On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before Donald Trump was scheduled to hold a rally on an airport tarmac in Erie, Pennsylvania, a tractor-trailer bearing a jumble of anti-Hillary Clinton slogans was spotted on the city’s streets: “Hillary’s Lying, Crooked World”; “Emails be gone!”; “Hillary for prison.” Nearly forty million Americans have already voted in the 2020 general election. Trump, his campaign, and even his supporters, though, appear increasingly hung up on the way that he won in 2016, and, by extension, on the candidate he defeated. The cargo was delivered four years ago, but the big truck’s owner still feels compelled to drive it around.
Trump’s fans arrived hours early and were waiting in a line that snaked for blocks outside the airport’s gates. The merchandise venders were doing brisk business. People had on Trump-branded hats, scarves, sweatshirts, sweat pants, buttons, flags—even face masks, although many went mask-less. A day earlier, after registering for the event as a reporter, I got an e-mail from the campaign that said, “By attending the event, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.”—and a coterie of other event organizers—“liable for any illness or injury.” As the fans were being let in, I was standing in a cordoned-off press pen. An older white woman walked by with an oxygen tube under her nose and a mask under her chin.
The mood was loose. The polls are what they are—Joe Biden has held a persistent lead over Trump in Pennsylvania since securing the Democratic nomination, in April—yet Democrats don’t trust the numbers, and Republicans dismiss them. Trump and his campaign have pushed “enthusiasm” as the metric to watch, as opposed to the polls, fund-raising, or early-voting numbers—and the messaging has trickled down. “He’s going to win Pennsylvania,” a man in an American-flag hat said suddenly to a stranger standing nearby. “The enthusiasm here, compared to the other side?” He made a gesture of dismissal with his hand. Trump, barely two weeks removed from a stay in the hospital after his COVID-19 diagnosis, has packed his schedule with rallies through Election Day. His family and members of his Administration are fanning out across the country, headlining events of their own.
Standing in the press pen, I spoke to people across a barricade. They tended to clam up, suspicious, when I asked for their names. Eventually, I closed my notebook and let people talk. A few hours later, as a group, they’d be delightedly booing and hissing the crooked media at the President’s urging. One on one, though, they made their arguments earnestly enough. Several volunteered that they knew Trump was “an asshole” and that his “tone” was horrible. But he was still their guy. On subjects like immigration, their voices hardened with anger. And their heads were filled with the minutia of the scandals and subplots of the day as provided to them by conservative media. “Have you seen Fox News here?” a man said, looking eagerly over my shoulder at the riser filled with television cameras. A woman in a red Trump knitted cap was going on about Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad. I was trying to listen without interrupting, but when she began to compare the Hunter Biden situation to the Russia investigation, during which she said no evidence of any wrongdoing was ever found, I couldn’t help it—I muttered something about Paul Manafort being a crook. “I don’t know who that is,” the woman said, looking me dead in the eye.
As the sun began to go down behind dark clouds, Representative Mike Kelly, whose district includes Erie, got onstage to warm up the crowd. “You are going to see the greatest show on Earth tonight!” he said. He encouraged people to get ready to “knock the living heck out of anybody in an opposite-color jersey.” And he told a story of a recent phone call he had with Trump. “The President called me last week,” Kelly said. “He said very clearly, ‘What the heck do we have to do to win Pennsylvania?’ ” Trump’s habit of making the subtext the text has rubbed off on some of the people around him. Kelly’s tone suggested that he was throwing red meat to the base, but in substance he was acknowledging the state of play: the campaign was scrambling during the closing weeks in a must-win state.
Trump’s great campaign innovation of 2020 has been the use of Air Force One as a campaign prop. The sky was black by the time its lights became visible up above. People thrilled and held up their phones as the great plane whooshed by, landed, taxied back, and parked itself behind the grandstands. The jet’s exterior gleamed under floodlights, as “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played from the P.A. system. It’s an ethical travesty—any notion of separating the office, the man, and the campaign is quashed. But it kills with a crowd. Trump disembarked, walked up to the stage, and got to work.
He bragged; he defended himself; he attacked Democrats, the media, the world. He made jokes and made fun of people. “Kamala, Kamala,” he said, alternating the syllables, treating the Vice-Presidential nominee’s name itself as material. He called immigrants rapists and murderers, a bit of noxious rhetoric that used to get headlines but now has passed into the background. In some ways, the rallies are more powerful on television than in person. Trump kept his back to much of the crowd. He was facing the cameras, speaking to them. (“They’re sick,” he said at one point, pointing at the row of news cameras.) He spoke from prepared remarks for much of the time—another recent change. “This is going to be bigger than four years ago,” Trump said. “There’s more enthusiasm. The crowds are bigger.” Trailing Biden in fund-raising and cash on hand, Trump’s campaign has notably had to pull back on TV advertising in several battleground states. At the rally, Trump took advantage of a captive audience and showed them an ad hitting Biden for his position on fracking. “Take a look at this clip,” Trump said, directing the crowd’s attention to a pair of giant screens above them. At one point, Trump’s mike malfunctioned and cut out for a few seconds. “I wonder who did that to our mike?” Trump said. “I don’t believe it was Joe. You know who it was? Crooked Hillary.”
Like Kelly, Trump betrayed some worry about his position in Pennsylvania. But he went further, building out a whole excuse for his potential electoral defeat, even as he continued to call defeat an impossibility. “Before the plague came, I had it made,” he said. “I wasn’t coming to Erie. I have to be honest. There’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to. I would have called you and said, ‘Hey, Erie, you know, if you have a chance, get out and vote.’ We had this thing won. We were so far up. We had the greatest economy ever, greatest jobs, greatest everything. And then we got hit with the plague, and I had to go back to work.” He smiled and struck a pose, adding, “Hello, Erie, may I please have your vote?”
On Twitter and elsewhere, Trump has spent much of the summer and fall denouncing mail-in voting as a plot against him, encouraging his supporters to stick with their plans to vote in person on Election Day. But on Tuesday, talking only to his supporters, he seemed stuck on how to deal with the trends that he had fomented. “You tend to vote very late,” he said. “Which is good. I understand that. It’s just the norms. And you tend to vote late. Get out and vote. Get out and vote.” By that point in the speech, people on the edges of the crowd were already moving toward the doors. Trump had said that he was planning to go a “little shorter” than usual. His speech ended after less than an hour. It was cold out, and getting colder.
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