COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by HarpercollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

Text © Carl Hoffman 2020

Cover layout design ©HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Carl Hoffman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN 978-0-00-841597-6

Ebook Edition © October 20 ISBN: 978-0-00841599-0

Version 2020-13-08

DEDICATION

FOR CHARLOTTE

EPIGRAPH

By compromising we could learn how each small demand for our outward acquiescence could lead to the next, and with the gentle persistence of an incoming tide could lap at the walls of just that integrity we were so anxious to preserve.

—CHRISTABEL BIELENBERG, THE PAST IS MYSELF

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

AUTHOR’S NOTE

PART ONE: HELL

1. THE CROWD LOVES DENSITY

2. ARE YOU A GOOD PERSON?

3. YOU MUST LOVE JESUS MORE THAN YOUR OWN LIFE

4. HE’S HEAVEN-SENT

5. DREAM ON

6. THE PEOPLE AND THE ANTI-PEOPLE

7. THEY EVEN DOWNSIZED WALMART

8. IT’S ALL PSYOPS

9. ORDINARY PEOPLE

10. SHE’D KILL TO WIN

11. THE LEADER WANTS TO SURVIVE

PART TWO: PURGATORY

12. HER PENIS IS SWINGING

13. I’D PICK UP HIS POOP

14. I WOULD FIGHT YOU FOR HIM

15. THAT BLACK WOMAN WAS NOT HERE

16. WE ARE KICKING THEIR ASS

17. THOUSANDS CRIED OUT … SOME FAINTED

18. A SELF-INDUCED IMAGINARY FRENZY

19. THEY GOT FULL OF IDEAS

20. WE HAVE A SOLUTION

21. COERCION. DOMINATION. CONTROL.

PART THREE: PARADISE

22. I WON’T BEND OVER AND LICK THEIR ASS

23. THE Q CLOCK WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

24. SOMEDAY WE’LL GO FOR A HORSEBACK RIDE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

OTHER BOOKS BY CARL HOFFMAN

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of nonfiction drawn from approximately three months on the road going to eight rallies in eight states. I drove more than five thousand miles, spent more than 170 hours in line in arena parking lots, and listened to the president, up close and in person, for more than twelve hours. Every quote is true, either transcribed in contemporaneous notes or recorded on my telephone. To capture the absurdist non sequitur nature of so many conversations, I have tried to keep them whole, rather than stitched together, which sometimes makes for long, strange passages. Each quote from the president was checked against transcripts of his speeches. Every name is real. There is nothing fake here.

PART ONE

HELL

The author (circled) feeling lost and apart at his first rally, in Minneapolis. Dana Ferguson / Forum News Service

1.

THE CROWD LOVES DENSITY

We trickled into Minneapolis by ones and twos, a migratory influx that grew as showtime approached.

In Las Vegas, sixty-nine-year-old Rick Snowden slipped into brown moccasins and loaded a few blue and gray pin-striped suits, a handful of repp ties, and a bottle of Paco Rabanne cologne into his 2001 champagne-colored Jaguar XJR sedan and headed for the airport. The Jag had 195,000 miles on its odometer and RAS—his initials—hand-painted on the front doors. The suits were Snowden’s real signature, though. Sixty million dollars, he liked to say, had passed through his hands over a long career as owner and manager of a slew of strip joints from D.C. to Vegas. He made a point of always looking good—and smelling good—in case he met the president. (He’d had his photo taken with six commanders in chief.) This would be his fifty-sixth Donald Trump rally, and no one had him beat.

In St. Marys, Ohio, where a once-thriving business district had been rendered a ghost town by Walmart and other forces of global capitalism, Rick Frazier and Rich Hardings climbed into Frazier’s SUV and headed north. Frazier, tall, angular, as thin as a two-by-four and as kind as a grandmother, was a sixty-three-year-old retired pipe fitter. With a high school diploma and a union card he’d weathered a nine-month layoff back in the day and several long strikes, and by the time he retired after forty years, he was making $30 an hour, with double time on weekends and triple time on holidays. He had paid vacations, health benefits, and, now, a pension. He had a cat named Frank (after Sinatra) who slept on his chest. He played the guitar and favored the classic southern rock of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd and had once headlined a band called Sterling Foster (named after a beer sign he’d seen). Frazier was as all-American as Budweiser before it was bought by the Belgians.

