I had visions of getting back to my chair at 4:00 a.m., but when the alarm sounded I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just the early hour, but the mere thought of listening to so many crazy people, of the hours and hours of loud Trump MAGA colors and chants and boasts and celebration of an America I didn’t recognize. I felt a weight. Something big and oppressive sitting on my chest, my shoulders. I didn’t want to go. I was dreading it. I didn’t want to have more conversations about drinking the blood of babies. I wanted to stay in bed. I tossed and turned and wondered what I had been thinking. Was everything I had experienced so far an anomaly? Surely not everyone shared the same extreme views. And didn’t I have an obligation to try harder, to work to get past the casual chitchat to a deeper connection? Finally I forced myself into the dark streets for the mile walk to the arena at 5:30 a.m. I was barely halfway there when I heard a hum, like bees, like some giant hive, and turned a corner and there it was: the line. It had mutated throughout the night and had become half a mile long. Shit, I thought, worrying about my chair and my precious place in line, and I ran as the hive hummed louder and the mass of humanity rose and began to move and to compress—the gates to the zigzagging entryway corral had apparently opened—and somehow I found my chair and my Huma Abedin blood-drinking conspiracy lady and fell in with her and we threaded through the gates and before it was even light there I was, sitting in the second switchback, a hundred fifty yards from the very front of the line, right in front of a forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high jumbotron, with thirteen hours to go.
Minneapolis, with its elevated, enclosed skywalks, had been an anomaly, it turned out. This was the real model, repeated from Dallas to Tupelo to Bossier City and beyond: a zigzagging switchback of metal fencing that could hold thousands, positioned in front of a giant video screen that came alive when it was barely light and repeated an hour-long loop all day of a ten-foot-high Lara Trump in conversation from “Studio Forty-Five in Trump Tower” with everyone from Brad Parscale (“The biggest threat to democracy in America is the media telling false information and lies; the Democrats want to get rid of airplanes, cars, and give everyone a job and give everything away for free”) to the Black conservative twitter stars Diamond and Silk (“People forget that the Democrats are the party of slavery and the KKK”) to Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip (“Trump is a genius”).
There wasn’t much to do but sit hunched in my camp chair, spine contorted in a torturous lumbar concavity, and watch Lara, with her Botoxed forehead and overfilled lips, demonize the crooked, corrupt, lying socialist Democrats, over and over again. A deep feeling of loneliness came over me. A kind of loneliness I’d never experienced, not even when I’d lived in New Guinea in a swamp without roads or stores or electricity. I found myself texting my adult children, my friends, almost everyone I knew. I felt desperate to connect with them. I had traveled all over the world, and I had spent hundreds, maybe even thousands, of nights alone in hotel rooms, and that was nothing compared to this. To be alone wasn’t lonely; to be by yourself in a massive crowd of people who didn’t share any of your values, to be in an echo chamber where reality itself wasn’t acknowledged, that was crushing.
For the first time I began to grasp what people drawn to cults might feel, how they succumbed. To stand alone against an entire worldview, an entire narrative, all by yourself for hours on end was emotionally exhausting. All I had to do was slip on a red MAGA T-shirt or sweatshirt and turn to my neighbor and admit that Donald Trump was the greatest president in history, that he was heaven-sent, and I would fit in. Wasn’t that what we all wanted, after all? To belong. To be part of something bigger than ourselves. That thing that I did feel I was part of I always recognized the moment I arrived home from some remote corner of the world. To step off a plane from Borneo or even Singapore or Geneva was to step into a world that was so much more cosmopolitan, multiracial, and multiethnic than anywhere else. The streets of New York or D.C. or San Francisco were filled with so many different people and colors and races and religions, creating a place where there were no tribes. I had spent a lot of time in Switzerland in 2016 researching a book, and I had the sense that it was the home of the Last White Tribe. My tribe was no tribe at all, and that was also my country.
Or had been.
“America does not consist of groups,”1 said Woodrow Wilson. “A man who thinks himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.” But one of the most disconcerting things about being immersed in the world of the Trump rallies was a sense not just of homogeneity, but of its celebration. A large part of what people loved about being at the rallies was being among people who were just like them. And overwhelmingly, that meant white people. There was nothing heterogeneous about a Trump rally, which gave an illusory sense of what America could someday look like if it were made great again. Of course there were Latinos for Trump and Jews for Trump and Blacks for Trump—at the rallies the handful of Blacks were often used as literal stage props, purposefully seated behind the president, so their presence would be captured on television—but the numbers of those groups paled in comparison to the tens of thousands of whites. I even saw the occasional person holding an LGBTQ for Trump sign. But those “others” were celebrated and tolerated precisely because there were so few of them. They didn’t have the power to demand anything.
At a certain level the mood at every rally was festive. A positive energy, said Dave Thompson. People were overwhelmingly celebratory, sitting and talking and eating chips and dip and watching the jumbotron. At a certain level it was no different from a big football game or a Phish concert. Weren’t those sort of tribal? Except those were groups to which anyone could belong as long as you liked the Gators or Phish, and they had nothing to with ethnicity or race, nothing to do with power.
People were unfailingly nice to me, even when I revealed I was a writer (though they usually assumed the book I was working on was pro-Trump). Yet an undercurrent of simmering resentment was palpable, the electricity of a mob that wanted action and confrontation, that wanted to boo the fake news and the corrupt Democrats, that was eager to build the wall to exclude the other, and I wondered what would happen if Trump suddenly pointed a finger and said, go get them!
Even without his explicitly inciting violence, acts of anti-Semitism and hate crimes were increasing. They were anomalies perpetrated by nuts, of course, at least in the words of the administration. But sitting in an arena among this homogeneous mob of nice people screaming “BUILD THE WALL,” I couldn’t help but think how the domestic violence of the Third Reich had been committed by nice people who loved their kids and tucked them in at night. I had spent time in Ambon, in the Molucca Islands of Indonesia, just four years after violence erupted between Christians and Muslims. It was one thing to think of such events in the abstract, another to be there, with someone who’d witnessed it firsthand, so close to the date. Buildings were still burned and riddled with bullet holes, and my guide described a place where he and his neighbors had lived together for who knows how long, a normal, everyday place, until suddenly it turned into a war zone. It was a common story throughout the world, from Germany in the 1930s to Bosnia in the 1990s to Ambon in the 2000s. Human beings were little time bombs capable of tremendous cruelty, and it didn’t actually take much to trigger it, especially when they were brought together in great numbers to celebrate their own tribe, a celebration explicitly and implicitly built upon demonizing anyone who was different, as Trump did repeatedly in his speeches. “These to me were just ordinary people,”2 writes Christabel Bielenberg in The Past Is Myself, her memoir of being an Englishwoman in Germany during the rise of Hitler, “. . . and I only got out of my depth when I discovered that at the drop of a hat, or rather the sound of a voice, they could transform themselves into a roaring jostling mob, with glassy eyes and right arms outstretched.” History showed we were all susceptible.