In advance of the debate I’m sending out this short dispatch “from” Philadelphia on Trump’s blue city strategy. My bet is that at the debate we’ll see a variation of it, a performance of “inclusivity,” Trump-style. That’s the signal. Below is the reception.
***
They work the line.
The Right Side Broadcasting Network correspondents, that is, my proxies in Philadelphia for the latest June stop on Trump’s blue cities tour: The Bronx, Vegas, now Philly. He’s not looking for votes. He’s prepping a lie. If he loses Pennsylvania, Nevada, he say, “look at these crowds. They rigged Philadelphia, they stole Clark County.”
It’s not about plausibility. All he needs is a script, a story for the base to believe and behind which the GOP can hide.
I’d planned to attend Vegas but I bailed—heat dome—and then I made reservations for Philadelphia, and I bailed again, because, again, heat dome, a different one even though they’re all beginning to blur. “Heat dome” is our condition. One hundred degrees, crows RSBN correspondent Nikki Stanzione. She finds it thrilling: the hotter the concrete the deeper the devotion of the fans frying outside 1776 N. Broadway.
I don’t have it in me to melt for fascism, but Nikki does it for me. Nikki and a walking combover in khakis called Bobby. Nikki, AKA “Nikki Stanz,” AKA per her promotional materials—she dreamed of showbiz and made it as a start of a variety of home shopping networks—“The Human Jukebox.” Big hair, big glasses, big, dangling earrings. Red top, tight jeans. She says it’s ok if you see her sweat. That’s the heart she has for the big man. “Real feel 110,” she says, as in degrees. “That’s love.”
Bobby nods.
They work the line. First stop: a kid, maybe ten, red muscle shirt. Tells Nikki he loves Trump. “He’s funny!” Humor is Nikki’s theme. She hits it hard.
The man next to the kid pats the kid’s shoulder. The man’s name is Slim. White suit, black shirt, aqua tie, with a gold tie pin.
“I’m dressed to say thanks to my president,” he tells Nikki. “I don’t know how else to say thank you.”
Behind him, a man wearing a flag as a cape: “JOE & THE HO GOTTA GO.”
Trying to angle into the camera, a man eager to show his flair: a beige t-shirt with big block letters: “DOESN’T GET PUSSY.” An arrow points up at the man’s face.
Slim’s “funny,” too. Says he’s going to run for Congress, here’s his slogan: “Congress is a little overweight, they need some Slimfast.”
Nikki begins to laugh.
Nikki and Bobby have heard rumors of a man in the heat for whom Philly would be 78th Trump rally. The “get” belongs to Bobby. Mr. 78’s name is Edward X. Young, a failed school board candidate in Brick, New Jersey—his slogan was “Make Brick Great Again”—who has appeared in more than 100 low budget horror films, including Creepy Clowns, Gerry the Psychopath, and The Cannibal Killer: The Real Story of Jeffrey Dahmer, of which he’s particularly proud. He’s wearing an upside-down American flag t-shirt a la Alito beneath a lime-green Hawaiian shirt, a la the Boogaloo Bois militia movement, only this one has Trump’s face worked into the pattern.
This isn’t the hottest rally Edward has attended. That’d be a year ago, in Pickens, South Carolina (it’s the banner on Trump’s events page). “103, outside, not a cloud in the sky,” he boasts. “People were dropping like flies. I was almost one of ’em!”
Bobby, who has a sideline doing presidential impressions in a show he calls “Make America Laugh AgainTM,” wants to know how long Edward lasted in the heat.
“I was probably on my feet for fifteen, sixteen hours,” says Edward. A security guard, he brags, told him his eyes were rolling back in his head.
Bobby: “Wow!”
In Pickens, the guard had wanted to take Edward to a clinic for heatstroke, but Edward couldn’t stand to miss his man. “I can hack it!” he’d begged. The guard had caved,with a caveat: “If I see you swoon one more time, I’m throwing you over my shoulder!”
I’ve been to my fair share of Trump rallies; this fever is a fair representation of the reality, the carnivalesque nodes of fascist glee dotting the mob. But the reality is an American grotesque, itself a deliberately comic distortion. The “humor” of a Trump rally, the caricature and the cosplay, the “jokes” Nikki rightly describes as media bait—represent the political mainstreaming of the rightwing troll. First time farce, second time the fist. It’s the Boogaloo shtick, which is a shorthand for civil war. It’s the running skit that is Trump’s hair. Trump’s people know his hair is funny, which is why they add it to the Punisher skull, which isn’t.
