It was Super Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, and the people — his people — were feeling good. They had arrived around sundown, disgorged from a small fleet of buses and ushered into the grand ballroom. Some of them were old hands at this place, they explained with great pleasure. Others, first-timers, gawked visibly at the chandeliers the size of jet turbines, the gilded molding and the grape-dangling cherubs, all that marble and mirror.
“It’s not quite Versailles,” a county party chairman mused aloud, “but it’s the closest thing we have here.”
Screens around the room were tuned to Fox News, relaying word of one state primary triumph after another, and the mood was expansive. Forgiato Blow, a self-described “MAGA rapper,” was showing off a heavy Cuban link chain, from which dangled a lemon-size bust of the man we had all come to see. His face was rendered in solid gold. His diamond eyes peered out from beneath the brim of a red cap, the cap, emblazoned with his once and future promise to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
The man himself appeared at 10:14 p.m., strolling into the ballroom from somewhere in the private depths of the club. For a strange moment he stood there, alone and mostly unnoticed in the doorway, a ghost at his own party, before the music kicked in and he made his way to the stage.
He began with some thank-yous and superlatives, some reminiscences about his presidency and denunciations of the one that followed. Then he got down to business. “We’re going to win this election, because we have no choice,” Donald J. Trump told us. “If we lose this election, we’re not going to have a country left.” He said it in a tone he might have used to complain about the rain that had doused Palm Beach that weekend.
“We love you!” someone shouted.
“We love you, too — and we love our country,” Trump replied, momentarily upbeat, before souring again. “This is a magnificent place, a magnificent country. And it’s so sad to see how far it’s come and gone.”
Victory-night speeches are not complicated. You thank the voters and supporters, the brilliant campaign staff, the long-suffering spouse and children. You celebrate the triumphs so far, express measured confidence about the road ahead. But if Trump did most of this on that night of March 5, none of it seemed to hold his attention very long, sometimes not even for the duration of a sentence, before he caromed off the prepared material back into the darkness.
“Our cities are choking to death,” he was saying now, some 20 minutes in. “Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.” He seemed only belatedly to remember the phrase stitched onto the red hats dotting the crowd before him. “And we’re going to make America great again, greater than ever before. Thank you very much. It’s been a big night.”
By the time the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” came on, he was already gone.
As the guests were ushered back onto their buses, Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime consigliere and presidential-pardon recipient, materialized before a small gaggle of reporters and reiterated what the former president said. “This will be our last election,” he said, “unless we elect Donald Trump.”
I had been attending Trump’s speeches on and off for several months by this time, as I had in the last days of the 2016 campaign and then throughout and after his presidency. Watching him in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina this campaign season, it was clear that something had shifted.
Trump is among the world’s most obvious political creatures, but the sheer constancy of his public communications, their assaultiveness and density, has sometimes made it hard to see clearly their evolutions, to trace changes in the signal through the formidable noise. His demands on the world’s attention make it paradoxically easy not to pay attention to the particulars. Most Americans, in any case, made up their minds about him one way or another long ago. This has made Trump appear more static than he actually is — made it harder to see how the Trump presidency, which profoundly changed America, also changed Trump.
When I got home from Mar-a-Lago, I pulled up a video of him from Super Tuesday 2016, addressing his supporters in the same ballroom under similar circumstances. I was stunned by how different the man on the screen was from the one I had just seen. The Trump of 2016 had a spring in his step as he congratulated Ted Cruz on winning Texas, ribbed a vanquished Chris Christie, bantered and parried with the assembled reporters. His digressions into the many evils he sought to remedy were brief, and he seemed eager to get back to all he had accomplished, and all he would accomplish.
“This has been an amazing period of time,” he said. “It’s been amazing for me, even from an educational standpoint, and I think honestly we’ve done something that almost nobody thought could be done. And I’m very proud of it. And I just want to leave you with this: I am a unifier.”
Trump’s critics were right in 2016 to observe the grim novelty of his politics: their ideology of national pessimism, their open demagoguery and clear affinities with the far right, their blunt division of the country into us and them in a way that no major party’s presidential nominee had dared for decades. But Trump’s great accomplishment, one that was less visible from a distance but immediately apparent at his rallies, was the us that he conjured there: the way his supporters saw not only him but one another, and saw in themselves a movement.