His friend, Hardings, also a pipe fitter at the same Continental Tire plant, was as round as Frazier was straight, and he traveled with a life-size cardboard cutout of the president. The two had been buddies for years. Both had been Democrats, Bill Clinton supporters, in fact, who had “walked away” to become fanatical Trumpians. This would be Frazier’s twelfth rally and Hardings’s second.

Further south in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, Dave Thompson briefly considered his choice of rides: the Chevrolet Suburban with the aluminum mag wheels and throaty growl or the classic 1983 Mercedes 240D? Both had a certain surprising flair for the fifty-eight-year-old deeply religious father of three. Lately, though, Thompson had been depressed. His ankle had swelled up for an unknown reason, and no matter how much he slept, he felt exhausted. He could barely muster enough energy to get through the day. But he’d been thinking a lot about God and about Donald Trump. End-times might be coming. There was some serious Satanic stuff going on in this country, and in his mind the president had been placed on this Earth to prepare the world for the next stage, which was going to be big. In the end he decided to fly to the rally in Minneapolis. Thompson was filled with new energy. Purpose. He felt like a man again, you might even say, and for as long as the wife approved, he resolved to hit up every rally he could while holding prayer groups at each one that might move the whole end-times process along.

Then there was Randall Thom. He was a native Minnesotan, a fifty-nine-year-old self-employed house painter and dog breeder, a former Marine, big boned and goateed, who walked with a rolling gait and traveled with a bottle of whiskey, a battery-operated bullhorn, several large flags, and banners exalting Donald Trump. He wore a T-shirt heavily decorated with the Stars and Stripes and the tag “#FRJ,” which stood for Front Row Joe. Thom was not just a Front Row Joe, though; he was the Front Row Joe. When newspaper reporters and TV folks referred to the “Front Row Joes,” they had in mind an ideal-looking Trump fanatic who traveled from rally to rally and was always the first in line and, once inside, crowded the rail right up by the president’s podium. This archetypal Trump fanatic was big and loud and he definitely had a goatee; he wasn’t very articulate and anything might set him off. While Snowden was in the front row at every rally—often along with Thompson and Frazier—they didn’t call themselves Front Row Joes. Snowden thought it was a bit too gauche. But Thom, he was that guy. The very one, and he wore it proudly. He would call everyone together for “the plan,” which usually involved trying to rally the rally goers with his bullhorn and not listening to the Secret Service or the police. Truth be told, many of his fellow superfans thought Thom was a boozing loudmouth. Though Thom said he was neck and neck with Snowden, claiming some fifty rallies to his credit, many doubted the number. It was Snowden who was the unofficial mayor of the line; everyone knew that and felt good about it.

This particular rally, Trump’s four hundredth since announcing his presidential campaign back on June 6, 2015, was scheduled for 7:00 P.M., Thursday, October 10, 2019, at Minneapolis’s Target Center. By 1:30 P.M. Wednesday (a bit late compared to many rallies), Snowden, Frazier, Thompson, Thom, and a flock of others were lined up and ready. As an urban arena in an often-frigid city, the Target Center was surrounded by parking garages connected by enclosed, elevated walkways, which meant that the front of the line was inside a carpeted skyway. When they found it, Snowden and the others were in for a surprise: none of them were first. Instead, ensconced in a padded, top-of-the-line camp chair, his shoes off and placed neatly under his chair, was a scraggly-haired young man in a blue-plaid shirt holding a bible of sorts (though far longer)—a collection of every tweet the president had ever made. Having recently survived cancer, Dan Nelson was seeing the world anew, which meant a fresh commitment to the actual Bible and to Donald Trump, who was remaking the world. This was Nelson’s third rally, and he had a thirty-six-hour jump on his nearest competitor, which was worth admiring since it spoke to his fantastic stamina and commitment—both valuable currencies in the arena.

