....The real action takes place while everyone is waiting for the rally to start, not during the actual speech. It’s free to attend and anyone can request tickets. People are admitted on a first-come-first serve basis. Tickets do not guarantee you a seat, and if the venue fills — which, despite what Trump says, does not always happen — people are refused entry.
Doors to the venue open hours before the program begins, and people line up hours before that to secure a spot. In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the parking lot opened at 9 a.m., the arena doors opened at 2 p.m., the program began at 4 p.m., and Trump was scheduled to speak at 6 p.m. If you want to know what experiencing a Trump rally is like, you need to get in line.
Around the rally site, music blares from every direction, sometimes from speakers, and often from live performers. In Johnstown, one musician was dressed in Revolutionary War garb.
Another was playing oldies and yacht rock under an umbrella. I passed him early in the day while he was singing a rendition of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and when he sang “…searching for my lost shaker of salt” and pointed to me, I returned the obligatory audience response of “Salt! Salt! Salt!” Others also returned his call, but their response was “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
As the day wore on, the performer adapted to his audience. I passed him again around 2 p.m., and he had changed most of the lyrics to the songs he had chosen to make them Trump-oriented, like singing The Temptations’ “My Girl” as “My Trump.” His cup overflowed with tips....
...Almost everyone wants to talk about 2016 and how they’d been waiting for someone like Trump to come along with the guts to say what they were thinking but they weren’t “allowed” to say out loud. “Is he an *******? Sure. But he’s our *******,” one man emphatically told me, and those around him nodded in agreement. They love that Trump created a space to speak their minds, which, in many cases, means being able to spout racist, sexist, hate speech that was all but forbidden in public life just a decade ago.
These individuals fully embrace the former president’s crass, offensive, disrespectful way of speaking, and imitate it, too. The mainstream media does not show the obscenity and profanity of these rallies, but it is everywhere and, for me, a defining characteristic of these events.
“fudge BIDEN” flags are still for sale from most vendors (even though Joe Biden dropped out of the race weeks ago) and appear on cars across the parking lots near the venues. Families wear matching T-shirts reading, “The Hoe is worse than Joe.” Kids wander around in “No more bullfeathers” visors with fake Trump hair attached, and browse bumper stickers that read, “I like big boobs and small government,” or show a naked woman’s torso with pistols resting on her hard nipples and the slogan “I <3 guns, titties, & whiskey.” After the assassination attempt in July, graphics featuring Trump with two raised middle fingers have popped on every type of merchandise you can imagine with taunts like, “You missed, *****ES.”