That us is still there in Trump’s 2024 speeches. But it is not really the main character anymore. These speeches, and the events that surround them, are about them — what they have done to Trump, and what Trump intends to do in return.
“I keep telling people: ‘Watch the speeches,’” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign chief executive and, briefly, chief White House strategist, told me recently. “When you look at the content of what he’s putting out there, he couldn’t telegraph this any more clearly: what he stands for, and what he’s up against.”
Trump has always said what he means in his speeches. He is also constantly obscuring it, by instinct or design, contradicting his own statements or waving them off as jokes, scribbling over them with tangents and lies and just plain weirdness. One of the first things I noticed watching him last year, though, is that this is less true than it once was.
As with everything about Trump, what was once revolutionary has become institutionalized. The insult-comic riffs and winding tours through the headlines are more constrained and repetitive now, his performer’s instincts duller than they once were. The brutalist building blocks of the prepared speech, its stock-photo celebrations of national triumphs (“We stand on the shoulders of American heroes who crossed the ocean, settled the continent, tamed the wilderness, laid down the railroads, raised up those great beautiful skyscrapers … ”) and lamentations of national decline, now stand out in clearer relief.
They build to a rhetorical climax that is echoed from one speech to the next. In Claremont, N.H., in November, he said:
2024 is our final battle.
With you at my side — and you’ve been at my side from the beginning — we will demolish the deep state. We’ll expel, we’re going to expel, those horrible, horrible warmongers from our government. They want to fight everybody. They want to kill people all over the place. Places we’ve never heard about before. Places that want to be left alone.
We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake-news media until they become real. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will finish the job that we started better than anybody has ever started a job before.
The great silent majority is rising like never before. And under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. You’re going to be forgotten no longer. With your help, your love and your vote, we will put America first.
And today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.
The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.
Our threat is from within.
No major American presidential candidate has talked like this — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Trump himself. Before November 2020, his speeches, for all their boundary crossings, stopped short of the language of “vermin” and “enemies within.”
When I asked the political historian Federico Finchelstein what he made of the speech, he replied bluntly: “This is how fascists campaign.”
For roughly the entirety of Trump’s political career, his detractors have debated, exhaustively and exhaustingly, whether the “f” word is reasonably applied to him. Finchelstein, the chairman of the history department at the New School for Social Research, was for years among those who argued it was not. In his 2017 book, “From Fascism to Populism in History,” he contended that the most useful historical point of reference for the newly elected American president was the postwar populism of Juan Perón, the president of Finchelstein’s native Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s and again in the 1970s.
An alumnus of a military dictatorship who served as an attaché in Mussolini’s Italy, Perón admired the fascist regimes of interwar Europe. But he also understood that repeating them was both undesirable and probably impossible following the defeat of the Axis powers. If authoritarianism had a future, it was not in openly overturning democratic systems but in working inside them.
The result was what Finchelstein called a series of “authoritarian experiments in democracy.” Perón won elections fairly within a democratic system and never tried to overturn it, as Mussolini and Hitler did. At the same time, he often acted autocratically in office, exiling opponents, removing unfriendly judges from the bench and shuttering hostile newspapers.
Like the fascists, Perón redefined “the people” as an exclusive, not inclusive, category: an us defined against a them. Where he differed, crucially, was in claiming the mantle of democracy — and presenting himself as its perfection. In populism, the leader had arrived to beat back a threat to the will of the people that came from within the country’s democratic system — and that, absent the leader’s vigilant rule, would return to cause worse destruction. Perón’s enemies were not just Perón’s enemies; they were the enemies of democracy.
Before Trump, no American populist had enjoyed the stature and structural conditions necessary to succeed at populism’s essential act of mashing a democracy into the shape of his own face: of winning a presidential election. His 2017 Inaugural Address, which came to be known as his “American carnage” speech, was a Perónist speech, Finchelstein argued at the time. It presented Trump’s inauguration as a total break with American history. It announced the defeat of a threat that came from within the system and the perfection of American democracy, now contained within the form of Donald Trump.
The worldview the speech presented was unapologetically us against them, but like Perón’s, it was decidedly heavier on the us. “Jan. 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again,” Trump told his admirers on the National Mall. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.”
