My own journey to Minneapolis was circuitous. Over the past decade I had lived with former headhunters in a ten-thousand-square-mile roadless New Guinea swamp and spent weeks walking through the rain forest with the last nomadic hunter-gatherers in Borneo, eating squirrel, civet, bearcat, and song birds. I had traveled by bus across Afghanistan in the middle of a war. I had rattled from Bamako, Mali, to Dakar, Senegal, in a train so old and crowded that the best place to sit was with my feet hanging out the door. And once I’d traversed the Gobi Desert at the height of winter in a twenty-ton propane truck that had three flat tires and only two spares. Over some twenty years and eighty countries, I had poked into the deepest and most exotic crevices of everywhere much more than my own country. I had never reported a single American political story.
Which was startling, because I had been bottle-fed from birth on a heady milk of politics and journalism.
My father, Burton Hoffman with no middle name, came to Washington, D.C., in 1955 to work at Congressional Quarterly, then the preeminent publication covering the U.S. Congress. There he met my mother, a lovely WASP divorcée with an English degree and an entry-level editing job, and I was born five years later. My father soon moved up to the Washington Evening Star. At age three, I am told, I got lost in the White House during a holiday event for the press corps, and later that year I stood amidst the crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue watching John F. Kennedy’s caisson pass by.
I don’t recall either of those events, but my first genuine political memory stands vivid. One summer’s day a pack of us kids were exploring on our own, and in the garage next door we discovered a dartboard stuck with steel-tipped darts and a six-foot-high, dry-mounted black-and-white poster of Barry Goldwater. What I remember most, the detail that makes this story stand out to me five decades later, is that we did not throw the darts at the dartboard and we did not throw them at the walls, or at each other, but at Goldwater himself. Not one of us was over eight years old that summer of ’65, but we all understood enough about American politics to know that Barry Goldwater stood for all the wrong things.
We moved soon after to a bigger house where the first thing my parents did was build bookshelves, lots of them, throughout the living and dining rooms. The Washington Evening Star and the Washington Post arrived daily and grew into vast piles. My father always said he read seven newspapers every day. Sometimes my sister and I got to go to the Star, where we marveled at the enormous room full of desks and typewriters and telephones and clattering UPI and AP wires; this was the beating heart of the world. We watched the presses roll (which they did every single day, itself a miracle), and we got our names in heavy typesetting lead from the kindly typesetters, and we nodded in admiration about the stories of reporters who’d started as jumpers and then become copy boys before finally getting beats of their own. That was the way it was done. Around the dinner table no one cared about athletes or movie stars.
We saw Ben Hecht’s The Front Page onstage and then the 1931 film. We carried with us the story of my mother’s tears when Adlai Stevenson lost to Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. In the summer of 1968 my father was sent to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. He was gone for weeks, and we watched them, looking for him, on our 1963 Philco black-and-white television. They were presented to us as epic dramas, those conventions. The politicians, the newspapers and journalists covering them, were engaged in a holy calling; we were nourished from the beginning on the idea that politics and government and journalism were great. Noble. Not a swamp. Not fake, but the very opposite: the citadel of truth and honor where good people worked to make life better. If anyone were country-loving patriots it was journalists and liberal Democrats. “Look,” my father said. “Government exists to help those who cannot help themselves. Not for us. We’ll always be fine. You’re smart, you’ve grown up in a house full of ideas and reading, but not everyone has had that advantage. We don’t need laws that help us, but many other people do. So remember that.”
My parents weren’t privileged blue bloods but the children of working-class immigrants—the most American of mutts. My father’s parents, Abraham Hoffman and Adele Buxbaum, had fled the Pale as children, he from what is now Ukraine and she from Poland. They were Orthodox Jews who first ran a small grocery store in Brooklyn, New York, and then a bar in Newport, Rhode Island. My father’s declaration of atheism at seventeen (the same year he joined the army) was a break, to him, from an Old World ignorance and its cultural and religious chains. He was the first in his family to attend college (which he never finished), thanks to the G.I. Bill.
My mother was born in North Dakota, on a farm without running water. One year the snow was so deep they had to burn pieces of the barn to keep warm. Her mother, Esther, was one of nine children of Norwegian immigrants. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, a great-aunt married to a one-term congressman from Michigan got my grandfather a job in Washington, D.C., in the Department of Agriculture. My mother grew up in D.C. in a two-bedroom apartment, worked retail jobs from the age of fourteen, and graduated from the University of Maryland a lover of Collette and Carson McCullers.
