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Today, we’re talking about going to a Trump rally in a swing county in a swing sate, going around to polling places on Election Day, and ultimately watching Amish people vote. It’s kind of a sequel to this blog, which was about being a swing state voter.

Make sure to read all the way to the end for the Media Events Signature Content Module™, “A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar.”

In 2007, I attended the single-greatest concert of my entire life: Gorilla Zoe, Soulja Boy, Swizz Beatz, Eve, Boosie Badazz, with Lil Wayne headlining. Unless you were into rap and especially southern rap in 2007, I don’t think I can adequately explain how monumental a bill this was. Gorilla Zoe’s “Hood N—ga” was a huge regional hit, Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” was the number-one song in the country, Eve was kinda back and Swizzy had never left, Boosie was in full-on cult hero mode and had just dropped “Wipe Me Down,” and Wayne was just goddamn everywhere, pyonging on the Yamaha from Hot Boy to Mixtape Weezy, on his way to becoming one of the few people to sell a million in a week in music’s pay-for-nothing-pirate-everything era. When it was Wayne’s time to come out, they introduced him with a super-goofy voiceover that went something like:

Lil Wayne, the Best Rapper Alive, was arrested last night in Atlanta for charges relating to guns, drugs, and being way too cool. [An obviously-fake mugshot of Lil Wayne is shown on a video screen, he looks surly and sexy and everybody screams.] He wasn’t going to be able to make it tonight, lawyers have negotiated a special release so that he can perform in Greensboro, North Carolina this evening. [Anticipation building, everybody screaming even louder now.] Here… is… LIL WAYNE!!!!!

Lil Wayne was then lowered from the ceiling onstage in a motherfucking cage, opened the door, and started rapping. We. All. Lost. Our. Shit. 

Such displays of showmanship always come across as corny if you’re not actually there. You have to feel the energy in person, the collective suspension of disbelief that’s tied to a feeling of gratitude that someone has gone above and beyond, in however silly a way, the normal conventions of an event to instead cultivate a sense of spectacle. Trump understands this innately, and plays with a lot of the exact same imagery that Wayne himself does. He incorporated his mugshot, his actual mugshot, into his iconography. He likes having his rallies at airports so that people can cheer his plane touching down, and sometimes his grand entrance is accompanied by a similarly goofy voiceover pumped in, a skit between his fake pilot and a fake air-traffic control guy navigating the landing of the plane, before Trump goes directly from the plane to the podium. Other times, you get a motorcade after the plane lands, which is just a second opportunity for people to cheer before the big reveal. 

Re Trump winning: I felt like this was coming, yet it also seemed impossible. Two weeks ago, I wrote, “It feels like he doesn’t actually care whether or not he wins, which means, somehow, that he probably will.” That was before the Madison Square Garden thing, just after he worked the fries at McDonald’s, when it appeared that Trump was just vibing out for the hell of it, existing as apolitically as the voters he hoped to court. Then he did the MSG rally and the parts that weren’t fascist were really bizarre and out-of-touch, and it seemed like Trump was trying again and was therefore going to blow it. Shows how much I know. 

And over the past few days I tried to know as much as I could. Emilie and I happen to be in Lititz, PA right now, which is where Trump did the rally on Sunday that appeared on the surface to be the nadir of a floundering campaign. We decided to attend, because why the hell not. Win or lose, this was one of Trump’s final rallies in Campaign Mode ever, it was probably going to be a weird scene, and maybe something newsworthy would end up happening. 

We were stopped on our drive to the Lancaster County Airport, where Trump was going to speak, by the police, who had blocked off the road leading to the airport, so we parked at a nearby grocery store and resigned ourselves to walking the two miles that remained. I asked one of the cops directing traffic why this was happening, and he said he had no idea, but the Trump people just asked them to specifically keep the side of the road that we needed to be driving on car-free. 