But populism, when it attains power, is unstable. In the leader’s story, they have a tendency to swell in number and significance as the impossible promises and prophecies the leader has offered us inevitably fail to materialize; us moves from a triumphant majority to an unjustly embattled one, surrounded on all sides by enemies. This was of course the story that Trump told, from his early grievances against the “deep state” through his first impeachment trial and then the 2020 election and beyond.
And populism is in a sense a retroactive label, because the true test of a government is how it ends. Some prominent historians of authoritarianism who resisted describing Trump as a fascist throughout his presidency publicly changed their minds after Jan. 6. Finchelstein was among them — almost. His current preferred term for Trump and like-minded figures like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and the title of his forthcoming book about them, is “wannabe fascists.”
The term implied directional movement more than classification. “Perón was a fascist who wanted to reformulate himself in democratic terms,” Finchelstein told me, “whereas Trump seems to be doing the opposite.”
But its equivocation also suggested the continuing difficulty of describing Trump. How do you think about a politician who openly veers into fascist tropes but, in four years in office, did not generally govern like one? Who — sworn testimony before the Jan. 6 committee clearly showed — did try by several means to overturn his electoral defeat, but in the end left the White House as his opponent was sworn into office?
On one level, the answer hinged on how the people — his people — heard what he said. His long pattern of self-contradiction and denial, of jokes that might or might not be jokes, meant that “he can talk in different layers to different people,” Finchelstein said. “There are people who take what he says literally. There are people who don’t take it literally. And people who ignore it as rhetoric. He’s talking to all these people.” The question was what they heard.
The first time I went to see Trump on the 2024 campaign trail was in Derry, N.H., in late October. A disorienting aspect of Trump’s new, harsher campaign rhetoric is that in every other way, his campaign is far more routine than his previous rally tours. The old pirate-ship energy and unpredictability that used to define these events, even during his presidency, has mostly dissipated, replaced by clean-cut staff members in personalized vests and windbreakers.
The crowds, too, are different. The serious Trump Train lifers, the parking-lot characters I met at rallies past, are still there, but in Derry, they were far outnumbered by the stock extras of New Hampshire in primary season: prim New England town-meeting types, wild-eyed libertarians, performatively uncommitted voters adding to their collection of candidate sightings.
The woman standing next to me had brought her daughter, who looked about 11. Somewhere on the far side of the crowd, some young men started a chant of “Let’s go Brandon,” a ubiquitous MAGA meme originating with a TV sports reporter’s mishearing of a crowd at a NASCAR race chanting “[expletive] Joe Biden!”
The girl asked her mother what it meant. “It was a name flub,” the mother said quickly. “Biden called someone Brandon by accident.”
After Trump took the stage, his speech eventually turned, as Trump speeches now always did, to his indictments. “When they start playing with your elections and trying to arrest their political opponent — I can do that, too!” Trump said. “If I win — which I hope we do, because we’re not going to have a country — but if I win, I could then say, I don’t know: ‘This guy, this Democrat’s doing great. I don’t like the poll numbers. Attorney General, come down, arrest that guy, will you, please? Give him a subpoena! Indict him!’ That’s the end of him.”
It had not been the end of Trump. “This is the first time in history that somebody’s been indicted and his poll numbers have gone up!” he crowed.
This was true — and it was a key to understanding Trump’s campaign. When a grand jury began preparing to indict Trump in New York in March 2023, over payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign, Trump was polling ahead of his primary rivals, but with the support of less than half of Republicans. This reflected the deceptively complicated nature of Trump’s relationship with the Republican Party, which had been remolded entirely in his image but was not yet fully in his control.
The Republican narrative of the last several years was Trump’s narrative. It began with the serial efforts by congressional Democrats and agency bureaucrats to hamstring his presidency — efforts that he was on the brink of defeating in 2020, when the pandemic hit. Democrats, again with the quiet but essential support of bureaucrats, had exploited the pandemic to many ends — not least expanding and making clever use of mail-in balloting in the November election, which, depending on whom you asked, had been stolen legally or stolen outright from Trump.