As the afternoon wore on, fans trickled in, greeted each other with hugs and high fives, and claimed their grub stake with cheap, folding chairs, to be carried along as the line shifted and then abandoned when the rush for the door came. Rich Hardings’s life-size cardboard cutout of Trump went up. People really dug that, liked to have their picture taken with “him.” A Black man arrived in a red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes baseball shirt, and no one commented—African Americans were not just welcome at Trump rallies but encouraged. If you weren’t thinking too hard about it you might see the occasional Black face and think, huh, this is a surprisingly multiracial, heterogeneous crowd. This would be ridiculous, since even a huge Black turnout at a rally might be a hundred in a sea of twenty-two thousand.

Fifteen or twenty people and soon thirty, thirty-five, and, still so many hours before the event, something important happened: critical mass. Being there, you could feel it—a sudden sense of excitement. Of tension. Of momentum. A chain reaction, a growing throng, which is the greatest crowd multiplier of all—for the crowd, writes Elias Canetti, who fled Hitler in 1938 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, “always wants to grow; within the crowd there is equality; the crowd loves density. … The denser it is, the more people it attracts.” Who hasn’t seen a mob on the street and run toward it? The millions in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. Woodstock. Tiananmen Square before the tanks rolled in. The panhandling acrobats in Washington Square Park on a perfect spring day. A burning building. The crowd has immense power. It can pull down statues and can defeat armies and collapse governments. As it builds, the Trump rally crowd hints at something, suggests something: raw power. Power simmering. Power building. An urgency to be there now, before you missed it, before you could no longer get in and be a part of it.

There are an unlimited number of tickets to a Trump rally, no matter how many seats in the venue. The ticket, obtained online, is free, and no gatekeeper will ever ask for it. In an ideal world, from the organizer’s perspective, two hundred thousand tickets for a venue with twenty thousand seats would be claimed, and all those ticket holders would come to the arena hours or even days early. They would create a mob. A spectacle of hungry emotion cooking in the heat or freezing in the cold—suffering is the prelude to redemption—yearning, eager, anxious to get inside. The spectacle becomes its own high-octane fuel, its own catalyst. And anyone who opposes the man controlling the mob is opposing the mob’s power itself. It is unsettling and invigorating. It is a forewarning. “After all, great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word,” wrote Adolf Hitler in 1925.

2.

ARE YOU A GOOD PERSON?

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, 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 fired 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 aware 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.

3.

YOU MUST LOVE JESUS MORE THAN YOUR OWN LIFE

Like Snowden, Frazer, Thompson, and Thom, I pulled into Minneapolis the day before the rally and headed straight to the Target Center, some thirty hours before showtime. I didn’t know what to expect. Crowds? Demonstrators? New revelations were coming out daily concerning the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories about Ukraine and his subsequent effort to block congressionally approved military aid. There was talk of impeachment in D.C. The Democratic mayor of Minneapolis was threatening to withhold crucial security forces and first responders unless the Trump campaign reimbursed the city, and he’d forbidden the wearing of uniforms by police attending the rally as spectators. Indeed, it was hard to remember the days when Minnesota had once been a crucible of left-wing populism, home to farmer’s cooperatives that had spawned the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party, which had dominated state politics in the twenties and thirties. Eugene Debs, the socialist and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, won 6 percent of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election, and twenty-seven thousand of those votes had been in two counties in northern, rural Minnesota. My mother’s relatives, a crowd of great-aunts and uncles and grandparents who remained on farms in adjacent North Dakota when my mother came east as a little girl, had been staunch Democrats. George McGovern hailed from South Dakota and Fritz Mondale from Minnesota, and Minnesota was the one and only state Mondale kept out of Reagan’s hands in 1984. All of which was why the 2016 election results had been so stunning: Hillary Clinton won the state by a mere 44,765 votes. Lake Wobegone country was now a sea of red, just like the rest of rural America, and the Trump campaign wanted not just to win Minnesota but to stake its MAGA flags in the heart of downtown Minneapolis, home to the country’s largest community of Somali Americans and the congressional district of Democratic representative Ilhan Omar.