Two miles and one guy in a VW flipping us the bird later, we were at the thing. Apparently Tulsi Gabbard and some local openers had already gone on, but by the time we made it past the bootleg Trump merch vendors and the mountains of trash right outside the venue, which people who’d gotten there the night before had elected to leave rather than throw away when the doors opened (we could tell they’d gotten there the night before because there were sleeping bags at the center of some of these trash-nests), nobody was onstage. Instead, they were playing music and it was actually kind of pretty good, which I guess makes sense because Trump exercises complete dominion over the iPad connected to the stereo in whichever Trump-owned room he happens to be in, and in general is an expert in the timeless art of “let’s make it into a music.” 

The venue, a fenced-off portion of a parking lot on the far side of the airport, chosen presumably for its proximity to multiple buildings, on whose roofs Secret Service snipers had set up shop, was a little more than half-full. Trust me, there is no stranger context in which you could hear The Ronettes, “November Rain,” “Burnin’ Up” by Elvis, or the 2006 hit single “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. I will say also that they played the Kid Rock song that mashes up “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Werewolves of London” plus that one Oliver Anthony song, and they matched the mood perfectly. 

With not much else to do, I scanned the crowd to see what the hell their deal was. Most of the people there seemed harmless, if a little eccentric. There was a guy wearing suit pants and a hoodie plus a beanie with an American flag pattern, a guy wearing shorts over sweatpants and a zip-up hoodie over another hoodie, multiple people wearing Trump hats on top of Trump hats, a dudes in worn camo and a far-off look in their eyes, lots of fathers and teenage sons who looked like kids I played on my high school golf team with, and a surprising of non-white families who seemed fucking amped. We kept seeing people talking like news reporters as someone filmed them with a horizontally held phone, and the more we watched them we began to realize that at least some of them weren’t doing a bit to amuse themselves as they waited but instead actual news reporters, seemingly from other countries. 

At some point, we began to notice that James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World” began to go long. Really long. And then Pavarotti started singing opera over “It’s a Man’s World” too, which is apparently a thing, and then we begin to see a line of motorcycle cops riding down the tarmac, followed by a fleet of American-made SUVs, one of which contained Donald Trump. A young man in Yeezy Boosts, tight jeans, and a too-big tweed sportcoat filmed it all on his phone and called his wife “babe” when he was done, then one of their kids dropped a Trump sign on the ground and the parents didn’t notice. We were standing near the fence on the side of the venue where all the cars were and as they pulled up a couple of privately hired security dudes pushed us back from the fence, I guess because they didn’t want anybody hopping over it to try to get to Trump, I heard them mumbling to each other about how dumb we were and then a lady walked up to the more jacked one and told him he looked like Brock Lesnar which I think she meant as a compliment but to the security guy (who looked more like Jason Momoa except the sides of his head were shaved) it probably confirmed his contempt.

The combination James Brown and Pavarotti song played for what must have been 15 minutes, like some Pro Tools wizard in Trump’s camp must have looped that motherfucker within an inch of its life or maybe that’s just how long the song is, I don’t know but I kind of zoned out and then suddenly Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” was on and nobody had noticed but now Trump was on the dais, standing stock-still at an 80-degree angle and it became clear that he was just gonna let the song play until it was finished. Emilie and I didn’t understand what the hell was going on but everybody else was going bananas, and then Trump started giving his standard stump speech for a couple of minutes and then started riffing, which I guess is what people come for. 

He started speaking at 11:09; people began leaving at a steady pace by 11:30. A good speech has a sense of flow — there are beats, themes that are expanded upon and referred back to later on, a building of tension and release until finally it all ties together in a dramatic crescendo that everybody can tell is about to hit. If you stick with this formula, you can generally get away with dropping bromides and bullshit and it’ll still be a pretty good speech if you nail the delivery. To be objective, this is not what a Donald Trump speech is like at all. Instead, he just rambles about whatever’s on his mind, stuck in an eternal middle as he goes nowhere. It’s hypnotic, in a way, but it also makes it really hard to follow or even figure out which parts he’s saying are newsworthy. At one point, he did five minutes about the placement of the panes of bulletproof glass around him and then cracked a joke about how the only way somebody could take him out was if they shot through the media, which he famously likes to position on risers near him almost as a prop. It felt significant, and as members of the fake news media who were not protected in a mass of our fellow corrupt colleagues it was kind of alarming, but then he started talking about other stuff and I’d already forgotten he’d said it at all.

