Liar’s Circus

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.

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