Downtown at the arena, though, all appeared quiet. As workers began erecting chain-link fencing around the perimeter, I circled it and noticed a small crowd overhead in a glass-enclosed skyway leading to the arena. I had not come prepared for an overnight hangout, and I didn’t understand yet what was happening in front of me; my plan was simply to reconnoiter and return before dawn the next morning. I hadn’t yet met Snowden and the gang. I found the skyway, snapped a photo of myself with Hardings’s cardboard Donald just for kicks, and left.

Getting to Minneapolis had taken me a week, days of rambling some sixteen hundred miles northwest from Washington, D.C., along interstates and blue highways. I had always hated the term “flyover country,” which wasn’t just condescending but ignorant, and though I hadn’t written a whole lot about it, rural America felt familiar to me. I had been to every state in the U.S. except South Dakota, including Hawaii and Alaska. I had been deep underground in an Appalachian longwall coal mine; I had spent days on an American deep-water oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico; I’d even visited U.S. aircraft carriers at sea, as sure a piece of American real estate as any other. The year I turned eighteen I’d lived for eight months in Colorado and spent occasional weekends with my roommate at his family farm in Goodland, Kansas. For years when my children were young, we had driven to my in-laws in New Mexico every summer. A magazine story I’d written about the majesty of eastern Montana had even been turned into a slogan advertising the state.

Middle America had changed over the years, though. In January 2009, the very week of Barack Obama’s inauguration, I’d taken a dispiriting trip on a Greyhound bus from Los Angeles to D.C. The final leg of a fifty-thousand-mile journey around the world on the most dangerous buses, boats, trains, and planes, it was by far the worst, most depressing segment of that epic trip. Even on broken African trains or on a crowded Indonesian ferry, I was surrounded by friendly, smiling, optimistic people eager to talk, curious about the United States. Delicious, home-cooked food hawked by vendors was plentiful and cheap. Most everyone carried shiny, new cell phones, and in many countries—India and Indonesia and Mongolia, for instance—the pace of new construction was frenetic. The world felt bursting and eager. But witnessed from the lurching Greyhound—the only conveyance on that dangerous journey that broke down so completely it had to be abandoned—the United States seemed to be coming apart; it looked broken, cracked, fading, full of abandoned towns and empty malls. My fellow passengers were no better: they carried their belongings in black plastic trash bags, ate at “Greyhound Steakhouses” (McDonald’s), and that trip was the only time in fifty thousand miles when a stranger refused to watch my bag for a moment. The decrepitude I’d witnessed on that journey was the fertile petri dish for the rise of Donald Trump.

Just nine months later, in October 2009, the Great Recession ended, and since then the United States had seen 124 consecutive months of expansion—most of it under Barack Obama—the longest in history. As I drove to my first Trump rally in Minnesota from my home in D.C., taking a week to ramble through western Maryland and West Virginia into Ohio, I could see it: the country—at least on a purely superficial level—felt brighter, more affluent, less despairing.

I spent a night in Celina, Ohio, the seat of Mercer County, which went for Trump by a whopping 81 percent, more than any other county in the state. Like so many of America’s small towns, Celina was two places—the new, bustling strip right off the interstate, of fast-food joints and chain motels anchored by a giant Walmart surrounded by acres of parking lot—and a quiet, old downtown, full of abandoned storefronts and once-stately stone or brick structures. Celina had a plethora of bars, though, and as the sun dropped and a few neon signs winked on, I stopped in at the Steak and Ale.

