In this week’s Presidential Debate, Donald Trump couldn’t resist talking about his rallies and the number of people who attend. For ardent Democrat Jonathan Kronstadt, attendance at a Donald Trump rally earlier this year was a quest of understanding: just who are MAGA supporters? He found a disconnect – between their politeness and the violence of the slogans on their hats, shirts and capes.
When I was a kid, one eagerly anticipated annual event was going to the circus. Another was going to the New Jersey shore. Many years later, I took the chance to do both again.
How bad could it be: a seven-hour round road trip to Wildwood, New Jersey, spending the day surrounded by tens of thousands of Americans dedicated to handing over our beloved democracy to an authoritarian huckster and serial sex abuser? At least I’d be by the ocean, and it’s hard to have a bad day when you’re by the ocean.
Early on, I decided this should be a buddy movie, so I canvassed my contacts list for a suitable wingperson. This proved successful, both as invitation and sociological survey of an admittedly homogenous group of DC-area white liberals. About a third of the respondents were immediately concerned for my physical safety and mental health. Another half or so expressed their affection for me and distaste for the offer in unambiguous terms.
Invitations to Trump rallies appear to bring out the animal in some of my friends. Others offered solid excuses for not being able to join me. My younger sister, who claims she hasn’t slept through the night since Trump was elected in 2016, agreed to go with me if I couldn’t find anyone else, but fortunately I got a few truly enthusiastic yeses. The most sincere and logistically simple came from my good friend Nick, whose six-month stint in Wellington thanks to a 2005 Ian Axford Fellowship provided my first introduction to the wonders of New Zealand.
Declining the offer of a press credential was a no-brainer. First, because I wanted to mingle with the masses, and second, because the press is public enemy No 1 at these events, shunted into a gated pen where they endure taunts and threats from speakers and attendees.
The first key decision of rally day was wardrobe. I wasn’t going undercover, so no need to pre-order a MAGA hat or Let’s Go Brandon (conservative code for “Fuck Joe Biden”) T-shirt.
I figured red and blue were statement colours, so I opted for dark green pants and a light green hoodie I got in Tybee Island, Georgia, an obscure enough location that I couldn’t be instantly politically pegged. A generic baseball cap completed the outfit. My vehicle choice was between a 2023 Chevy Bolt EV and a 2016 Prius Prime. Given that I didn’t feel like dealing with finding a charging station, and the fact that Trump routinely rails against the evils of EVs, I decided to take the car that would get us there and back without stopping for fuel of any kind. One friend pressed me to borrow his pickup truck for cover, but I wasn’t giving up my devotion to small cars for a failed reality TV show host.
As the crow flies, Wildwood is only 193km from my house, but because you have to go around one bay and over the skinny end of another, the drive is 290km. I picked Nick up at 9am Saturday, realising we’d be among the later arrivals for the rally’s proposed 2pm start. Some Trump supporters had arrived as early as late Thursday afternoon and camped out on the beach to be among the first in line. Trump was scheduled to appear at 5pm. Traffic was surprisingly light, and we decided to park about a kilometre away from the rally’s entrance in case a clean getaway became advisable.
Wildwood is a beach town intentionally stuck in the 1950s, a nostalgia-fuelled playland with wide, white-sand beaches and a classic Jersey Shore boardwalk. It’s known as “two miles of smiles” for its dizzying array of arcades, amusement parks and culinary indulgences, from French fries and pizza to the regionally iconic soft chewy candy, the salt water taffy.
It stakes one of many claims to being the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll as, in 1954, Bill Haley and his Comets first played Rock Around the Clock there, the first rock song to top both the US and British pop charts.
It was a fitting spot for a Trump rally, with his ever-present promise to Make America Great Again, an unveiled desire to go back to a gauzy time when things like civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and the like weren’t such pressing and troublesome concerns, and most of the quarter of a million immigrants we got annually – that’s a monthly total these days – came from Western Europe. Still, I was sort of surprised to hear the sentiment coming from 20-year-old Mason, a recent college graduate and the first rallygoer I spoke to, shortly after Nick and I took our spots at the end of one of the longest lines I’ve ever seen.