They had both by some mysterious path found their way to books and ideas. Truth, in our house, was empirical. We proudly pursued logic, reason, critical thinking, a world not just without God, but also without Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy.
“Be smart,” said my father.
“Think about it,” said my mother.
When my father caught me in a small lie, he told me the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. I felt so guilty! Lies, it was clear, had consequences.
In 1972 my father quit his job as deputy managing editor of the Star and took the position of press secretary to Sargent Shriver, George McGovern’s running mate. On election night he grasped our hands and led us up onto the stage full of Shrivers and Kennedys and bright lights, and we stood in the center of the world as Shriver made his concession speech and a crook won reelection, soon to resign in disgrace.
In the midst of bussing and white flight, my sister and I attended District of Columbia public schools, where in senior high I was one of only five hundred or so whites in a system of eighteen thousand students. The principal was Black, the assistant principals were Black, most of my teachers were Black, the mayor was Black, as was most of the city council. There was nothing strange with that, for that was our city.
After a stint as the editor of the political magazine National Journal, my father left journalism and moved to the Hill as an aid to John Brademas, then the majority whip. Though he wasn’t a newspaperman any longer, my father installed a UPI and AP ticker in his office. He claimed to be unable to concentrate without the sound of the constant banging keys. Those, I think, were his favorite years. He loved working for Brademas and House Speaker Tip O’Neill, plotting and scheming, he used to say, alongside two very different men—one an intellectual, the other an old-line Boston Irish pol—who represented the best in liberal politics and democracy and saw government as a beautiful endeavor intent on lifting people to their very best.
One summer I worked in the U.S. House of Representatives folding room, an archaic place of giant mechanical machines that folded members’ newsletters. The next summer I did political organizing for the AFL-CIO. And the summer after that, between my junior and senior years of college, I worked on the reelection campaign of Maryland senator Paul Sarbanes. It was a heady time, in the midst of which I didn’t just represent Sarbanes at campaign events, but I fell in love.
In that moment I left politics behind. She was a reader and traveler who’d wandered through Mexico with a parrot and lived in Rome and her father was a writer. She said let’s travel, and we did. I’d never been out of the United States, but we finished college and lived in an Airstream trailer in the backyard of a group house for fifty bucks a month and painted houses for four months and saved enough to head to Europe, the Middle East, Asia.
I never looked back. I wrote about travel and technology and remote indigenous people, anything but politics, first for magazines and later in books. Then came the election of Donald Trump. For people like me, it was incomprehensible. The streets of Washington, D.C., on the day after the election were deserted, silent, as if the whole city was in mourning and couldn’t get out of bed.
My childhood had given me a clear foundation of values. Truth mattered. Science, reason, logic—the tenets of the enlightenment and liberalism were unassailable givens. Politics and government were a noble calling, as was journalism’s speaking truth to power. The exceptionalism of America, the quality that made it unlike anywhere else I’d traveled, was that anyone from anywhere could come here, like my own grandparents, and become American, be thought of and looked upon as an American by other Americans. That Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty articulated America’s greatest asset—an outward-looking, dynamic people who eschewed tribalism and thus became a true City on a Hill beckoning the huddled masses yearning to break free. This wasn’t merely snowflake-y compassion, but the very foundation of America’s cultural and economic dynamism, a continual influx of new Americans hungry for success and freedom, bringing new ideas and energies, novel talents to a continually growing nation. Even that most Republican of Republicans had said so at a time that now seemed long ago: “Anyone, from any corner of the world,1 can come to live in the United States and become an American,” said Ronald Reagan. “Here, is the one spot on earth where we have the brotherhood of man.” Trump’s signature campaign promise, the border wall, struck me as fundamentally un-American, the very antithesis of the limitless horizons of manifest destiny, of an idea—because that was what America had always been, first and foremost—about a nation that was different, that looked outward without fear and embraced change and the future.
Over three years of Trump’s presidency so many of those values became challenged. Neo-Nazis were defended, dictators befriended, immigrants persecuted, trusted institutions undermined, experts and scientists shunned (with deadly consequences when a crisis finally arrived), truth subverted, national unity gleefully fractured. Americans by the millions supported a politician whose morals and vision I didn’t recognize. My city came back to life, but I wasn’t close friends with a single Trump supporter and never encountered them in my daily rituals, so far as I knew, whether in restaurants, bars, the park, my coffee shop, airports or airplanes or buses or trains. A neighborhood family pizza joint, known for its Ping-Pong tables and booths full of kids and their moms and dads just fifty feet from the drugstore whose shelves I stocked in high school, was invaded by an American terrorist carrying an AR-15 assault weapon. Edgar Maddison Welch fired2 three shots into the crowded restaurant as he frantically searched for imaginary tunnels in which Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, it was said on the dark corners of the internet, tortured babies and even drank their blood. The fact was, I had no face-to-face interaction with Trump supporters, ever, which was incredible, since sixty-three million Americans had voted for him.