This idea that Trump territory was some unrecognizable, alien place simply wasn’t true, I thought, looking over a fantastic list of five hundred beers as a college football game played silently on the tube over the long wooden bar and Nina Simone ached through the speakers. In fact, over the course of the next several months, I was struck repeatedly by how familiar it was. It looked the same everywhere, from Ohio to Minnesota to Mississippi to the suburbs of the bluest of blue cities like D.C., places like Manassas, Virginia, a giant, vast suburb of increasing homogeneity. There were exceptions, always, but so much of America outside of its urban centers consisted of the same stores, restaurants, hotels, motels, car repair joints, gas stations; the same music on the radio and the same shows on TV or the internet and the same clothing. I was just beginning to understand this was one small piece of the great structural issues that had led to Trump. In the opening of my travels in Celina, I hadn’t yet identified it, an idea that only took shape gradually, the more I saw and the more I listened.

“Eh, things here are good and they’re bad,” Justin the bartender said, pouring me a pint of Moeller Brew Barn’s Wally Post Red Ale and taking my order for the filet mignon, which turned out to be as tender as a piece of chocolate cake. He was thirty-six, had black studs in both ears, black rectangular glasses, a wispy beard, and wouldn’t have stood out in my hipster D.C. coffee shop.

“I grew up here and we’ve had a real bad drug problem,” he said. “Opioids. Lots of young people have passed, people I went to school with.”

“What do you think about the president?”

“Well, I voted for him, though I have a lot of mixed feelings about a lot of things. Like the border. Why let in any refugees if you’re not going to close the border? It should be closed. Don’t let anyone in. He wants to build the wall and they’re holding him back, just so the next one who gets elected can do it and be the big hero.” I wasn’t sure what he meant about “the next one,” when he added, “And right now you got the U.N. guarding the border.”

“Wait,” I said. “That’s not true. The U.N. has no jurisdiction over the U.S. border. At all.”

He smiled and shook his head. A knowing smile, a little condescending at my naivete. It was the first of dozens of such conversations I’d have in the coming months, conversations that led directly to the most insidious conspiracy theories, a mythical worldview that wasn’t possible to refute or even discuss. The knowing dismissals were not occasional, but constant.

Justin claimed to be Irish and Native American—“I’m half Mescalero Apache, the three hundredth generation of Geronimo,” he said—and “given my heritage I don’t like to open the door to conflict and I just keep it to myself, but there’s a lot of ethnicity around here. Two Mexican restaurants owned by Mexicans and a lot of Marshallese”—Mercer County’s chicken processing plants had drawn one thousand citizens of the Marshall Islands to Celina—“and some things they do are okay and some are not okay. I don’t want their beliefs rubbing off on my children,” he said, as Amy Winehouse kicked in.

As I drove onward through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, I listened to FM radio, and in the broadcast desert of rural America there was one constant: religious radio. It was everywhere all the time, a stream of invective and partisan “news,” and extreme preaching. We must think, a preacher in Ohio said, “what Christ wants versus what man wants. Jesus is saying we must choose to do what Christ wants rather than what our family wants. A father cannot support his homosexual son. If a daughter is wearing the wrong clothes and a father does not say to his daughter you cannot leave the house with those clothes on, then he’s not being a good father. If we have to choose Christ over family, the answer is Yes. We must carry our own cross. I pray that our attachment to Yes is so strong that we give everything else up.” I changed the station.

I was still trying to process that message—was this preacher really suggesting that disowning our gay sons was good parenting? Was that really what Jesus would have wanted us to do?—when a different preacher on a rival station started talking about “the Tribulation, when one quarter of the world’s population would die.” He mentioned the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and explained that some people think the Rapture will come first, some the Tribulation. “There is a time when you can’t buy or sell. You’ll be put to death unless you take the mark of the beast, which might even be a computer chip.” There was something about “ints,” which we’d all use to carry out worldwide trade because by then—and “then” seemed pretty soon—there would be “one world currency and one world system and you’ll have the mark of the beast or you will be put to death and starve. At what point would you lose your faith?” the preacher asked. “What would you do if someone said you must deny Jesus Christ or we’ll take your children and they will be abused and starved? Would you maintain your faith?” You must love Jesus more than your own life, he preached, more than your own children. “Some Coptic Christians walked down the streets of Cairo with T-shirts that said, ‘I’m a martyr, take me.’ Isn’t that wonderful if we in the U.S.A. did this?”

