: what he represented, more than anything else, was the end of American exceptionalism. Trump’s rise to power showed that America was just like everywhere else. We were no more immune to COVID-19 than we were to autocracy, corruption, and base idiocy. Trump was, in fact, the opposite of heaven-sent. A no one. He had cheated at everything. He had lost enormous sums of money, his own and other people’s. He didn’t read. Knew nothing of history. Had no judgment or honor. So much of his identity was simply the creation of a reality television producer, Mark Burnett.
Nowhere was this clearer than in his response to a real crisis. As the economy tanked and tens of thousands of Americans died, Trump tried to replace his weekly rallies with daily coronavirus briefings, full of the usual blizzard of conflicting and upside-down statements, and an inexorable return to his populist demagoguery of us versus them and loyalty at any cost. The problem with the virus, he and his enablers hinted with his “LIBERATE MINNESOTA” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” tweets, was a problem with cities full of Black and foreigners, not to mention the Chinese and Others from whom the real America needed to be liberated and protected. And woe to anyone who contradicted him, as the skipper of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt found when he tried to save his crew at a time when the virus was supposed to be totally under control. Or as Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the federal agency charged with developing a vaccine, discovered after being fired for refusing to go along with Trump’s embrace of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump was putting “politics and cronyism ahead of science,”5 Bright said.
But the daily briefings were not rallies. They were not filled with thousands of fans shouting out their love for him, hanging on his every word, no matter how nonsensical or contradictory. Rather, his immediate audience was largely filled with skeptical, informed, insistent journalists pointing out his every misstep. And there was no one to dangle, no one to kill or gloat over; he was chained to Anthony Fauci and, though he tried to avoid it, to science. Then, when George Floyd was killed and mass demonstrations broke out across America, Trump could say or do nothing right, appearing to lose complete control, cowering in the White House basement as he tweeted racist tropes about shooting and siccing dogs on enraged protesters outside.
Without the rallies boosting his own ego and reinforcing his power, he had nothing. He appeared lost, a deflation, the first signs of his grip slipping away. His poll numbers slumped. The rallies were everything to a populist demagogue, as elemental as food, water, air. Sure enough, even as the coronavirus burned through the heartland as spring gave way to summer, Trump reached for his lifeline, announcing his first rally in 110 days: Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Tulsa Officials Plead for Trump to Cancel Rally as Virus Spikes in Oklahoma,” read a New York Times headline on June 16, 2020. That same day, four days in advance of the rally, the faithful began coalescing. The fourth and fifth in line? None other than Rick Frazier, with Dave Thompson not far behind.
Nothing new had been revealed about Trump since he’d been in office. All this was clear in 2016. Yet America had freely elected him anyway to its highest office; had made the wrong choice. And then men and women who should have known better had flocked to him and defended him and abetted his corruption and responded to his racism and xenophobia, and there was nothing noble about any of those things. America, it turned out, was a place full of human beings, and humans—all of us—were easily mislead. By social media. By demagogues. By our own emotions and feelings, our anger and resentment, and our petty fantasies about skin color and tribalism that lurked inside so many of us, just waiting to break out. You could con Americans as readily as Russians or Italians or Argentines and Americans were just as ready to compromise themselves and their cherished values.
Trump and his rallies showed how we were all corruptible, if we weren’t careful. They were a window into the darkest of human natures and of the power of the crowd itself. I felt strangely lucky to have witnessed it first hand. Whether he won again in 2020 or Joe Biden won or the coronavirus or the Black Lives Matter movement destroyed him, exposing the smoke and mirrors for everyone to see how naked and un-heaven-sent he was, the rallies showed me how it was us who bore the blame. It was an old story, as ancient as humanity itself and every one of our myths and tales. “This is the excellent foppery of the world,”6 wrote William Shakespeare, channeled through Edmund the schemer in King Lear, “that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.”
No one had forced Gale or Rick or Dave or Christine or any of the mob to come to a Trump rally or to vote for him. No one had forced Marsha Blackburn to call Colonel Vindman a traitor or Mitch McConnell to say that Trump was the greatest president in history. When Trump was gone, which someday he would be, no one could “lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star,” except Trump himself, for to him everything was always someone else’s fault. Still, as reports from Rick Frazier came in, telling me of fellow rally goers falling to the coronavirus and attending social distancing protests, I felt strangely optimistic. There was a reason that Adam and Eve ate that apple. Wisdom didn’t come from innocence or from “heavenly compulsion,” but from experience, from loss. From the great wound of Donald J. Trump, I hoped there might be an opportunity for wisdom. And I could honestly say that someday I looked forward to a horseback ride in the fresh air and backcountry with Gail Roberts.