Trump’s rallies are the rituals by which he stamps his name on the American dream. As he prepares to resume them for the first time in months, his followers are ready to receive
Yusif Jones, standing in front of a long row of porta-potties, slides his plastic Trump mask over his face. “I’m him!” he exclaims. He puffs up his chest in his homemade Trump shirt. It’s a short-sleeved American flag pullover, onto which he has ironed black felt letters across vertical red and white stripes: GOT TRUMP? Then he flashes the O.K. sign, a silver ring on his pinky. “I’m him, dude!”
In Trump’s case, divine backing is more about smiting than healing. When Rep. Elijah Cummings died last October shortly after sparring with Trump about Baltimore, Peterson declared on his radio show, “He dead”—like Trump enemies John McCain and Charles Krauthammer, Peterson noted. “That’s what happens when you mess with the Great White Hope. Don’t mess with God’s children.”Jones only recently became one of those children. “I’ve been on the side of evolution my whole life,” he confesses.
In 2016, I attended Trump rallies around the country to witness the role played by religion. I found it in the fervor for oft-traded stories of the candidate’s riches, his private plane, “Trump Force One” and its golden interior, and in the promises of D-list preachers who opened his rallies with sermons ranging from the staples of abortion and decadence to the miraculous wealth with which God had anointed Trump.
Inside, on the arena floor, it’s mostly men. A crowd has gathered before the stage to stand for hours—no sitting permitted—rather than wait in the stands. I strike up a conversation with a middle-aged couple. They’d been first in line that morning, before dawn; as a reward for this devotion, they had been presented by traveling evangelists with matching black long-sleeved shirts declaring in white block letters, TRUMP’S TWEETS MATTER.
“No!” Dave isn’t offended. It’s unthinkable that anyone down here, so close to Trump’s podium, could really believe that. “It’s like—” he looks for a word.“Yes,” he says with a youth pastor’s grin. “Like Scripture.” Every tweet, every misspelling, every typo, every strange capitalization—especially the capitalizations, says Dave—has meaning. “The truth is right there in what the media think are his mistakes. He doesn’t make mistakes.” The message of the shirt to Dave is: Study the layers.
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