It was jarring to hear exaltations of martyrdom on mainstream radio. How was that much different from ISIS or Al Qaida or Taliban suicide bombers, for whom death in service to God was better than life on Earth taking care of their own families? Passing through state after state, I listened to hours of these millenarian, apocalyptic warnings, and it all served as context for the rallies, a warm-up of sorts, an introduction to a deep and wide vein of American evangelical Protestantism. It was the tap root of American culture, dating right back to the Puritans and Plymouth Rock, and it helped pave the way for so many of the conspiracy theories that were the foundation of Trump’s presidency and support. If you believed the Rapture was imminent and were looking for the Mark of the Beast, why not that vaccines caused autism or that the Q Clock was a font of coded messages or that Hillary Clinton raped babies or that the deep state in collusion with the Fake News was trying to stage a coup? I was beginning to get an inkling of the darkness I was journeying toward.

I crossed into Iowa and noticed an island in the middle of the swollen and slow and silvery Mississippi called Sabula, and in the gray chill of late afternoon I crossed a half-mile causeway into a rugged little community that reminded me more of places I’d been in Siberia than America. Duck-hunting blinds made from skiffs, bristling with sticks and camo, sat on trailers in front of tumbledown houses. Fences askew, old cars rusting on blocks. At one end of town stood an abandoned building with silhouettes of pole dancers on the windows and a diner with worn linoleum floors that had the best pork chops and mashed potatoes with gravy I’d ever tasted. From the riverfront I watched a mile-long freight train lumber across a bridge, janking and clanking, its whistle long and lonely.

Though still full from my lunch, I spotted a church barbecue at the local firehouse, so I went in for a second meal. Tables and chairs easily accommodating forty or fifty were set up, though only a dozen or so people, all of them elderly, were there. I filled a paper plate with barbecue and oozing mac and cheese and plunked down across from ninety-four-year-old Florence McCutcheon.

“Oh, I was born twenty miles west of here on a farm,” she said, pulling her pink cardigan a little closer in the chill of the firehouse. “My dad was killed when I was eleven. He had a nice new tractor and went out to plow and it rained and he got stuck and he refused to leave his new tractor out in the rain and it upset on him and killed him. My two brothers were fourteen and sixteen, so they took over and we kept going. But I couldn’t milk a cow! I tried and tried but I couldn’t, so I got out of there.”

What she did was work. “I worked all my life. I went back to work when my daughter was nine months old and I was twenty-two and I worked sixty-six and a half years without a break. I loved it! And,” she said, lifting a foot up to reveal mid-heel black patent leather pumps, “I love my high heels. They’re part of me. I always wear ’em.

“Anyway, that was in 1947 when I went back to work. First, twenty-three years in the garment industry, sewing, and I loved every minute of it and you’d never believe what I quit to do: drive a semi! My husband drove one and I drove one. I didn’t like it, though, and my husband didn’t appreciate my driving. He said I drove too fast. So then I went into abstracting. Got up at four A.M. every day and I did that until I was eighty-seven. I’m going to make it to a hundred and twenty.”

I asked what brought her to the BBQ. “My daughter is seventy-two and she’s the minister of this church and we live together now, so I came with her. I have a prosthetic eye, you know, so I don’t drive anymore.”

How did she feel about Donald Trump?

“I love him. Just love him. For years I was a registered Independent, but now I’m a registered Republican. I just want to shake his hand. Just because he’s rough around the edges and he’s not a politician and I guess that’s what I fell in love with. I don’t know if he’s doing right or wrong, but gosh I’d sure love to meet him.”

