Inside Trump’s Tallahassee rally, where politics is a carnival
‘He isn’t Hillary’
The atmosphere was sizzling. Traffic backed up for hours, and thousands of people lined up at a gate, Florida residents came out in droves to support Donald Trump at yesterday’s rally in Tallahassee. Despite everything – these last few weeks, The Donald has had an awful campaign, he’s done poorly with a number of different groups, he’s polling at just 30 percent in Florida and most people in his position would have given up – despite those stats, thousands of people still lined up, waited for hours in traffic and took time off work to get into Trump’s rally. I met those people yesterday.
The lines of people were all equally as anxious as me to get inside. Police officers had to calm rally-goers down. College bros, clad in Make America Great Again hats, sang Florida State’s war chant when the gates opened. There was a carnival-like atmosphere inside. Port-a-potties lined the fences, food trucks had lines of people waiting to get hotdogs on a stick and a tent full of Trump memorabilia for sale was placed at the front of the field.
“Is that a camo Make America Great Again hat?” a college-aged girl screamed to a street vendor. “It sure is, 20 dollars.” There was an old pick-up truck, decorated with pumpkins and hay bales right behind the main stage. I felt like I was at a fall festival rather than a presidential rally.
A good majority of the attendees were dressed in either red, white or blue. I’ve always wondered what a Trump rally was really like on the inside, about what types of people I’d find. I realized while walking around that his supporters all looked and, for the most part, acted like normal people. Parents with their children, teenagers, old couples. But one thing I did notice was a lack of diversity. I could have counted (and actually did), the amount of minorities or single women at the event on one hand. The groups which Trump seems most interested in, when he exclaimed things like “African Americans have been betrayed, Hispanic voters have been betrayed,” didn’t seem all that interested in him.
I honestly wondered how his supporters felt about him. What about Trump made them tick, made them feel as though he could provide an America to believe in once again. I stopped one supporter, wearing a green polo with a Make American Great Again hat on, and asked him exactly why he was voting for Donald Trump. He looked at me, blinked in thought, then motioned to the crowd. “Look around,” he said, gesturing to the supporters running to the gates in excitement as Trump’s car pulled up. “All these people here are for him. They love him. That’s why.”
I’d noticed as the night went on, every time I asked one of his supporters why they were voting for him, they’d state why he was so great with lines like “he’s honest,” “he’s real,” or “he tells it like it is.” The majority of the people I spoke with thought he’d be a great president, that he’s amazing and that’s why they’re going to vote for him, but only once did I get an answer that spoke about what Trump stands for, or why they liked his ideals. It seemed as though they just liked the idea of him as a president.
“Hillary is as crooked as a three dollar bill,” “she’s a liar,” “why don’t we deport her instead?,” “the system is rigged.” And this is when my third and final revelation of the night happened. No one liked Trump as much as they hate Hillary. With Trump droning on, failing to say anything with substance, I realized people liked him not because they like Donald Trump, but because he’s a figurehead, an outlet in which they can harvest their anger. At this point, liking Trump is just something to be a part of. I realized, with great disappointment, that Trump’s entire campaign is nothing more than a popularity contest. It’s a spectacle.
As Trump droned on and I looked into the crowd, many who began filing out not even halfway through his speech, the others engaging in chants of “build that wall,” I wondered if any of Trump’s supporters would like him as much as they do if he were, say, a Democrat instead.