“It’s not really about politics,” Mason maintained. “It’s a way of life. It’s about going back to the way things were. Not trying to reinvent the wheel, just really focusing on getting back to the American way.” I thought about asking him how he knew how “things were”, given that he was just three years older than Trump’s oldest grandchild, but I let it go. Though this was his first Trump rally, he claimed they were “all peaceful, there’s no tension in the air. It’s almost like Woodstock,” a truly mind-bending comparison.
Fox news playbook
Pretty much everyone I spoke to was about as nice as they could be. All answered my questions politely, but every answer was pretty much straight out of Fox News’ Guide to the Trumpiest Talking Points. The retired New York City firefighter and lifelong Republican told me he came because it was a beautiful day and to hear what Trump had to say but felt compelled to add that “you can’t go to Manhattan any more because it’s too dangerous”.
Speaking of danger, it was not lost on me that we were just 45 minutes from another famous New Jersey shore town, Atlantic City, where, at one point, Trump owned three casinos, employing 8000 people and accounting for nearly a third of the area’s gambling revenue. But two of the casinos failed, the third was sold, and Trump Entertainment Resorts declared bankruptcy four times, in 1991, 2004, 2009 and 2014.
As usual, though, Trump walked away enriched. “Atlantic City fuelled a lot of growth for me,” he said in a 2016 interview. “The money I took out of there was incredible.” The city, however, wasn’t as fortunate, and the resulting decay fuelled what is now one of the highest crime rates in the nation.
“When Trump failed with his casinos he turned Atlantic City into a ghost town,” said photographer Brian Rose, who did a book on the city’s post-Trump struggles. “His legacy still haunts the boardwalk.”
We made our way through security – about 90 minutes from the end of the line to the other end of a metal detector – provided by the US Secret Service, what with Trump being a former president. We strolled to a spot about as close as we could get to where the speakers would be, which was still pretty far away. Then we waited. And watched.
If you couldn’t read English, you would have left thinking it was a perfectly peaceful, happy crowd, as most of the aggressively menacing and violence-pledging messages were on rallygoers’ shirts, hats, capes and flags. I wanted to talk to the two guys wearing “Alex Jones for President” shirts about their clearly divided political loyalties, but engaging folk who are fans of a guy who called the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a hoax was a bridge way too far.
I wanted to talk to the 40-something couple wearing “Real Jews Vote Trump”, though really only to ask how they knew, given the whole secret ballot thing.
I wanted to try to cheer up the poor kid in the MAGA hat – he looked to be about 8 – who spent the afternoon filling, emptying and refilling three cans with some of Wildwood’s finest white sand. I don’t think this was what he had in mind when his parents said they were all going to spend the day at the beach. The crowd did get excited when Trump’s plane flew overhead, and later, when it appeared a motorcade arrived on the scene.
Finally, after about 90 minutes of utter confusion thanks to what was arguably the gayest playlist ever – Queen, Elton John, ABBA, Village People (YMCA and Macho Man) – Pastor Jesse Eisenhart of True North Church got things started with a fairly standard invocation. He did get me shaking my head when he spoke of vengeance being the sole purview of God, given that he was opening for a man who has made “I am your retribution” a literal rallying cry. But there are so many disconnects and incongruities at a Trump rally you have to pace yourself.
The patriotic parade continued with the Pledge of Allegiance, delivered by someone introduced, free of context or affiliation, as Rob Cantini. Then Dr Sungbae Ju, president of the Bel Canto International Society, slowly and painfully wrestled our national anthem to the ground, taking two operatic minutes to do what the US Navy Band – the gold standard for Star Spangled Banner-ing – does in 79 seconds.
Mike Crispi, a 31-year-old rising star in the MAGA movement and host of the Mike Crispi Unafraid podcast, spoke next and got cheers by proclaiming the gathering the biggest in New Jersey political history, and by trotting out a relatively new MAGA slogan: “Too Big To Rig”, meaning this time Trump will win by such a wide margin the Democrats will be unable to steal the election as they did in 2020.
