THE ART OF RALLY SERIES
But come to a Trump rally in Middle America, and you'll start to wonder if he ever campaigned at all, or instead just held a series of parties.Yeah, this just happened from out of nowhere.Īrt of Rally is not only an alternative towards the more simulation-heavy rally racers out there. It's a common line that Trump campaigned only on darkness and carnage. "It was wild in the parking lot" before the rally, said Gary. "This was the s-, man," said Neil, a local in his 20s, after the rally. Now they had their guy, riding in on a military chopper. Politicians, Republican and Democrat, have all been having fun, getting rich, flexing muscle, often to the detriment of the type of people in Blair County. Wolf clearly just wishes you all would stop living the way you do, with your coal-smeared work uniforms, your churchiness, your hunting.
Trump was talking about open schools, open churches, fracking, and coal mining - all things Wolf has opposed or somehow impeded, and all the things that define daily life for so much of the crowd. Tom Wolf as the "governor who doesn't want you to do anything." This wasn't an exaggeration. Trump embraced the crowd that otherwise is attacked by politicians. "Let's go!" one young man behind me cheers as if his quarterback were taking the field. Trump, as he walked the runway to the stage, threw Red MAGA hats to the crowd. (Remember Katie Couric's dishonest attack on gun owners?) Trump's for us. The elites against us use their power to get more power and make us look bad. “He’s for our jobs,” Josh the coal miner said after the rally. That's what the Democrats say every election, right? Whose side are you on? But what he says and whose side he's on is what matters. Was it bizarre that the working-class and rural folks around me would find “their guy” in a golden mansion atop a tower on Fifth Avenue? Sure. As Trump would later put it in the rally, "rule of the people" was, for now at least, triumphing over the "rule of the corrupt political class."
It was the people who had been crapped on for years by both parties, by the media, and by academia, getting to be the champions. Trump’s fly-by was simply a turning of the tables it seemed, as Queen blared. Our major media have stopped pretending they’re not partisan actors. Our federal law enforcement agencies spied on Trump’s 2016 campaign. Facebook and Twitter tried to cut off access to New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling. YouTube is currently trying desperately to lead people away from the videos of Joe Biden calling for a ban on fracking. Then I recalled all the other institutions that we might expect to be apolitical or to avoid taking sides in the culture war. Were these people really just celebrating that their guy - the guy who stands up for coal miners, for the “poorly educated,” for gun-owners - had his hand on the levers of power and was using them to entertain them? The 20-something suburban mom behind me was really 100% behind the “grab-'em-by-the-p-” guy? Are none of these people bothered by shifting farmers’ income from market income to subsidy income? What about his bad tweets? Tim Carney the moralist was thinking about how perverse it was that these people were celebrating Trump. The farmers, coal miners, gun-owners, and bikers have had their share of sand kicked in their faces, but for now, they feel like they’re winners. The Central Pennsylvania crowd sang along with this song, as a welcoming song of the president. I've had my share of sand kicked in my face/ Then Marine One landed, and a new song blared out the lyrics:
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The coal miners, truck drivers, immigrants, blue-collar parents trying to raise a family, the landscapers - yes, mostly white, but also black, Hispanic, and Asian, including immigrants - were belting out with heartfelt sincerity “Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand / Lord, don't they help themselves, y'all … It ain't me. “Fortunate Son” was the perfect celebratory song for the crowd. Part rock concert, part playoff game, the Trump rally in a tiny airport in a tiny town in Central Pennsylvania, especially in the moments around Trump’s entrance, was exuberant.
THE ART OF RALLY DRIVER
I took in the beaming faces of the coal miners Doug and Josh in the bleachers to my left, the cheers of truck driver Scott Dilling standing next to me, the laughter of grandmothers, grandfathers, and the envelope-factory workers. Fortunate Son? Really? - Pete Schroeder October 23, 2020īut then I looked around myself, and supercilious-reporter-Tim Carney and ethics-sniffer-Tim Carney faded away for a moment.
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