My long, strange trip to Madison Square Garden to meet Trumpy – the nation

Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was my last chance to see the man in action before the election. So even though the organizers had denied my request for a media pass (what, The nation?), my husband and I decided to go anyway. Unfortunately, when my husband and I got to Penn Station, the place was packed and the police, who were many, had blocked every exit but one. It took us years to get out of there. Once we got out, we had no idea where to go. For some time we stood in a long queue, which turned out to be reserved for VIPs. “How did you become a VIP?” I asked several people who didn’t seem to have a clue. “My friend arranged it,” said one woman with a shrug. We walked to 34th and 6th and joined the regular line. It was even longer. So much for some mischievous Democrats trying to sabotage the event by registering and not going.

The first thing I noticed was how many black and brown people there were—lots of Hispanics, more than a sprinkling of blacks and Asians. Of course, there were plenty of white people, including elegant Eastern European women and their dashing husbands, young Orthodox Jews (where were the women?), and loud young men who regularly erupted in shouts of “USA! USA!” But the image you might have had of Trump rallies as all-white celebrations was not true.

The first person I spoke to was a black woman holding a huge American flag over which she had draped a white embroidered tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. Her top three issues were immigration, mandatory vaccination and “boys in girls’ toilets”. She claims her 11-year-old daughter was told at school how to wear rolled up socks next to her vagina to simulate male genitalia. She was vehemently against abortion, even though her boyfriend at the time urged her to terminate her pregnancy. She also told me that she had dreams where God told her what was going to happen. For example, two weeks before Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, God told her that an assassination attempt would be made on him.

Next was a Colombian-American woman who said she was 82 and had been in the United States since she was 2 years old. Her English wasn’t great, especially considering she would grow up and go to school here, but what she told me was clear: Under Trump, her trucking business was doing great—gas was cheap, taxes were low— but now, thanks in part to “that stupid Obamacare,” he was struggling. I asked her how she felt about Trump’s many insults to Latino immigrants. Like everyone I interviewed, she simply didn’t accept anything that contradicted her opinion: “Trump loves the Hispanic people!”

Next, a young Christian, anti-abortion Korean-American woman in a stylish gray MAGA hat. She was just the nicest person in the world. We immediately bonded over being petite women in a sea of ​​taller people. She told me that she works from home doing something on the Internet for NYU, but she doesn’t want to say more, probably because she’s developing her own online business, the nature of which she also doesn’t want to reveal. Like many Trumps I’ve met, she had gone far down the rabbit hole of alternative facts she discovered by following far-right commentators on the Internet. She believed that the FBI and Nancy Pelosi orchestrated January 6th. She believed an elderly woman was now in jail because she walked past the Capitol that day. She believes jurors found Trump guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll because they were threatened with physical harm by, among unnamed others, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. What about the many sexist things Trump has said? “So many men talk like that,” she said with a small smile. Even though her parents were immigrants, she supported Trump’s plan to deport millions of them: after all, her parents waited years to come here legally. When I pointed out that many of the undocumented people are seeking asylum, she said yes, but their appointments are five years in the future, so they just whff! ran away

Standing nearby was an old white man from Cape May, New Jersey who described himself as a construction worker. He told me that the flood in North Carolina was the fault of Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband. Two weeks before the floods, Emhoff had bought permits for lithium mines in the state, but people had refused to sell their houses so the mines could be built. Then came the floods which destroyed the houses – now the property could be bought for next to nothing. Too convenient, those floods, huh?

I asked his daughter, a yoga teacher and life coach, what she wanted Trump to do: “I just want it to be like 2020,” she replied. Meanwhile, a young white woman was yelling, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” while dancing with a sign that read “Say No to the Hoe”.

I wish I had had the opportunity to meet this energetic misogynist, but at this point we were informed that the garden was full and began the long and confusing trek back to 6th Avenue. I had asked a very tall young man to take a photo of the crowd from as high as he could lift my phone. It shows the street packed with people all the way to MSG, two long blocks away. (When people say the garden wasn’t full, don’t believe them.) This affable young man turned out to be a newly hired reporter for The Daily callconservative shop founded by Tucker Carlson. His main issue seemed to be the banning of gas stoves that Harris was allegedly pushing for, a claim judged to be false by The Washington Post.

I came away from my afternoon with Trumpy confused. We talk a lot about people living in a blue bubble, and rightly so – many of us do. But these (mostly) friendly regulars also live in a bubble—from TikTok videos, far-right YouTubers, and websites like, um, The Daily Caller. They are deeply alienated from standard sources of information. For them this thing is reported in New York Times or The Washington Post is another reason to find him suspicious. It’s a paranoid vision where the vice president’s husband controls the weather (well, he’s Jewish) and the government will come into your apartment and take your stove. Yet they seemed perfectly normal—well, maybe not the woman who thought God was speaking to her in dreams. Some of my friends thought I would be risking violence by mixing with the crowd, but people didn’t seem disappointed when I said I was for Harris and was just there out of curiosity.

Of course, I don’t know what’s going on in their heads. Are they really just setting up Trump’s many racist, misogynistic statements; his lies; his rejection of democratic norms? Or a longer conversation would have revealed that they agree with him, that immigrants are rapists and criminals who come from stupid countries and eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs, that Democrats are the enemy from within, and that Harris is not just a politician , who they don’t agree with, but a lazy, low-IQ guy who slept his way into government and has no idea what he’s doing?

Several people have told me that Trump loves them. Indeed, he says it all the time. The day after the rally, I received a text message from Trump: THIS TEXT IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. You get it because I love you, Kata. Most politicians don’t talk like that. It’s a rare Democrat who would say Harris really loves them. Perhaps there is an emotional connection between Trump and his followers that supersedes the substance of everything he says. Maybe the very things we make fun of him for—his long ramblings, his clumsiness, his orange hair and makeup, his oddly distant relationship with Melania—make him seem endearingly human. Perhaps all that matters to them is that he acknowledges and affirms their nostalgia for that supposedly simpler time when the US was on top and it seemed like life was going to be okay. On my way out of the crowd I ran into a young black man selling MAGA hats and t-shirts. I asked him if it was about Trump or if it was more of a business thing. “Oh, I’m for it,” he said with a big smile. “Trump loves people!” I asked him what people mean when they say Trump will make America great again. When was America great? “Whenever you were happy,” he said. “Trump wants it to be that way.”