The death’s head stands for vengeance: the pain to be dealt, the hurt to be brung. Edward, for instance, says it’s his “duty as a Christian” to fight Democrats, “cannibalistic murderers”—remember his movie? First time farce, second time the first he raises to know to express his meaning—“full force.”
Or maybe that’s supposed to be “funny,” too.
Often it’s both, threatening and ridiculous from breath to breath. In 2019, I attended a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the self-declared “sweetest place on earth,” 100 miles west of Philadelphia. Trump told a “joke” about staying in office “twelve more years”—“I’m only kidding!” he declared—and then pivoted to the City of Brotherly Love, “one of the very worst sanctuaries anywhere in America,” dispatching immigrant child molesters into the countryside.
“So many times before I came down here,” one of the white men in Nikki’s next interview says of the Black neighborhood in which this rally’s being held, “I had people telling me be safe, watch your back.”
Farce and fist: He and his comrades are like a MAGA gang as filtered through Monty Python: they wear matching red shirts, shorts, and tight knee-high American flag socks.
Their message is “Make Crypto Great Again.” They’re hawking MAGA bitcoin. They say a percentage goes to an outfit dedicated to “raising awareness” about child trafficking, a real scourge and also a QAnon obsession, exaggerates the scale of it by a factor of hundreds of thousands.
Here’s a photo from the outfit’s “About” page of its founder, also a “frequent contributor” to the History Channel’s Sniper: Deadliest Missions:
Nikki responds to the white crypto gang’s concern about its safety in Black Philadelphia by declaring the rally proof of Trumpism’s transcendence of race. The blue city rallies perform double duty in this regard. On one hand, they tell the white base that doesn’t openly identify with racism that some Black and brown people also like Trump. That’s the the bit about bringing America “together.” On the other, they show Trump’s guts as he and his people—the white people—venture into the darkest urban depths and come out alive. That’s the bit about “taking America back.” White supremacist masculinity likes to believe it can go both ways: colorblind and yet ever-ready to stare down a “mugger,” a “thug,” the “illegals” Trump claims are swarming in our overrun cities.
***
There’s a protester, but we can’t see her; she’s surrounded, her back to a row of porta-potties. “Peaceful,” says Bobby. We catch a glimpse of her heart-shaped sunglasses before wall of men press forward. “A little bit of banter,” says Bobby.
“I always find it funny,” muses Nikki, “that the name Trump means ‘to overpower,’ to dominate.”
“Right,” agrees Bobby, stretching to see what’s happening. The crowd is chanting at the pinned-down protester: “We Want Trump!”
“You use it as a verb,” Nikki says of the name, “to say it’s taking over.”
To note that the protester far better represents Philadelphia than the crowd surrounding her is to miss the “joke.” Then again, fascism is still working the set-up: the punchline will come in November, when win or lose Trump will declare blue cities stolen , and Fox News and Newsmax and maybe even Nikki on humble RSBN will replay these scenes from Philadelphia, interviews with Latino voters in the Bronx, as “evidence” of the urban “love” for Trump that proves the vote tallies wrong. That proves reality wrong.
In the meantime, too many liberals will keep getting trolled, making their own jokes about Trump-in-the-city, ignoring the way fascism worms its way into the minds not just of angry white men in Ford F150s but also of a growing number of people of color. A small number that will stay small, even if it gets bigger, but in a majority white nation fascism isn’t about winning the Black vote; it’s about blunting it. Suppressing it yes, but also siphoning off enough of it to reassure whiteness of its supremacy. There’s the white supremacy that burns crosses, and then there’s the much broader white supremacy that likes to talk about about its very good Black friends.
Here’s one of Trump’s: the improbably-named James Earl Jones, a Philadelphia military contractor who was lonely in his support for Trump in 2016 and now speaks from the podium to mostly white people, standing in front of a backdrop comprised for the camera mostly of Black people.
“It’s important that we all know,” cries James Earl Jones, “that we have a president who doesn’t mind going to the hood.”
Whether James Earl Jones persuades even a sliver of Philadelphia’s Black voters doesn’t matter. The “we” of his statement is the white television audience. The message they receive is that Trump is fearless, undaunted by even the dark heart of the city he’s called “one of the very worst,” “the most corrupt,” the majority Black and brown city he’ll call at this very rally “the most egregious.”
Most egregious what? The missing noun doesn’t matter. His people knows what he means.