It might be that Trump, or at least his team, understood something that Harris and her campaign did not until it was too late: In today’s ultra-siloed media environment, shamelessly spouting off messages that as a whole are incoherent or even contradictory is actually a tactical advantage, because very few people will actually notice, and that the people who do are probably hyper-focused on the legacy media, who the people Trump used this strategy to speak to just do not give a shit about. 

The New York Times updates from the speech made it seem like Trump had come onstage and delivered a rant about how they (“they”) were hacking the voting machines and the election was rigged against him and then talked about how he wished the media were dead, all of which was true, but presenting this information in such a manner implies that Trump gave more weight to these points than anything else he said, which is absolutely not what happened. This stuff, however newsworthy it might have been, was no more or less important than anything else he said, which is to say that he was just saying shit to hear himself talk. He made claims about how paper ballots were superior, then got into how computers are sometimes bad and sometimes good, they were very good for his friend Elon Musk’s rockets for example, and this led him to talk about how elegant Elon’s mother was, and then he said something about “Susie and Chris” before saying that Democrats cheat before interrupting himself and asking, “Isn’t this better than my speech?” People were leaving in higher numbers by then and I couldn’t focus on what Trump was saying because I was staring at a long-haired dude in hemp cargo pants, then Trump said “Barack Hussein Obama” was a “major troublemaker” and I zoned out again until he said, “Fast racehorses produce fast racehorses whether you like it or not, I’m smart, brilliant probably, I do the weave. This is a weave, right?” (For the record: Trump refers to his stream-of-consciousness digressions as a “weave;” I am too lazy to look up why this is the case.) 

Despite the heavy security presence, you could bring in whatever food or drinks you wanted to, which was good because nobody was selling any concessions. This might have been why people were leaving, and if nothing else it was why we left alongside a bunch of other people as Trump boasted of the event, “There’s people as far as the eye can see.” 

The people who love Trump the most — or at least those who aren’t the Boomer Republicans who simply adapted their shit to better vibe with Trump’s shit — are often sad and lost, and talking with this particular strain of Trump fan always makes me wonder what happened in their lives that made them this way, and sometimes leaves me worrying that this person might need immediate material aid that I cannot personally provide.

On the long-ass walk back to our car, we met a woman who was walking on the side of the road with a dog and a gigantic American flag. We started chatting with her and found out that she didn’t even go into the rally, she just went in the hopes of getting her picture taken. She’d ended up on the front page of the New York Times, she told us proudly, because as much as Trump claims to hate the fake news the fake news represents validation and his supporters innately understand this, and went on to tell us that she and her dog go all over the country to Trump rallies and also Chronic Lyme awareness rallies. She and the dog sleep in her car a lot, she told us, and it made her scared sometimes, a little less so now that she had a van instead of her old Ford Focus. 

I had this big plan that I was going to go to a bunch of polling places on Election Day and talk to people, see if I could find some sort of wackjob trying to enforce “election integrity” or whatever. Unfortunately, the fatal flaw in this plan was that I had forgot about how fucking boring Election Day actually is. Early voting has sucked the air out of Election Day as an event, even in Pennsylvania which has a janky-ass early voting system. 

