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Don’t think of a Trump rally as a political event.
It may have all the hallmarks of a traditional political rally, like candidates, legislators, activists, and attention whores, but a Trump rally is more grandiose. It’s an arena concert for the isolated, the angry, the disengaged and the swindled.
A Trump rally has more in common with a Grateful Dead or Taylor Swift show. (Don’t hurt us.) There are hucksters selling bootleg merchandise in the parking lots, while diehard fans in faded T-shirts tailgate. There are devotees who boast in bathroom lines about how many times they’ve seen Trump live. Guys in costumes appear at so many Trump events that they just become part of the scenery. Some of the people who show up to Trump rallies can be truly nice people, even to the camera-wielding press. Some will offer food and a beer, and open up like a sweet neighbor.
But something changes once you get inside. Suddenly everyone else is destroying America, the press is “the enemy of the people,” and they’re all part of some impossible conspiracy to feed babies to subterranean lizard people.
Almost 10 years on, the Trump show is slick, choreographed. When entering, you’re greeted with a smattering of classic pop and rock songs booming, like the Village People. The warm-up act is usually a local loyalist who will talk about how they are personally making America great by starting in your hometown. Then come the cable news staples, like a backbench congressional bomb thrower or some asshole sheriff, to chum the crowd with red meat. Finally comes the MAGA all-star(s) to hurl bombs and buzzwords, and generally keep the crowd entertained in the event Trump is running late (which he often is).
When Trump finally takes the stage, it’s always some over-the-top production. There’s pyrotechnics, smoke machines, backlighting, and laser lights bouncing around. Smartphones pop up from the crowd like a 21st century cigarette lighter to shoot shitty video nobody else will ever watch.
And Trump just stands there. He sways back and forth, awkwardly clapping and smiling, as the entirety of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” plays at a deafening volume.
You already know the rest: He spends the better part of the next two hours rambling through a speech being fed through at least two teleprompters. He’ll play some classics, like immigration (“Build the Wall”); threaten to prosecute his detractors (“Lock Them Up”); and lie about the press turning cameras off (“Boo”) and complain about “the deep state.” He’ll play some of the newer hits, like “election fraud,”maybe noodle around with a “Sir” story.
Eventually the speech just sort of ends. And there is never any encore.
The Trump show is now the gold standard of right-wing politics. But he’s an almost 80-year-old man who boasts about a diet high in saturated-fat and sodium. He slurs his words and wanders in and out of subjects. While that isn’t anything that hasn’t been reported in the previous decade, no amount of theatrical bullshit can hide the fact that he’s not getting any younger.
So now the Trump show is mutating. A new crop of young people who’ve lived much of their lives in the shadow of Trump’s political career have spent years cultivating their own image. They’re well groomed and physically fit, they wear tailored suits and have real tans. Instead of appearing on a federally regulated broadcast or cable news shows, they’ve built slick media empires on Meta, Twitter, Rumble, Telegram, and TikTok where they can say whatever they want.
Their rallies are full of in-jokes and memes intended to keep young people engaged. They’re sponsored by groups who shill water that isn’t “woke,” and cellphone plans for patriots. They tell you to buy shirts and hats with slogans and logos rather than organizing GOTV strategies or door knocking. It’s not, “vote, vote, vote,” it’s, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”
They’ll set up shop around Trump rallies in an attempt to utilize an already captive audience. This past weekend, while Trump was finishing a speech at Huntington Place in downtown Detroit, white-nationalist Nick Fuentes climbed a staircase across the street and spoke through a bullhorn to over 250 people. As Trump supporters left the rally, they were greeted by Fuentes’s “America First” acolytes in leather trench coats and dark suits, gripping rosaries — it’s a whole thing now — and wearing “AF” pins on their lapels. They may not have known Fuentes was kicked out of the event, but parroted the same white-nationalist and Christian-nationalist themes as other high-profile speakers at the Trump rally. Fuentes’s was just more overt, with his crowd throwing out Heil Hitlers like candy.
They are wresting the torch from the hands of people like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon who pioneered shilling snake oil and conspiracies to rubes. The cult following they’ve built has been primed not to accept any sort of defeat. So when someone like Bannon takes the stage to tell a crowd, “It’s very simple: victory or death,” assume they’re not fucking around.