My friend Nick’s comments were typical in my universe. Nick was no tree-hugging Birkenstock wearer. He’d grown up in a tight-knit Catholic family of eight, had paid his own way through the University of Maryland, and risen, through hard work and hours that left me dizzy, to become senior vice president and partner at a global consulting firm, from which he’d been able to retire while still in his fifties. “I guess I’m part of this calcification of the conversation,” he said over drinks one night. “I’ve lost my tolerance. It used to be that if we went out for dinner with conservatives I’d say, ‘We can agree to disagree,’ but I can’t do that anymore. I mean, if you support Trump’s policies that are racist, then you’re a racist. Are you a good person? I don’t know anymore! I realized I can’t do it; I can’t sit there and be tolerant. Their bubble of ignorance and loss of critical thinking just ruins it for me.”
What was happening in this country? My country? I’d spent much of my career traveling the globe to understand cultures that were deeply unfamiliar to me, and suddenly my own felt nearly as foreign as that of the pygmies in the Ituri Rainforest of the Congo. The America of my parents appeared gone. Who were these Trump supporters, this mythical Trump base, and why were they so fervent about a man who stood counter to seemingly every cultural, ethical, social, moral, and political value of my childhood? The ranks of the MAGA faithful included not just that base of non-college-degreed white men, but also men and women with deep educations and power in the GOP; people like Mitch McConnell. So strong was Trump’s hold over the Republican electorate that it became political suicide for any Republican to challenge Trump. What explained his attraction and his hold on people?
For so many years, when I’d wanted to understand a culture, no matter how remote or potentially dangerous, I threw a few clothes in a bag and headed off. I thought nothing of traveling for days to the remotest of places. What interested me the most in those faraway communities was the gathering together of people where ritual and myths reconstituted identity, where people became whole. Was there an equivalent within the United States to help me understand this new America?
My thinking kept returning to Trump’s rallies. They were legendary and legendarily raucous, opportunities for screaming fans (or so I saw in news clips) to chant LOCK HER UP and boo the press. No other president in history had staged as many, an average of more than one a week since his election, often in places sitting presidents rarely traveled, such as Mississippi and Louisiana. The ticketing process pulled in valuable voter data like a giant Hoover vacuum, of course, but that utilitarian purpose seemed their least important function. From the outside, the rallies appeared to be a new American ritual where the identity of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them was solidified, confirmed. “Rituals reveal values at their deepest level,” writes Monica Wilson, who lived among the Nyakyusa people of Tanzania in the 1950s. They are “the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.” The vast majority of those big GOP donors and pols who were now entwined around Trump’s fingers had originally disdained him. Why had that change happened? How had he converted them? The rallies, it seemed to me, held the answer. Trump had found influence not through the cultivation of years of relationships, of studied political favors and lever pulling in back rooms, but through an unruly, feral, electric mob—incubated and indoctrinated online—that was made flesh and blood and nourished weekly in a new kind of ritual.
The idea took hold and wouldn’t let go: the rallies were the key to decoding and understanding this phenomenon that had swept my country. If Trumpism could be seen and felt, that place was at his rallies, in the arenas that brought together his fabled base into concentrated form. And if so, then it was someplace I could travel to just as surely as a village in the swamps of New Guinea or the huts of nomads in the rain forests of Borneo. “For I was constantly aware3 of the thudding of ritual drums in the vicinity of my camp,” writes the anthropologist Victor Turner. “Eventually, I was forced to recognized that if I wanted to know what even a segment of Ndembu culture was really about, I would have to overcome my prejudice . . . and start to investigate it.”
If I was drawn to the rituals of indigenous people, why wasn’t I attracted to the rituals of my own countrymen and women? If I could endure extreme heat and mosquitoes to live with the formerly violent, head-hunting Asmat eating sago worms, why couldn’t I live with the Trumpians? If I could dress in a shalwar kameez and a keffiyeh and ride a bus unchallenged through the Salang Pass of Afghanistan in the middle of a raging war, why couldn’t I go where journalists were vilified in my own country?
The answer was simple: I needed to overcome my prejudice and journey into the heart of darkness that was my own nation. I would get to know, or try to, the most passionate of Trump fans. Live with them. Eat with them. See if I could pierce—and understand—their world.