Listening to Donald Trump, there’s a point when you begin to feel your brain dying. Words don’t come, and sentences will not form; the language simply isn’t up to dealing with the shamelessness and tedium of a Trump speech. With that dread, I hastened with a driver named Wendy to Butler, Pennsylvania, 35 miles north of Pittsburgh, last Saturday, to witness his triumphant return to the agricultural showground where an assassin came within a millimetre or two of killing him.
Wendy is a black woman with mixed heritage who remembers the time in the 1960s when her mother—whose background was white and American Indian—traced the outline of her children’s feet on paper so she wouldn’t be refused service at the shoe store in Pittsburgh. The city may have changed but out here, in the Republican stronghold of Butler County, she told me they hadn’t. She couldn’t wait to drop me on Buttercup Road, near the ground, and hoped that I would meet her before nightfall.
I was denied media credentials by the Trump team the evening before. This was a blessing, it turned out, because I got the full experience of queuing with thousands of Trump supporters, all pumped about the second coming of their man to the showground and wearing his gear—Maga caps, orange Trump wigs and T shirts with combative slogans like “I’m voting for a felon”; “My rights don’t end where your feelings begin”; “You missed Bitches!” and, of course, “Fight, Fight, Fight”, Trump’s cry as he was hustled from the stage by the Secret Service at 6.11pm, on 13th July.
The return was important in itself, but Trump and Maga made such a big deal of this particular rally because they want to elevate this previously unregarded town in Pennsylvania to hallowed ground, and its aura to radiate out into the expanse of farms and forest that lies between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. In Pennsylvania, “you got to show up”, Josh Shapiro, the state’s popular Democrat governor, said about campaigning here. And in this election, showing up is what it’s all about. It is the largest of the battleground states with 19 electoral college votes—three votes more than both Georgia and North Carolina—and Kamala Harris almost certainly must win it to secure the presidency.
Between presidential elections there are countless changes in the electorate. What existed in the previous contest often doesn’t hold true four years later. For one thing, 16m people have reached voting age since 2020, which is why Taylor Swift endorsing Harris and urging the young to vote really mattered.
Other changes are less obvious. From 2000 to 2012, the Democrats did better in Pennsylvania than across the US by an average of around two percentage points. But while Biden won the national vote by 4.4 points in 2020, the Democrat margin in Pennsylvania fell to just 1.2 points. Inch-by-nerve wracking inch, the state appears to be moving towards the Republicans.
The Brookings Institute says the candidates are currently matched. “Of the 12 head-to-head polls conducted in the Keystone State in the last three weeks, six are tied. Trump leads in four and Harris in the remaining two,” William Galston of the institute, wrote on 1st October. He says that Harris must have an average lead of at least three points nationally to win the state. British polling expert Peter Kellner says the more Harris’s lead exceeds three per cent the better her chances of victory.
On Tuesday, the New York Times Siena poll put Harris at 49 per cent to Trump’s 46, and the polling trend is now ever so slightly in her favour. She is making headway on the key issues of the economy and immigration, though lags behind Trump on both. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen in the Keystone State, thus called because of its crucial role in the politics, history and economy of the early US. On election night, watch the returns from the suburbs around Philadelphia, which are likely to go for Harris, and the result in Erie County, in the north, which has voted for the candidate who would win the presidency in every election since 1992.
Once I had been frisked by the Secret Service, I got my bearings in the showground. It was already about half full, even though Trump would not appear for another five hours. It’s a compact site, with a rise in the middle that means most of the crowd cannot see the stage, except on the TV screens. A better view was had by the assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks when he lay in 34 degrees of heat on the gently pitched roof of a farm shed, not much more than 100 yards from where Trump had started to speak on 13th July.
People around me recalled that day; where they were standing in the ground; what they heard and saw. They expressed disbelief at the failure of the Secret Service. That I understood, but when they nodded as speaker after speaker attributed Trump’s survival to God’s will, I reflected that if there is one man that certainly comes low on the list of deserving miracles, it is the destroyer of small businesses, convicted felon, rapist, habitual liar, would-be usurper and failed putschist Donald J Trump. Yet the doctor who treated the wounded on 13th July declared that he had been summoned from the crowd by the voice of God. Trump’s running mate JD Vance proclaimed it a miracle saying, “I truly believe that God saved President Trump’s life that day,” and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, told us that God had spared his life because “he is not finished with Donald Trump”, then descanted upon the fight, not between her party and the Democrats, but good versus evil.
This isn’t much covered by the US media because it’s a familiar part of the landscape. God has been recruited by every scoundrel in American history, but to see the cynicism of the Trump team close-up—the demonic flipping of good and bad—and the credulity of the Trumpers made this liberal, atheist Briton sorely miss the debunking wit of his homeland.
The demagoguery works on a particular demographic, which was handily represented at the fairground. Men outnumbered women by roughly two to one, and most were white. The average age of the crowd seemed to be between around 40 and 45. It’s likely, based on wider trends, that most of the crowd of 50,000-60,000 did not have a college degree. They resembled, in a way, the sports crowd that assembled in Pittsburgh that weekend for the Steelers’ game, yet I have to say that never seen more smokers gathered in one place in the US.