But the fact that Trump was undeniably central to this story of the recent past that most Republican officials and voters espoused did not necessarily mean he was essential to their vision of the path forward. Reporting around the margins of the post-presidential MAGA movement in 2021 and 2022, attending anti-vaccine protests and “patriot” assemblies and campaign rallies for right-wing candidates still bent on overturning the 2020 election, I met many people who loved and admired Trump and shared his grievances but were also beginning to consider a future without him. Some complained that he was too focused on his own petty resentments, holed up at Mar-a-Lago licking his wounds while they continued to fight the movement’s battles. Others simply feared he would lose if he ran again.
This was the opening that Ron DeSantis, in particular, so clearly aimed to exploit. No serious Republican candidate could campaign directly against Trump or question his claims about the 2020 election. But they could argue for moving on from him.
What Trump had to offer in this context, and really his only hope, was not moving on. He could remind us just how dangerous they were, reiterate the crimes and desecrations they had committed that had not yet been avenged.
“In these movements, you have to take the moral high ground first,” said Bannon, who remains in Trump’s orbit — and received a presidential pardon from him — and serves as a sort of in-house philosopher-strategist of MAGA on his “War Room” podcast. The aim of Trump’s early campaign speeches, he explained, was “to reinforce to his core followers: ‘We know what happened. We’re united. I’ve got it. I’m all in.’ And put the enemy” — his rivals and antagonists in the party — “on notice.”
Bannon pointed me to a speech Trump gave at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023, shortly before the first of his indictments. “In 2016,” Trump told the audience, which included Bolsonaro, “I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
He repeated it for emphasis: “I am your retribution.”
“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Bannon said. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”
In this context, Trump’s many criminal prosecutions — the New York indictment and the state and federal charges that followed in three other jurisdictions for mishandling classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election — were an extraordinary gift. They were a real-time story reinforcing the message of his campaign, weekly evidence of their terrible power, the power they would unleash on the people in this room if Trump ever stepped back from public life, relinquished his place as the protective barrier — the big, beautiful wall — standing between us and them. And by supporting him amid these tribulations, the people — his people — were sending a message to them. “Because the people understand,” Trump told us in Derry, “it’s bullshit!”
“Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted.
There was something incantatory about the word, stretched out by the chant into a two-syllable seesaw of tension and release. It was at once an eruption of visceral disgust and an exhilarating collective transgression — and a lesson in how quickly the former could become the latter.
“I went to Washington,” Keekee Hunt told me.
She said it quietly, almost under her breath, and at first, I didn’t catch her meaning. “When he was inaugurated?” I asked.
“You know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “When we ‘breached the Capitol.’”
“I can’t believe you did that,” her friend said.
We were waiting in a line outside an arena in Rock Hill, S.C., where Trump would soon be speaking. Hunt, a 49-year-old local bail bondswoman and hairstylist, was dressed in a TRUMP GIRL T-shirt and distressed jeans, her blond hair spilling out from under a red MAGA-style cap proclaiming her support for the Second Amendment.
In 2015, Hunt was living in Myrtle Beach, which happened to be the site of one of Trump’s earliest proto-campaign appearances, at a local Tea Party gathering several months before he declared his candidacy. Friends of hers were early converts.
I asked when she started paying attention to politics herself. “When Obama became president,” she told me. “That’s when everything started changing.”
“What bothered you about what was happening?”
“Well, for one, I didn’t think he was an American.”
She had thought long and hard about going to Washington on Jan. 6, she said. On her phone, she showed me a video she took at 4:07 p.m. that day. Rioters were clashing with police officers at the foot of the Capitol steps, with plumes of tear gas drifting overhead. “They were fighting over here, fighting over there,” she said. Before she made it too close herself, she said, the tear gas got in her eyes, and she turned back.
She swiped through more videos and pictures, eventually arriving at a group photo of her and her friends with the Capitol in the distance, shortly before they marched, holding American flags and Trump banners on long poles. A woman on the edge of the group was smiling and holding up a sign that said “STOP THE STEAL — Save Our Republic”: a local parents rights activist, Hunt said, who was coming to the rally today. She had gotten one of the coveted seats in the section right behind Trump.
“She’s going to be V.I.P.,” Hunt said.