When Emilie and I went around Lititz on Tuesday, there weren’t many people actually voting, just polite Democrats and Republicans sitting at folding tables greeting non-existent voters before they entered the polling places. It was slightly less dead at the local public library, but still dead enough that the Democrat and the Republican poll greeters had become friends. The Republican dude used to be the mayor of the town, which he told me was mostly a symbolic job, but still caused people to freak out because he was also the fire chief at the time. Neither of them wanted to talk about politics and instead wanted to yak about local land laws. You know how there are a bunch of random tracts of land in towns that are too small and oddly shaped for someone to want to buy? Well in most towns those are owned by the local government, but here a lot of them are owned by the Moravian church. Interesting stuff! Then a man wearing a militia-style t-shirt and a woman wearing a “I’M VOTING FOR THE FELON!” shirt walked by and the Republican guy got really excited.

The only polling place we went to that was really poppin’ was in Intercourse, which is where all the local Amish people were voting. I’d seen someone repost a couple of TikToks on Twitter earlier, one of a caravan of buggies with Trump flags going on the road, and another of a tearful woman staring into her phone as she said that the Amish “might save America,” and yes she was using TikTok voice because TikTok voice transcends ideology. It seemed like the exact sort of scene that I’d hoped for. 

When we pulled up, the Amish were indeed voting in droves. They came by buggy. They came by pickup truck (the Amish are allowed to have cars if they’re for work, and a lot of these folks in Lancaster County are in the construction business). They came by van, because the non-truck-driving Amish are allowed to ride in cars if someone outside of their community is driving. They came by those bike-scooter-looking things, because the Amish don’t really ride bikes like that. They were all obviously voting for Trump. Rather than actually talking to any of them about why they were all doing it, I — an idiot, and a very distractible one at that — got into a long conversation with the lone poll greeter there from the Constitution Party, which in case you’re unfamiliar is sort of like if the John Birch Society were exclusively full of kooky libertarians who hate the existence of the federal highway system. Amid politely listening to him talk about how the size of the federal budget was an existential threat to America, he did mention that the only people who’d actually come up to talk to him were the Amish. I guess both of those are data points. 

I say all of this to say that we really don’t know shit. The post-mortems are all rolling in, and they’re all, to a certain degree, a little correct, because there’s no one specific reason he won and Kamala lost. But I think that Trump is a master of iconography and sloganeering, and also has lizard-brain instincts for big-picture obvious stuff, which is a huge tactical advantage when your opponents are dummies who overthink everything and can’t see the forest for the trees. 

He knew that he had the good luck of presiding over a good economy and then when the economy turned bad because of COVID he got to give everybody free money and put his name on the checks, he knew that getting shot sucked but he could turn an L into a W by striking a pose and raising his fist. 

He knew that if the economy is bad and we’re funding wars that nobody likes, you can just say vague stuff about making the economy better and ending the wars and people will dig it, especially if your opponent is, for reasons even you do not understand, acting like people actually love the economy and also the wars, and if someone has ceded the moral high ground that you might as well run with it. 

He knew that Morgan Wallen is more popular than Charli xcx and Chappell Roan put together, he knew that he should go on whichever podcasts his tall son told him to go on, and he knew that joy doesn’t mean shit if it’s mandatory.

He knew that if, after ceding the moral high ground, your opponent starts trotting out a Republican campaign surrogate who’s hated among her own party and known by most people because of her dad who they associate with (A) the Iraq War and (B) shooting a guy in the face, that your opponent has also ceded the fun ground so you might as well get Hulk Hogan and Dana White out there to act ridiculous.

He knew that people don’t like being told what to do and that every expert saying voting for him was a bad idea was only going to make people vote for him more.

More than anything, he knew that what some people call bullshit is just what others recognize as good marketing. 

A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar

Skrilla - “Chiraq”

The new Skrilla record, Zombie Love Kensington Paradise, is basically everything I could have hoped for from him. He’s the best. My basic pitch if you’ve never heard him before is that he’s a new rapper from Philly whose music sort of bridges the gap between old Gucci/Wayne/Thug vibes and the new out-there rappers who kind of get lumped into the overly large category of “underground.” But mainly this is just a really good vibe for transitioning from autumn into the abyss. 

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