Uncertain Trumpettes
Why isn't there more reporting on MAGA crowds?
I’ve been wondering what’s been happening—or, perhaps more to the point, what’s not happening—at Trump rallies. One of the more notable absences during his recent trial was large crowds protesting on his behalf in lower Manhattan. Despite fears they would swell after his conviction, that didn’t happen, either. Perhaps this dog that didn’t bark can be explained away as the trial taking place in the heartland of blue America.
That’s presumably why a big deal was made of Trump’s rally in the South Bronx last month: the rising tide of MAGA people of color! Yet from what I can tell, there was little reporting about the numbers of that crowd, which also appeared to be more Staten Island than Hunt’s Point and not exactly huge in number. (Have a look at the photos published by NBC; why hasn’t an effort to gauge numbers been a standard feature of reporting these stories?) Trump got a lot of media attention for his rally at a black church in Detroit last weekend, but that crowd was overwhelmingly white—and indeed, media people seemed to supply a significant proportion of the attendance there and elsewhere. I find myself wondering if media outlets like the Washington Post have an interest in playing up the story to prop up their business model; might it include scaremongering?
We have been hearing a little more about Trump’s incoherence at his rallies, the way his post-conviction riffs are repetitive, tiresome, and downright weird (like his recent disquisition on the intricacies of shark electrocution at a rally in Nevada, or his troublingly vacuous appearance before CEOs in New York last week). We get lots of reporting about his support and the spectacle of his rallies for sympathetic audiences in the heartland of red America. But I see glimpses that many people are not paying particular attention at these events, ignoring him and/or socializing as he speaks. (This apparently was common at church revivals, an indication that theology is always less important than having a good time.)
The aging-Biden drumbeat continues to sound, and does continue to be worrisome (notably the apparent need for former president Obama to lead him offstage at a recent fundraiser). But there’s a hollowness amid the Trump bluster, an illusion of vigor in his self-presentation, that makes me wonder how much of a threat he actually is—or more accurately, how valued a vessel he is for a constituency that has been desperate for messenger in a plutocratic Republican party that stiff-armed its populist supporters for far too long (something that the Democratic party has also been doing). I understand that Trump represents something real. I’m just not sure how real he is.