Time for another disconnect though, as, contrary to the leader of the movement –who, 45 minutes later, proclaimed his desire for solely day-of-election voting with paper ballots and voter identification required – Crispi advised people to vote any way they could: vote early, by mail, by ballot harvesting, and on election day.
Donna Higbee, a retired chief of police in a nearby town, told the crowd that “putting our families, our faith and our communities first has to be our No 1 priority”, but no one seemed to worry too much about how to put all three first. Then Ben Ocasio Sr, pastor at Rock of Salvation Church in nearby Vineland and one of only three African-Americans I saw at the rally, implored the crowd to “be kind to all people, be honest and humble, live a life of morals, be gentle”. I didn’t see anybody change their T-shirts after he said that.
After a video showing University of North Carolina students restoring an American flag that had been replaced by protesters with a Palestinian flag, another beach icon – a plane with a message trailing behind known as an aerial billboard – flew by with the affirmation “God Bless D Trump”. They must charge by the letter.
We clearly were getting close to the main event, because up to the podium strode North Dakota governor, billionaire and vice-presidential wannabe Doug Burgum. If Trump is looking for someone who is incapable of upstaging him, he need look no further than Burgum.
He starts with an obligatory but confusing call and response. “I’m gonna ask a question and if your answer is yes I want you to yell ‘Trump’ as loud as you can,” he said, and then proceeded to ask a decidedly un-yes/no question, “Who are we going to send back to the White House in November?” On the third try he urged the crowd – estimated to be between 30,000 and 100,000 strong – to yell so loud “they can hear it in Biden’s basement in Delaware”, 135km away.
Next up was Christian Craighead, a British special forces hero who’d saved 20 lives in a 2019 terrorist attack in a Nairobi hotel. He spoke of that experience and of meeting Trump in the Oval Office. And then it was time for the headliner to appear.
‘We’re gonna win New Jersey’
We couldn’t see him stride to the podium from where we were, but his walk-up music is unchanging and unmistakable: Lee Greenwood’s anthem of American exceptionalism, God Bless the USA. Trump opened by telling the crowd, “We’re gonna win the state of New Jersey” – he lost it to Biden in 2020 by 16 percentage points. Speaking of Biden, which he does an awful lot, Trump said he’s “crooked, corrupt and incompetent. Other than that he’s doing quite a good job.”
This gets a pretty big laugh, so he repeats the joke almost verbatim. Then he shouts out to two nearby VIPs: “Look at those two guys, OJ, Lawrence, my golfing friends.” Lawrence was, and still is, Lawrence Taylor, perhaps the greatest defensive player in the history of American football.
The OJ at the rally was Ottis Jerome Anderson, a relatively famous football player, but nowhere near as famous as the Orenthal James Simpson I and most of the rest of the crowd thought he was referring to, which was weird given that that OJ had died a month earlier.
What made it even stranger was later when he spoke of the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” who is, for those of you who don’t know, a fictional cannibal from the movie Silence of the Lambs, so never alive and really not great. But that and the OJ reference together added a shot of seance into the rally.
During a critique of inflation, Trump said, “Let’s talk about hot dogs,” and then bent the space-time continuum again with this story: “Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, never eat before you perform. I said, ‘I’m not performing, I’m a politician,’ if you can believe it.” Thing is, Sinatra died in 1998, and Trump wasn’t a politician until 2015. Then, apropos of nothing, he added: “Pavarotti was a good friend. He ate all the time; he didn’t care.”
Then he sicced the crowd on the press, but only for a minute, before going back to trashing Biden; then claiming “we handled Covid as well as any country in the world”; railing about the 20 million illegal immigrants” who come mostly from jails, insane asylums or terrorist cells; comparing his four criminal indictments with just one for Al Capone, likely the most famous US gangster ever; gets downright profane in leading the crowd to answer “shit!” by asking “Everything they touch turns to what?”; gets boos when asking if anyone likes Chris Christie, former New Jersey governor and leader of Trump’s 2016 White House transition team; then mock-admonishes someone in the front row who calls Christie a fat pig.