Inside, a low rumble of synthesizer, playing a vaguely liturgical suspended chord, filled the arena. A mass of men’s voices came in, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The recording was poor quality, far-away-sounding and distorted around the edges, and the voices had a hauntingly flat and gray affect as they sang of the twilight’s last gleaming. Then the voice of the former president, clearer, rose above them: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
The crowd listened respectfully. It was a recording called “Justice for All,” released early last year, credited to “Donald J. Trump & J6 Prison Choir”: a group of men among those currently serving prison sentences related to the Jan. 6 riot — a majority for assaulting police officers — who were recorded singing over the phone from the D.C. jail. As the prisoners reached the end of the anthem, they broke into a chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The crowd joined in, unified in the new resistance.
The recording’s producers included Kash Patel, a former Trump administration intelligence staff member who is involved in Trump’s 2024 campaign. It opened Trump’s first proper rally of this campaign, in March 2023 in Waco, Texas, and the rallies since. It offered a compressed version of one of the campaign’s central arguments: that Trump’s prosecutions were an extension of the dispossession of the Trump faithful in 2020, and that the weight of the state would fall not only on Trump but on anyone patriotic enough to dare to stand with him.
“Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are really the true threat to democracy,” Trump told us that afternoon. “They use the D.O.J., the F.B.I., our election systems. They rigged our elections and attacked free speech. It is amazing all the people that go get investigated, all of them, all of them — they don’t go after the people that rigged the election. They go after the people that want to find out who it was that rigged it.”
As the speech neared its conclusion, the room once again filled with music, a stately cinematic swell of synthesized strings. This recording, an instrumental composition called “Mirrors,” was also thick with subtextual information. Several years ago it was appropriated, seemingly at random, by devotees of QAnon, the conspiracist cosmology that holds Trump to be the central figure in a world-historical battle against a cabal of Democrats, business leaders and celebrities trafficking and torturing children. In 2022, Trump appropriated it, too, using the song for a video he released on social media, and later at a rally in Ohio, as a soundtrack for the rousing finale of his speech. Although a spokesman denied that it was a wink at the QAnon faithful, supporters at the rally responded by raising their hands in a familiar QAnon gesture.
As was so often the case with Trump, what had at first been scandalous had quickly become standard. “Mirrors” now closed out every Trump rally, a bookend to “Justice for All.” As the song played in Rock Hill, he told the crowd: “Together we are taking on some of the most menacing forces and vicious opponents our people have ever seen. But no matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting are, you must never forget this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage. And our American liberty is your God-given right.”
The crowd was on its feet as he recited his benediction:
Together we will make America powerful again!
We will make America wealthy again!
We will make America strong again!
We will make America proud again!
We will make America safe again!
And we will make America great again!
The people — his people — roared. Trump did a little dance. Then he descended the stage in the direction of the barricade. A wave of excitement rippled through the crowd. The four-on-the-floor backbeat of “Y.M.C.A.” thumped through our close-packed bodies like a shared pulse.
He was brandishing his permanent marker like a conductor’s baton, briskly autographing campaign signs and MAGA merchandise. Sweat was beading around the edges of his makeup. “Don’t reach out to him!” a rally veteran advised us. “Just yell at him!”
As Trump passed, my view was momentarily obstructed by a woman’s wide-brimmed hat, glittering with sequined stars and stripes and covered in buttons. The largest featured a grinning Trump framed by the words: “ONE LAST TIME GOD SENDS AMERICA A LEADER.” Another read: “Trust is an expression of love.”
Early in his Rock Hill speech, Trump had paused to recognize one of the Republican politicians in attendance, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Wilson’s profile in national politics consisted mostly of a single moment, during President Barack Obama’s address to Congress in September 2009, when Wilson interrupted Obama by shouting, “You lie!”
Somewhat less remembered than Wilson’s outburst is its context. He was objecting to Obama’s assertion that the Affordable Care Act would not cover undocumented immigrants — a preoccupation of the ascendant Tea Party movement. As a candidate six years later, Trump adopted and further radicalized the Tea Party’s immigration politics, which cast migrants as the tip of the spear of a “globalist” effort to undermine the security and identity of the United States.
Wilson’s outburst was one of those moments in pre-Trump politics that seems exotically distant now, the genuine shock with which it was met in the political class — genuine enough that Wilson, at the urging of congressional leadership, called the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to apologize — an anachronism of a bygone age. The interruption now seems not just normal but seminal, a blueprint for the MAGA generation that came after Wilson. “He said, ‘You lie!’ You remember?” Trump told the crowd in Rock Hill. “I’m sure nobody remembers that, but I do. He is one of the most incredible people.”
