The World Trump Created

By Jack Butler

Friday, July 02, 2021

 

Wellington, Ohio — It’s a common trope in literature, and probably to some extent a feature of our own lives, that journeys end where they began, either literally or metaphorically. So it’s tempting to see former president Donald Trump’s return to northeastern Ohio this past Saturday for his first campaign-style rally since leaving office as a kind of bookend to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. There, just short of five years ago, Trump formally secured his status as the standard-bearer for the Republican Party. It certainly has been a journey since then.

 

But this literary lens would skew the situation. Not just because the small town of Wellington, home to the Lorain County fairgrounds, which hosted this rally, is 45 minutes southwest of Cleveland, and quite different from the Lake Erie metropolis. More important, whatever these two Trump visits to Ohio bookend, what I understood as an attendee of this rally is that he has no intention of ending his political journey anytime soon. And his myriad supporters will remain by his side, self-affirming conspiracy theories and all.

 

The people who came to this “Save America” rally were happy to be here, and helped it resemble an event in the middle of campaign season rather than an event against pro-Trump-impeachment Republican Anthony Gonzales, who represents a nearby House district and is up in 2022. There were signs of this enthusiasm before I even got to the fairgrounds. Rural landscapes and small towns throughout the state remain dotted with Trump paraphernalia. As I got closer, traffic patterns were being redirected to accommodate the massive influx of Trump fans to Wellington (2010 Census population: 4,800, surely doubled, at least, by day’s end). Cars in the fairground’s grass parking lot displayed license plates from not just Ohio but also Indiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Alabama — and those were just the ones I saw. Awakened by the return of their champion, they had come from far and wide.

 

In certain respects, both the things I saw and the people I talked to gave off every indication of this being an ordinary, if highly charged, political event. Jane Timken and Mike Gibbons, two candidates vying for the Republican Senate nomination in the state, both had large presences; the former had volunteers standing outside the fairground gates handing out flyers for her campaign; the latter, a large charter bus with info booths set up nearby. There was plenty of anti-Biden sentiment in the air, more or less of the sort one would expect from anywhere in conservatism these days. Biden is “like a puppet. He’s being used. I almost feel sorry for him but our country’s too important,” Diane, from Medina, Ohio, told me. “This guy’s running our country into the ground,” is how Gina, from Lima, Ohio, put it. “He’s an embarrassment.”

 

It wasn’t simply in their general antagonism toward Joe Biden that this crowd displayed a certain normalcy. They were the sort of people you can watch quiet down and turn toward the singer as, from far off, the national anthem is heard, then dutifully remove their hats and hold their hands over their hearts. Who bow their heads to a distant prayer. Who break into chants of “USA!” when they intend to express approval.

 

But there was another side to this rally, and some of its attendees. It was noticeable before I got to the fairgrounds themselves, as I saw cars festooned with slogans and stickers proclaiming the owners as QAnon believers, and saw people walking around with InfoWars T-shirts. (I even saw one shirt that read “Trump/JFK Jr. 2024,” an allusion to a more-obscure provision of the QAnon catechism that posits that the deceased son of JFK is actually alive, and possibly Q himself). Those, to be fair, were the rarer and more out-there indications of a conspiratorial frame of mind.

 

Far more common was evidence of a simple belief: The election was stolen. “Not my president” was not exactly an unusual refrain from Resistance liberals during the Trump presidency. But many at this rally seem to have taken this to the next level, wearing shirts that read “Trump won,” and affirming this belief in conversation. “He won, okay?” said Ken, from Florida, who claimed to have been to upwards of 900 Trump rallies. “You can quote me. He won. He won in November.” Ken was hardly alone. “Our election was stolen,” said Becky, from New York. “You do the math,” Gina said. “It’s not adding up.” Many rally attendees cited the rally itself as evidence that Biden, whose campaign had a deliberately light footprint, could not possibly have won the election.

 

Such a belief lends itself to a pretty out-there conclusion. You may recall the to-do a few weeks ago over whether Trump honestly believed that he would be reinstated to the presidency in a few months. He has never spoken publicly on the matter. But it’s something many of the attendees I spoke to at this rally accepted as gospel. “I think this is the beginning of his comeback period and I hope to God it’s sooner than later,” Diane told me. Likewise, Becky affirmed for me, “I want Trump before 2024.” And Gina, after Trump’s speech, told me that she was “waiting for him to say, ‘I’m coming back.’”

 

Some people I spoke to only hoped to be able to vote for Trump again in 2024. But others sounded notes of despair, of conspiracy theory, of bizarre calls to action. Then there were the blatant contradictions in narrative: I found one woman saying that she would have gone to the January 6 Capitol rally if she’d been closer, and a man talking to her who said that the whole thing was an FBI setup. They both seemed to agree with each other.