The greatest hits go on:
• Terminate the green new scam and drill, baby, drill. Get rid of the windmills; they kill the birds and whales.
• Nato nations don’t pay their bills.
• EVs are fine but they don’t go anywhere.
• Crime in Venezuela is down 72% because they sent so many of their criminals here.
• On day one we will begin the largest deportation in American history.
• We sent abortion back to the states, which is what everybody wanted.
• No money for schools that have mask or vaccine mandates.
• No men in women’s sports.
Perhaps the most unexpected thing he did during his speech was take a shot at New Jersey’s most famous and favourite native son. “We’ve got a much bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen,” he said.
But the one that got the most attention was right near the end. He was, as usual, bashing Biden as the worst president in history and intended to say that Jimmy Carter was happy now not to be at the bottom. But he called him Jimmy Connors – the tennis player – instead, and got very flustered, called him just Jimmy for several non communicative seconds, then brain reined in, his correct last name.
He begins his ending with an all-inclusive, apocalyptic appeal. “We will fight for America like no one has ever done before.”
Keeping track of all of Trump’s superlatives is exhausting. “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side we will demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers from our government, drive out the globalists, cast out the Marxists, socialists and fascists, throw off the sick political class that hates our country, rout the fake news media and drain the swamp, and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”
That’s followed by the “We will make America ___ again” word salad, which today features the following adjectives: powerful, wealthy, strong, proud, safe, and of course, great.
His walk-off music is Sam and Dave’s R&B classic Hold On, I’m Coming, which makes a lot more sense than his 2016 choice, the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want. To be honest, I caught the last hour of his 90-minute speech in the comfort of my living room. He started 90 minutes late, and about half an hour in, it was already 7.30pm, getting quite chilly, and we’d been there since 1pm, so Nick and I turned to each other almost at the exact same time and decided we’d had enough.
We weren’t the only ones, either, as a slow but steady drift towards the exits started shortly after Trump started talking. My guess is most of the crowd were day-trippers, tired from having stood for hours, and just wanted to beat the traffic and get home. Besides, they’d got to spend hours with like-minded folk who all seemed very happy to be there, and that seemed the best part of the day for most of them.
Nick and I spent the drive home testing theories as to how almost half of US adults had been hoodwinked by this unimaginative huckster into believing that he cared about them and their families, when his every action demonstrates he’s capable of caring only about the man in his mirror. None alone seemed to answer the question, but together grievance, insecurity, tribalism, a feeling of being marginalised by the ruling class and a few others seemed to form a reasonably sufficient narrative.
I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but I was pleasantly surprised by how friendly everyone seemed to be, even those to whom I admitted being a lifelong Democrat. I like to think that the true nature of these folk was revealed in our pleasant one-on-one encounters rather than the unkind slogans they chanted and the jokes they laughed at.
What surprised me most about the event was how poorly paced and staged it was. The warm-up speakers ranged from uninspiring to downright confusing, and you never knew when or why whatever was happening was happening. A lot of the time nothing was happening. I’d have thought, having done so many of these and given that this seemed to be an exceptionally large and important rally to the campaign, that it would have been a better-oiled machine and that, frankly, more would have been done to keep the crowd engaged.
The previous month, I took an even longer drive to be in the zone of totality for my first full solar eclipse, so I could now tick that and experiencing a Trump rally off my bucket list. Both involve an impressive amount of darkness, but only one offers the certain promise of light returning.
Election Day on November 5 still seems far away, and the most appropriate song at present wasn’t on the rally playlist: Tom Petty’s The Waiting (Is The Hardest Part). Hopefully, unlike for OJ, Capone, Sinatra, Pavarotti and even Hannibal Lecter, the light will return for the rest of us.
This story was originally published in the NZ Listener’s, July 20 - 26, 2024 edition.