Seated not far from Wilson at the rally was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the second-term Georgia congresswoman and Trump sidekick. Since the beginning of Biden’s presidency, Greene has become a serial interrupter of his speeches, refining and expanding on Wilson’s legacy. She arrived at the Capitol for Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address in a Make America Great Again hat and a matching red blazer festooned with buttons. One of them featured a photo of a smiling young woman: a 22-year-old nursing student named Laken Riley, who had been murdered the month before while she was jogging on the campus of the University of Georgia.
The day after Riley disappeared, around the time Trump took the stage in Rock Hill, the campus police arrested a suspect in the case, an undocumented 26-year-old Venezuelan migrant named Jose Antonio Ibarra. It soon emerged that Ibarra had previously been arrested after crossing the border near El Paso in September 2022, requested asylum and was later released while his case awaited adjudication. Since then, he had been arrested on suspicion of shoplifting and released again.
As Biden glad-handed his way down the aisle on his way to the dais, Greene attracted his attention and managed to hand him a button that said: “SAY HER NAME: LAKEN RILEY.” It was a phrase slyly borrowed from the emotional appeals of the racial-justice movement.
“Say her name!” Greene shouted repeatedly at Biden during the speech, until he finally veered off-script. “Lincoln Riley,” Biden said, garbling her first name: “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.” He held up the button Greene had given him.
This was, by any measure, the greatest coup of the many that Greene had pulled off in her short time in office. And it happened just two days before Trump was scheduled to hold a rally in Greene’s hometown, Rome, Ga.
In Rome that afternoon, I saw two women standing outside the arena, one of them holding up a large placard with Riley’s picture on it and “SAY HER NAME!” printed below. They were being interviewed by Vanessa Broussard, an anchor for Right Side Broadcasting Network, an online streaming outlet that serves as a kind of house organ of Trump’s government in exile. (Greene is dating one of the network’s anchors.)
“Laken Riley — tragic story,” Broussard was saying. “Let’s talk about that and how, you know, this hit home. Not just because this was a beautiful American college student, but also right there in your backyard here in Georgia.”
“It’s very concerning with us who have kids and grandkids, you know, and families and friends that’s got younger kids,” said the woman with the sign, a 56-year-old rental-property manager from Elijay, Ga., named Deanna Foley. “It’s tragic. It’s embarrassing that Joe Biden’s not even acknowledging her.”
“Absolutely,” Broussard said. “It’s disgusting.”
When Broussard moved on, I asked the women how they had heard about Riley’s murder.
“Fox News,” Foley replied. “That’s the only news I watch.”
Illegal immigration, she told me, was the most important issue for her in the election. “I’m very concerned, you know, with the human trafficking, child trafficking and the crime that goes along with it, fueled by illegal aliens and the cartels,” she said. And then there were the tens of thousands of children who had gone missing in Ukraine since the Russian invasion, she added: “That’s just nothing but a human-trafficking thing right there.”
Many children, perhaps thousands, were indeed abducted from Ukraine by Russian soldiers in the early days of the war; journalistic and legal investigations have found that many are being held in Russia, where they have been subjected to re-education and used occasionally for propaganda purposes. But this did not seem to be what Foley was talking about.
“What do you think is happening to all those kids?” I asked.
“Pedophiles,” Foley replied. “The Illuminati.”
“Definitely pedos,” her friend, Tina Murray, interjected.
“Pedophiles,” Foley said again. “Hunter Biden. Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton. Bill Clinton.”
“Hollywood,” Murray said.
This sounded like the QAnon theory of the world, in which practically any event could be explained and connected by a great liberal child-trafficking conspiracy. When I mentioned QAnon, Foley nodded. “I like Q,” she said. “They give people hope in very sad and low times.”
“You’ve got to use your discernment online,” Foley went on. “But you don’t use your discernment on the Democrats, because, I mean, they’re just” — she paused, looking for the word — “against America.”
“So you think all the stuff about them is true that you see out there?” I asked.
“On the Democrats?”
“Yeah.”
“Absolutely. It’s worse than I could ever even dream of.”
