Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the BOK Center, June 20, 2020, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
When Donald Trump gathered his flock in Tulsa recently to bask in his glory and sing familiar hymns like “Build That Wall” and “Lock Her Up,” it was meant to be a new beginning.
Coming together in large numbers to share a common experience may be a universal human ritual, but for most of us the idea is now tinged with a combination of nostalgia and anxiety. But the president could tolerate the wait no longer. So he called to his supporters to cast aside their fears of contracting COVID-19 and pile into an indoor arena to shout and sing and inhale each other’s droplets—of course without wearing masks, a precaution taken only by the weak and those whose devotion to Trump is insufficiently pure.
To most everyone’s surprise, the event turned out to be a dud. Though Trump’s campaign claimed that a million supporters had requested tickets, only 6,200 people showed up, in an arena with room for 19,000.
So it was not a new beginning after all, but a kind of ending. The Trump rally—inevitably televised, endlessly analyzed, weighted with symbolism and sure to offend—has lost its power. The signature political event of this era is fizzling out.
No candidate in history has relied so heavily on the rally of supporters as the beginning, middle, and end of his campaign as Trump did in 2016. It became not just a means of obtaining media coverage (though it was that) but the embodiment of the Trump candidacy: chaotic, vulgar, angry, hateful, always seeming on the edge of violence. Trump is never more Trump than at a podium before his MAGA-hat-wearing supporters, shaking their fists and shouting his name.
According to Wikipedia, he held 323 rallies during the 2016 campaign; since then he has held 81 more. Then as now, Trump does almost no traditional campaigning, in the sense of going to a local diner to shake hands or doing town halls to answer voters’ questions. The rallies were the campaign, and were supposed to be again this year.
Early on, that fact was often taken as one more reason his candidacy could not possibly succeed. Observers steeped in the details of campaigning knew that in order to become a party nominee you need not just charisma and good timing but fundraising, endorsements, skilled and experienced staff, and a competent and comprehensive organization to identify and mobilize supporters. Trump had almost none of that; particularly in the early days of the primaries, his campaign consisted of little more than a plane to carry him from place to place to place.
Precisely because they assumed Trump could not possibly succeed, news organizations seldom entertained the idea that broadcasting his rallies from start to finish—which they did for no other candidate—was an extraordinary gift that would make his nomination and eventual victory far more likely. Why worry about that, when the spectacle in all its depravity was such good TV?
By March of 2016, with the primary race already firmly in his control, Trump had spent a piddling $10 million on advertising, less than five of his rivals. But according to one analysis, he had been the recipient of nearly $2 billion worth of media attention.
To Trump’s primary opponents, it was deeply unfair; they felt they couldn’t get traction when the media spent all their time talking about the bizarrely fascinating Trump campaign, with each new rally guaranteed to feature some moment of crudeness, bigotry, or worse. And they were right.
But the time since has made clear that sucking up all the attention isn’t necessarily good for Trump. At the moment, Joe Biden is running a decidedly low-key campaign, and he leads the race by an average of about 9 points. Trump may continue to both fascinate and horrify, but that doesn’t make him any more popular.
And when you’re running for re-election, your ability to turn spectacle into votes—especially a spectacle everyone has seen hundreds of times before—shrinks in the face of your actual record. Trump’s presidency is no longer hypothetical, one that can be woven out of visions of infinite winning and humiliation of friends and enemies alike. It’s an inescapable reality, one that includes mountains of corruption and dishonesty, along with 125,000 Americans dead from the pandemic (and counting).
So the days when all the cable networks would simply broadcast Trump’s rallies in their entirety are over. Fox News still does so much of the time, but CNN and MSNBC stopped a long time ago. The rallies still make news when Trump inevitably says something appalling—like saying he told his advisers to “slow the testing down” so the number of coronavirus cases would look smaller than it is—but that doesn’t exactly help him.
Trump may continue to both fascinate and horrify, but that doesn’t make him any more popular.
Now Trump’s campaign is trying to figure out how it can adapt after the failure in Tulsa. One idea is to hold more rallies in airplane hangers; since they have no seating, it avoids the picture of empty seats.
But there’s simply no question that the Trump re-election campaign will continue to hold rallies. The president can’t do without them. He needs to soak up the love of the crowd, to make an arena full of people listen while he goes on a rambling, stream-of-consciousness soliloquy for a couple of hours.
Inside that arena there are no bad polls, no pandemic, and no economic crisis. The enemies that surround him are nothing more than foils for his unsurpassed wit, there to be knocked down a few pegs with insightful put-downs while his supporters cheer their encouragement. In the arena, victory in November is assured, as is his acknowledgment by history as America’s greatest president. America has been made great again. If Trump could spend his every waking moment in that fantasyland, he would.
Should he lose, scenes from Trump rallies will still be recalled and replayed as a vivid illustration of everything this presidency represented, for as long as anyone cares to think back on the Trump era. But in the end they will tell a story not just of rage and reaction, not just of a presidency built on spectacle, but also of desperation and defeat. They will remind us of how dangerous Donald Trump was and the damage he did, but also of why he ultimately lost. Perhaps then they won’t be so painful to watch.