 

Who created this world? The answer is obvious: Trump himself. The speakers at the rally who preceded him veered back and forth between the world of conventional politics and this new world Trump has created in his refusal to accept his loss. You had, on the one hand, typical features of a campaign rally. Local Republican officials urging on-the-ground action. Mike Carey, a Republican running for a nearby House seat in an August special election, assuring us that he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman. Ohio congressman Jim Jordan throwing out anti-Biden red meat, much of it fit for my consumption. But it was hard to keep these two worlds apart. Jordan, at one point, proclaimed, “That’s why you’re all here. ‘Cause you want [Trump] to run again in 2024.” Nearby in the packed crowd, I heard a voice scream out: “We want him now!”

 

One can only conclude that this worldview is the more encouraged one, when you have people like Douglas G. Frank, a Mike Lindell associate, giving a PowerPoint presentation purporting to explain, in precise detail, how the election was stolen, using graphs and everything. (Most people in the audience seemed to be numb to it, as I was, even if they agreed with its conclusion.) Or people like Max Miller, a Trump White House aide running against Anthony Gonzales who gave off strong Madison Cawthorn vibes, saying that “in 2024 we’re gonna get [Trump] elected for the third time.” Or people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. The already infamous Georgia congresswoman asked the crowd, “Who’s your president?” and hearing its Trump-affirming response, she explained, “He should be president right now, but the dirty rotten Democrats stole the election.”

 

But these were all warm-up acts to the Trump show, which is still ongoing. When Miller was announced, there were some discontented voices from the crowd, who were waiting for Trump, not for him. And after Miller, the crowd waited for nearly an hour past Trump’s scheduled speaking time of 7 p.m. before the man actually appeared, to raucous applause. But there was a logistical frustration for attendees even once he started speaking: Many couldn’t see him. From my vantage point, he was blocked by a teleprompter stand, and I was relatively close to the stage. Others weren’t so lucky. Large screens nearby had transmitted the images of other speakers to those not as close but, for some reason, did not display when Trump began. At one point, the crowd’s discontent, manifested in a cry of “We can’t see you,” was loud and sustained enough to stop Trump himself from speaking; this logistical failure was eventually corrected.

 

Even Trump’s remarks, when eventually delivered, reflected the rally’s division between the conventional and the abnormal. Much of what Trump said was essentially standard criticism of Biden’s tenure in office so far, albeit delivered in his unique style: a crisis on the border, critical race theory in schools, American deference returning to the global stage. All true, all objectionable. There was even a reprise of some of Trump’s greatest hits that wouldn’t have been out of place at any prior rally: complaining about the media; reading “The Snake,” a poem that some people around me recited with him; dancing to “YMCA” when his remarks ended, as he did during the 2020 campaign.

 

But Trump’s heart clearly was not in the conventional. It was in maintaining the conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss — his “so-called” loss, as he put it — that have become the essential part of his brand since November 3, 2020. He called the election “the crime of the century.” He asserted that the real numbers would show “we won in a landslide.” He expressed hope in the various actual and proposed “audits” of the results. He claimed that he wasn’t the one undermining democracy but rather the one “trying to save it.” And, tantalizingly, to his fans in attendance, he teased that “we won the election twice, and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time.”

 

He claims that he has no choice but to fixate on this, that in looking back on 2020 with anger, he’s thinking about the future:

 

You have to look back. We won the election in 2020. Who the hell knows what’s gonna be in 2024. We won’t even have a country left. We’re not gonna have a country left. And if we don’t figure it out, we’re not gonna be in a position to win in 2022 or 2024.

 

Again, in this, the attendees of the rally were in lockstep. Sharing Trump’s sense, before his speech, of how bad things had gotten, Becky put little hope in the utility of future elections if things weren’t fixed immediately. Of the 2022 midterms, she said, “When we have rigged elections, those don’t mean a darn thing.” Gina went even further: “What’s gonna be left in 2024? Biden’s running us into the ground.”

 

Despite our differences, I could at least understand many of those I met in the crowd. I shared many of their concerns about the country, and many of their criticisms of Biden. They were polite, ordinary, decent people I could see myself interacting with in the course of life in this place, my home state. Whatever delusions they have fallen into, it is impossible for me to judge them.

 

Trump, however, is another story. In response to losing an election he could have won, he decided not to accept any blame. Instead, he casts himself as protagonist against “sinister forces” and castigates the country’s institutions, forcing his supporters to choose between him and everything else.

 

In their enthusiasm, fomented by Trump himself, many of the rally-goers here have chosen him. To this day, he claims to love them, and they him. But his affection for this crowd would seem one of instrumentality. I wish that Trump’s supporters could see this, and behold how Trump has failed them, how more tact, restraint, or decency on his part could have made him a standard-bearer truly worthy of their support — and possibly still president. It saddens me that they have so lost faith in the political system that they must place all hope with him. Their faith is unconditional. Witness, however, how Trump has treated loyalists who transgressed even slightly; his faith in his supporters is very conditional. But unless or until they change their minds, my sense is that Trump’s political journey is not ending. Rather, it is beginning a new stage. Where it all ends is anyone’s guess.

 

It probably won’t be Ohio.