The threat of violent migrant criminals has been a foundational element of Trump’s politics, and his rallies, since 2015, and by early this year it had assumed center stage in Trump’s speeches as he began to back away — not entirely, but noticeably — from last year’s talk of vermin and internal enemies. This reflected an actual worsening of the situation along the Southern border, which remains one of Biden’s great political vulnerabilities — enough so that Trump leaned on Republican lawmakers to kill a bipartisan immigration bill in the Senate in January, reportedly because he hoped to continue campaigning on the issue. But it also seemed possible that Trump was aware he had perhaps pushed things a little far in the revenge department.
Talking to voters in Iowa, away from the bubbles of the presidential campaigns, over the course of several weeks leading up to the January caucuses there, I had been surprised to hear a number of longtime Republicans and Trump supporters expressing wariness about Trump and, for the first time I could remember, openly worrying about what he might do if he won. “I voted for Trump twice,” Bob Meyer, 75, a retired bar and gas-station owner in the town Lake City, told me. “I still like the man. I like what he says. But I wouldn’t vote for him again, because that’s how dictators take over.”
Enough similar misgivings seemed to have reached Trump that he revised himself in a Fox News town hall in Des Moines in January: “We’re going to make this country so successful again,” he said, “I’m not going to have time for retribution.”
At the same time, Trump’s denunciations of migrants “poisoning the blood” of America — a phrase that immediately drew Hitler comparisons, which drew Trump’s loud insistence at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, that “I never read ‘Mein Kampf’” — was a reminder that his immigration rhetoric was the same song in a different key. If immigration was Trump’s clearest link to the Tea Party, it was also his clearest link to an emerging class of European leaders in countries like Poland and Hungary who, at the time of his election, were infusing Perón-style postwar populism with right-wing xenophobia and nativism — a far darker parallel legacy of interwar fascism.
On March 8, the night before the Rome rally, Trump met with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, the most successful European practitioner of this strain of authoritarianism. Over the past several years, Orban has become a darling of American right-wing intellectuals for his unapologetic defense of an “illiberal state” and his hard-line immigration policy, framing each as part of the remaking of his country as a stronghold of traditional European culture and identity.
In his recent speeches, Trump, too, was grasping for a larger context for his denunciations of migrants — though with none of Orban’s deftness, instead unspooling increasingly extravagant and explosive conspiracy theories. The border crisis was a deliberate act on the part of the Biden administration, he told his crowds: the second part of a process of disenfranchising Americans and attaining permanent Democratic rule that began with the theft of the 2020 election.
“Biden’s conduct on our border is, by any definition, a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he said in Greensboro, N.C., a week before the Rome rally. “He is a danger to democracy. No.1, he goes after his political opponent, which nobody’s ever done in this country.” But beyond that, he warned, “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”
Now, in Rome, he gazed out at the arena as the crowd held up Laken Riley placards like the one Foley held outside. “You understand what’s happening here,” he told us. “Joe Biden has no remorse. He’s got no regret. He’s got no empathy, no compassion. Worst of all, he has no intention of stopping the deadly invasion that stole precious Laken’s beautiful American life.”
“What Joe Biden has done on our border is a crime against humanity and the people of this nation, for which he will never be forgiven,” he went on. “I will stop this invasion. I’m going to do it. I will stop the killing. I will stop the bloodshed. I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country. They’re conquering our country. These people are conquering our country.”
When “Mirrors” came on toward the end, and Trump spoke of our final battle, a young man in the stands behind me bellowed the QAnon rallying cry at the top of his lungs: “Where we go one, we go all!”
“Who are these people that would do this to us?” Trump asked. “Who are these people who would destroy our country?”
“Democrats!” the people around me shouted. A woman behind me held her hands, prayerlike, against her lips.
He seemed reinvigorated that night, speaking for a half-hour longer than usual. He was improvising and digressing again, riffing with the crowd, moving beyond the stock bits that he shuffled around most nights. The crowd, too, seemed electrified in a way I had not seen for years. The lifting up of the martyr, the processing of her death into rage, the processing, through Trump, of the rage into joy — the old alchemy was working again.
On the arena floor, the last stragglers were dancing merrily to a final round of “Y.M.C.A.” and grinning for selfies. Scattered on the floor around their feet were discarded SAY HER NAME placards, Riley’s face limp and sticky with spilled soda. The tiny print near the bottom of her picture was scuffed, but I could still make it out: PAID FOR BY DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT 2024, INC.
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