I had five days to drive one thousand miles to the next rally in Dallas, Texas, straight south through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, all solid Trump country. Plenty of time and miles for serious reflection. There was a lot to untangle about the rally I’d just seen—its aesthetics, Trump’s rambling exhortations, the aspirations of all those people in MAGA gear so enraptured by the whole of Donald Trump. It was one thing to read about everything Trump-related in the newspaper each day, another to experience it firsthand. And by everything I mean everything, from his tweets to the churning of staff at the White House to his continuous pushing at the boundaries of the law to the way he appealed to and was constantly stirring up his base. The rallies, it was clear after even just one, were the heart of it all, the place where you could see and experience the rise of an American demagogue . . . and possibly something far worse.
I needed to go deeper in every way.
The rallies were something altogether new in American politics. For the first century of American history,1 would-be presidents had hardly campaigned and rarely spoke directly to the American people. The founders, after all,2 had been particularly “worried by the danger a powerful executive might pose to the system if power were derived from the role of popular leader,” writes presidential scholar Jeffrey Tulis. Almost 175 years3 before Hitler or Mussolini or Juan Peron, those wise and far-seeing architects of the American republic had cautioned in the very first Federalist paper “that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” At his very first inauguration4 George Washington addressed his speech to the Senate and House, not to the people at large. And although he’d written a seventy-three-page set of recommendations for Congress, Washington discarded it and instead “used the occasion to praise virtuous men, to display his own character and virtue, and to implore fellow officers of the government to take their guidance from the Constitution and from ‘that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe.’”
“Prior to this century,5 presidents preferred written communications between the branches of government to oral addresses to ‘the people,’” writes Tulis. And even until 1956,6 when Adlai Stevenson took to leaping across the country by airplane, presidential candidates campaigned via train. “For fifty years,7 the routine hardly changed,” writes Timothy Crouse in The Boys on the Bus, his classic book about the press and the 1972 presidential campaign. “In the post-Depression era, the thirty or forty reporters would pile out at each whistle stop, wearing fedoras, carrying notebooks and pencils, and when the high school band had blared its last sour note, and the candidate had stepped out onto the rear platform, they would stand on the tracks making notes and counting the crowd. When the speech was done, the train’s whistle would blow, and the reporters would clamber back into their fetid press car.” Airplanes and television changed all that, as did ideas about a much more expansive presidential power.
Still, most presidential campaign events were small, at least until candidates picked up momentum toward the final stretch. In 1972 Edmund Muskie8 tried a whistle-stop revival through Florida and barely drew 3,000 people. Mitt Romney’s rallies9 in 2008 seldom cracked the 10,000 mark. Barack Obama was a phenomenon:10 he drew 75,000 people to a rally in Portland, Oregon, in May 2008, and then in St. Louis, Missouri, that October, 100,000 people crowded under and around its famous Arch to see and hear him—more than have ever attended a Trump rally, it’s worth noting. But then January rolled around, and the winning candidate became president, and governing and campaigning were two different things.
Trump never saw it that way. As a political outsider he had no institutional power base. For him, the campaign rallies weren’t just voters coming to see and hear him, voters who needed to be motivated and inspired to go to the polls and cast their vote his way. Trump’s power came directly from the ground up, and through the rallies he began creating a strange and particular alchemy, an animal that had a life of its own and that he understood had to be constantly fed and refed. And as he did so, that animal grew; it grew in size and density, and once he was elected—maybe even before he was elected—it was no longer about votes but about power in and of itself: his power. As I witnessed and began understanding the dynamics of his rallies, I understood Mitch McConnell’s obsequiousness and Trump’s fearless march through the impeachment trial and his pardoning of war criminals and every other transgression.
Every rally was a display of and reinforcement of that power, and Trump wasn’t just a demagogue: he was a textbook right-wing authoritarian populist, the likes of which America had never seen, never mind elected. He wasn’t a fascist, for classic fascism required state-sponsored violence against its own citizens and a premeditated plan to destroy democracy, but consider the characteristics of an authoritarian demagogue as delineated by Federico Finchelstein in From Fascism to Populism in History.
Populism is an ideological pendulum,11 but some features . . . remain constant: an extreme sacralizing understanding of politics; a political theology that considers only those who follow an illuminated leadership to be the true members of the people; an understanding of the leader as being essentially opposed to ruling elites; an idea of political antagonists as enemies of the people, who are potentially (or already) traitors to the nation but yet are not violently repressed; a charismatic understanding of the leader as an embodiment of the voice and desires of the people and the nation as a whole; a strong executive branch combined with the discursive, and often practical, dismissal of the legislative and judicial branches of government; continuous efforts to intimidate independent journalism; a radical nationalism and an emphasis on popular or even celebrity culture, as opposed to other forms of expression that do not represent “national thought”; and finally an attachment to an authoritarian form of antiliberal electoral democracy that nonetheless rejects, a least in practice, dictatorial forms of government.
Trump was the people; he was the people and he was the state, which is why opposing him made you a traitor, and it was easy to imagine that in every conversation and every meeting he had, whether it was with the Pentagon chiefs of staff or National Security Council advisors or members of the House and Senate, that he pictured all those stomping fans screaming “I love you,” screaming his name, waiting in lines all day to hear him and to see him, thousands of them, in rally after rally, city after city, week after week, and that image gave him the power, literal and metaphorical, in his own mind, to say and do whatever he wanted.
The essence of that kind of populism was not just that he was the people—the real people—and that he spoke for them, but that the others were the anti-people. In Trump’s case, that included everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, was a loyal Democrat, or was nonwhite; indeed, xenophobia and racism lay at the core of Trump’s message and his power. It was no coincidence12 that “George Wallace had criticized Johnson for being ‘soft on the nigger question,’” writes Finchelstein. “Wallace defended racism13 ‘in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth.’ By the people he meant American whites. Famously, Wallace had argued that New York City was not precisely an example for the rest of the country: ‘In New York City you can’t walk in Central Park at night without fear of being raped, or mugged, or shot,’” said Wallace. Just twenty years later14 Trump echoed him, taking out full-page ads against the Central Park Five, and he was a key proponent of the birther conspiracy theory that Barack Hussein—he liked to say his middle name in a long, drawn-out cadence—Obama wasn’t even American. Trump would never try to unite the country; doing so would dilute his power, a power built upon the existence of enemies he could demonize and save us from. As long as there were demons and enemies he could fill the arenas, and as long as the arenas were full and the mobs came to his rallies and cheered and said I love you, his power was a kind of cudgel, and there was no stopping him.