McCutcheon’s spirit and energy buoyed me, and I was all set to leave Sabula when I noticed a plain-looking green building with a rusty sign identifying it as the Sabula Miles VFW, “open to the public.” Inside I found a scene from The Deer Hunter. A yellow Formica-topped bar ran along one end of a big, open room floored in more brown linoleum. The walls hung with framed American flags and medals, two slot machines blinked, and over the bar the Green Bay Packers were battling it out with the Dallas Cowboys. Five women with gray hair, cradling cans of beer in insulating foam cozies, sat next to each other on black Naugahyde stools. I found an empty one next to Kevin Lambert, who was drinking bourbon and soda out of a plastic cup. Lambert, the former police chief of Cordova, Illinois, on the other side of the river, was dressed in a black MIA/POW T-shirt and a black baseball cap. I ordered a can of Bud Light in a cozy and settled into another tale of hard knocks and woe: time in the military; a car accident as a young policeman that left two dead and him in a coma for one month and unable to walk for one and a half years. Lambert’s wife left him and he’d lost his job. But he’d clawed his way back and repossessed his badge, only to lose it for the last time after, he said, he dared to arrest the son of the mayor, who was technically Lambert’s boss. “‘I’m just doing my job,’ I told him, but he was on my ass from then on, trying to fire me. I got a lawyer but the writing was on the wall.” (What he didn’t mention—what so many men, especially, didn’t mention in their them-against-the-man stories—was his own responsibility in his fall from grace. In fact, a simple Google search revealed that, not long before his resignation, he’d been discovered “asleep” in his car in a parking lot late at night and then been driven home by a fellow law enforcement officer, which was just a few months after he’d struck a car at 1:00 A.M. and then fled the scene. Nor did he mention the two protective orders signed against him by his former wife and another woman.) Now he slung beers at the VFW part-time, and he was often on one side of the bar or the other. “I like it here. I like to talk and I like to listen,” he said, “and everybody supports everybody else. We don’t talk politics at the bar. I was raised a Democrat, but I like the way Trump stirs things up. I voted for him and I’ll probably do it again.” I remarked that I was surprised the VFW was open to the public, and he said something that stuck with me: “No one joins the VFW anymore. We can’t get ’em in, and if it wasn’t open to the public, it would all just die.”

4.

HE’S HEAVEN-SENT

It was still dark when I climbed out of my Uber on rally day at the Target Center in a cold drizzle. And immediately I panicked. I was late. The crowd had materialized. Clusters of TV trucks parked on side streets, their tall antennas raised, fresh-cheeked reporters standing in the glare of lights. Portable fences now circled the arena. Streets were closed. Police cruisers with lights blinking and black Chevrolet Suburbans parked at odd angles against jersey barriers. A cluster of Trumpians stood in the street in garish red, white, and blue MAGA regalia, from baseball caps to sweatshirts, and some big guy with a goatee and a Stars and Stripes cowboy hat—Randall Thom himself, I would soon learn—was chanting “USA! USA! USA!” into a bullhorn in front of cameras. Nobody was fooling anyone: Trump supporters loved the media, and especially television cameras, as much as the Kardashians. They gravitated toward them like everyone else. I followed packs of similarly clad men and women funneling toward one of the parking garage entrances and found several thousand people snaking hundreds of yards back from yesterday’s front of the line. I felt nervous, a little uncertain—should I out myself? How would people react?—as I slotted in next to Al Kocicky and Troy Hatlestad. “I woke up in the middle of the night with a start thinking about parking, and my phone pings, and I’m like who’s calling me? and it’s my buddy Al—he saw on Facebook that I was going—and he said, ‘You still going?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’”

“We’ve probably seen each other like three times in the last twenty years,” Al said, “but I saw he was going on Facebook and I woke up thinking about the rally and I just got chills; I knew I could count on him.”

I hadn’t had coffee and offered to see what I could find for Al and Troy if they saved my space and watched my knapsack; the line was ever-growing behind us.

“Sure,” Al said.

“Wait,” said Troy. “Do you know this guy? You don’t, right?”

“There’s nothing really in it,” I said. “No bomb—you can look inside.”

Troy shook his head, looking serious. “No fucking way, man.”

I slung on my backpack and trudged off, returning thirty minutes later to find the line two hundred yards longer.

