A writer attends his rallies to find out.
I've probably seen Donald Trump speak live and in person significantly more than the average American: six times in eight years. |
But I hadn't been to a full-blown Trump rally since before the pandemic. So this month, I went to Trump rallies in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to see what the former president looks like today as he consolidates support and gears up for a year of trials. I wrote about the experience in an essay for Times Opinion this week. |
Most people, if they saw anything of Trump's recent speech in Waterloo, would have seen a cropped image of him, in a suit, behind a lectern, in front of just the stripes of an American flag, probably cut to 30 seconds or less on an evening news broadcast or in a clip on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram or TikTok. |
The view I got, though, was inside an older warehouse on a brisk day, with light streaming in from overhead casement windows. Waterloo isn't a huge place, so we were all about a couple hundred feet, max, from Trump. And because of the setup of the venue, I had an unusually complete view of his entire security detail, organized in an octagon pattern — stoic and grim for the full hour Trump spoke. |
 | | Katherine Miller |
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A lot of the experience of attending political events in real life is waiting for them to start, but that left time to take in the American weirdness of waiting in a warehouse for Trump to speak while an Elton John song played over the speakers and some people took their seats in T-shirts with Trump's mug shot on them. |
But when he does speak and you really, really listen to what he's saying — at length, not just in a clip — it's notable how much his defeat in the 2020 election still is present and fresh for Trump. He's talking about it in a different way from what I had thought: He ties the claim that the election was stolen from him to much of what ails the world today, from the war in Ukraine to inflation to Hamas's attack in Israel. "We would have had a deal with Iran. We would have had no inflation. Russia would have never ever in a million years gone into Ukraine," he said in Waterloo. |
A lot of the ways he talks about the world and about President Biden aren't so different from the way other Republicans do. But the omnipresence of the 2020 election in his worldview — even as he prepares for a trial next year centering on the events leading up to Jan. 6 — hasn't gone away and is startling to hear. It is also something neither other Republican politicians nor the courts seem ready for. |
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