To the wealthier participants at the Butler, I wanted to shout, “What the hell is eating you?” Because, right now, things are objectively getting better. Under Joe Biden, the bipartisan Inflation Reduction and Infrastructure acts respectively pumped $370bn and $400bn into the economy. No further interest cuts are needed from the Fed—the central bank—because the economy is so healthy. Clear evidence of this came last week with a report that 254,000 more jobs were created in September. More people than ever before are employed in the US.
To the less well-off—the people for whom the American dream is a joke, one that makes them feel bad about themselves as well as their society—I wanted quietly to point out that there’s a reason 60 billionaires have endorsed Trump. He is going to give them further tax cuts, which will vastly increase America’s debt. Harris has said, quite reasonably, the rich should pay their way. In the last four years, the wealth of America’s 737 billionaires has, according to Forbes, increased by almost 88 per cent. Elon Musk’s fortune has ballooned from under $25bn in 2020 to $185bn a year later and $259bn today. You want to ask, “Has your income nearly doubled in the last four years? Do you know anyone who has enjoyed a seven-fold increase in their wealth, like Elon has?”
The afternoon wore on. It was hot. I hid from the sun behind an ambulance, where four older men in shorts scuffed the dirt with their trainers and gloomily topped each other’s conspiracy tales. We listened to prayers, heard more speeches about Trump, saw skydivers drop into a tiny space near the assassin’s barn, and watched an artist create a painting featuring Corey Comperatore, the 50-year-old fireman who died protecting his family from the gunman three months ago.
I was unmoved; in fact, I was repelled. Far from being a new kind of Gettysburg, resonant with meaning for future generations of Americans, the showground was a place where some key ingredients of fascism—sentimentality, patriotism and kitsch—were briefly and unedifyingly fused. Make no mistake: Trump intends to be a dictator from day one. He has said as much, and what I saw that afternoon tells me that all the precursors are in place.
At 3.30pm we were asked to look up and, as the Top Gun theme played, Trump’s plane appeared above us, his name on the fuselage glinting in the sun. People cheered and waved and held phones and clenched fists aloft. I was aware of a vibration from the past—Leni Riefenstahl’s film The Triumph of the Will, which she cleverly edited to show Hitler descending though clouds to the masses of the Nuremburg rally. Five minutes later, the Trump plane came back, spoiling the theatre of the first pass but no doubt giving Trump another opportunity to marvel at the size of the crowd, his consistent obsession since his 2017 inauguration.
I endured three-quarters of the speech before leaving, but I’ve since watched it twice more in full, and I have some observations to make.
Trump has always been a very poor speaker, but he’s got a lot worse. He repeats himself, meanders and has only rudimentary language at his disposal. There is an absence of ideas, insight, humour, wit and joy. He sometimes raises his voice for impact but mostly the delivery is unvaryingly dreary; his sentences seem to lose altitude at the end, when they should lift to carry people with him.
Look no further than his narcissism to explain all this. Instead of giving energy to the crowd, as Kennedy, Clinton and Obama did, he is taking it from them. They allow this because they need to feed the man who is giving them what they want: the permission to be their dumbest and worst selves, to be racist and transphobic; to disdain government, rules and the rule of law; to deny and ignore the huge impact of global heating on American life. In other words, an exchange takes place, and they really do not mind if he lies to them. That’s part of the deal.
Tax his supporters with his craziness and they say fondly, “Well, that’s Trump, but he’s our man.” They indulge him on everything from his conviction for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and his sexual abuse of Jean E Carroll to the 6th January riots, because his people need him to keep ramping up the racist, exceptionalist and isolationist rhetoric. And above all they crave a focus for their patriotic, martial longing and that, mystifyingly enough, is only satisfied by the draft-dodging Captain Bone Spur.
Watching Trump, I felt him beginning to exhibit what the American Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt has identified as “the loneliness, self-loathing and emptiness at the centre of the tyrant’s being”. In this, his third campaign, Trump is almost always on his own. His son Eric was at the showground, but where were the other children and his wife on this special day? Even his companion Laura Loomer, a true hatemonger, seems to have been sidelined. Steve Witkoff, a Manhattan real estate developer who was golfing with Trump when a second assassin was intercepted and is apparently an old friend, spoke about Trump’s underappreciated empathy. I looked at the expressions of my companions in the shade of the ambulance. They were unimpressed because that’s not what Trump is about. Empathy is a Democrat thing. Harris and Tim Walz have empathy. Trump doesn’t give a damn about anything or anyone, which is what makes him the soulless destroyer his people yearn for, and the billionaire class know will increase their power and money.
With that in mind, I waited for Musk to speak. With Trump watching him, Musk—wearing a “Dark Maga” black cap—said, “The other side want to take your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. The want to take away your right to vote effectively.”
The apprentice liar had pleased his boss and Trump resumed talking. It was time to leave. With hundreds of others, I made my way through the car parks to Buttercup Road, and to my rendezvous with Wendy. “What was it like?” she asked. It’s simple, I told her, the day was all about him. It wasn’t about those who were killed or injured in the attempt on his life, nor the crowd before him, nor his party or even the American people. It was just about him, and it always will be.
What I didn’t say to Wendy was that I believe Trump is the man the Founding Fathers feared most when they were drafting the constitution, a tyrant for whom they designed many checks and balances. But these would only work, as George Washington wrote, “so long as there shall remain any virtue in the body of the people”. I saw no evidence of that democratic virtue in the crowd at Butler, and that, ultimately, is what scares me.