“Starbucks, eh?” said Troy, looking at the coffee I handed him. “Did they object?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, Starbucks. They’re liberals. They might have spit in the cups while you weren’t looking.”

“He’s not wearing colors,” said Al, looking me over.

Troy was fifty-three, a flooring contractor from Oak Grove, Minnesota, a big, muscular man with a gray goatee and a shaved head wearing blue jeans, a Trump sweatshirt, and a camo baseball hat. Al was three years younger, clean-shaven and half a foot shorter. “Don’t let him fool you,” Al said to me, nodding toward his friend. “He’s rich. Works his ass off.”

Suddenly a middle-aged woman in full regalia yelled out “Thank you for your service!” as two policemen walked by.

“COPS FOR TRUMP! COPS FOR TRUMP! COPS FOR TRUMP!” the line broke out in chants.

Al had been wiped out in the 2001 recession and then again in 2008, and now he was rebuilding himself once more as an independent mortgage broker. “I don’t consider myself a Democrat or a Republican,” he said. “Trump is down to earth. He’s a businessman. He says what he stands for and he can’t be bought. He couldn’t have come at a better time. He’s heaven-sent. Really. As far as his taxes, all along I bet he knew they would come at him and at the end he’ll give ’em out and say, Full House, they’re clean! He’s so much smarter than everyone else, I just love it. He’s a wizard and he’s a step ahead of everyone, always has a pair of aces up his sleeve. Here’s the deal: Pelosi, Biden’s kid, they’re all crooked as shit. Donald Trump is the real deal. The corruption runs deep.”

“If the liberal left gets back into power it’ll be like a North Korea, a China,” chimed in the middle-aged woman in front of us. This was her first rally, and she’d gotten up at 2:00 A.M. and driven down from the South Dakota border. “Sure hope he wins in 2020 or else we’ll have socialism. I’ve voted Democratic in the past, but no more. The Dems have gone off the rails.”

“Yeah,” said Troy, “imagine what would happen if he didn’t have to deal with this bullshit. Obama set up the whole fucking thing.”

It was 9:00 A.M.

The hours passed slowly. I sat on the ground. I made trips to a bar several blocks away to use the bathroom. I paced the line, an ever-growing snake of men and women and children and teenagers in red, white, and blue T-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, shoes, capes, and MAGA and KAGA (Keep America Great Again) hats, clutching signs and flags and bumper stickers and pricked with buttons, that filled the skyways and the parking lots. I wondered if people could tell I was an imposter. I felt conspicuous; I was sure they were looking at me. I felt like the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”; couldn’t people see and hear my liberal heart? Randall Thom roamed up and down the line with his bullhorn exhorting chants of “USA! USA! USA!” and I tried to introduce myself and talk to him, but he was too fevered to focus. A smiling man in a blue suit worked the line selling small Trump buttons the size of quarters for one dollar. He seemed so confident and so at home, almost like he worked for the campaign itself, that I wanted to know him, but he, too, was on the move, and I was hesitant to blow my cover as a journalist.

It was a festival, a rock concert, and people were fired up. “I’m not anti-Muslim,” said Alley Waterbury, a woman in black leggings, who was standing in line with us a few places back and running for Congress to challenge Ilhan Omar in the Fifth District, “but we have a problem with Muslims in Minnesota. That is our biggest national security threat.”

“They suck,” a teenager with long black hair and a MAGA shirt said.

By 1:00 P.M. the energy quieted; people were tired, and there were still six hours to go until showtime. But then the line heaved. Moved. A great shifting. Chairs. Bags. Sacks of food. It started compressing, and the noise level picked up again, and from then on it was hard to sit—there was little room.

Doors were scheduled to open at 4:00 P.M., but at two the line shifted again, a mass movement of thousands, during which I lost Troy and Al; the doors apparently were open, and half an hour later I was through the TSA and Secret Service-staffed metal detectors (no backpacks, no cameras with removable lenses, no recording devices, no firearms) and into the arena itself, seated in the sixth row, about one hundred feet from the stage.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.