The Trump Cinematic Universe

Meditations on a rally in the Bronx

My recent cellphone photograph of Donald Trump

The last time I saw Donald Trump in the flesh, it was January 20th, 2017. I was covering the inauguration for the Village Voice and straining to capture a day unlike any other in American history. Before then, my experiences with Trump were limited to 2016, when I was the staff reporter with the Jared Kushner-owned New York Observer tasked with covering the presidential campaigns. Campaign rallies are, in an obvious sense, overrated and misleading; they attract only die-hards, the very small minority of Americans who care enough about politics to turn up and listen. But there were two candidates that year who made the rallies matter, who showed you, once you arrived, that American politics were heading inexorably somewhere else. One was Bernie Sanders. The first time I saw Sanders, it was at a town hall in a small New Hampshire town near the Vermont border. This was 2015 and I was writing a profile of Sanders, one of the early one in the mainstream press, for the Observer. Sanders wasn’t yet a phenomenon but it was clear, already, he possessed what Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley did not. The people there were excited, entranced, and ready for possibilities that weren’t otherwise on offer. In retrospect, the rise of the first Sanders campaign seems rather inevitable—Clinton was a tepid, dynastic candidate who had run once before and never settled on any memorable message—but it is hard to emphasize, to those who weren’t paying attention then, how dismissive most of the media was of the democratic socialist senator from Vermont. At best, he was a curiosity. The idea, in the spring and summer of 2015, that he would go on to win major states like Michigan was regarded as laughable. He was covered sparingly until the rallies and town halls became too large to ignore.

Trump existed in his own category. He had been a B or C-list celebrity since the late 1970s, flirting perpetually with running for president. Finally, in 2015, with his relevancy at a low point—few watched The Apprentice anymore—Trump descended the golden escalator and made himself a presidential candidate. Trump did not think he was going to win. It was a bid, in part, to get himself back in the news and make trouble for a political establishment, Barack Obama included, that had mocked and dismissed him. In the 1980s, there were serious news people who asked Trump about the state of America and treated him as if the myths he propagated about himself—the self-made master builder of Manhattan—were actually true. By the 2010s, he was firmly C-list, and he was best remembered by the Americans of my generation for his kitschy reality show and increasingly desperate cameos in various movies and sitcoms. (My favorite? The Little Rascals.) In 2015, I was a twenty-five year-old journalist who believed the data-minded among us; Trump as Presidential Candidate was going to flame out, and the best he could hope for was a Newt Gingrich or Ben Carson-like surge. Or he could repeat Pat Buchanan’s performance, riding isolationism and nativism to a few victories before caving to an establishment favorite.

I won’t recap 2016 for you. What I will say is that my opinion of Trump’s chances shifted when I traveled to see him in Iowa. I had never seen hundreds of people line up outside of an auditorium to see a candidate before and I had never seen so many of them so giddily and furiously invested. It was like they were all waiting to see King Kong chained up on the stage; instead of jeering at him, they were Kong worshippers. It was then, as I wrote that January, that I began to believe in Trump’s power. I went to New Hampshire and found the same intensity in a Manchester arena, and then flew to Mar-a-Lago to watch Trump destroy the old Republican Party on the night of the Florida primary. He had, I argued then, “carved his initials into the balky tree trunk of the body politic.” Not long after, as covering Trump for Kushner’s newspaper began to make my life untenable, I quit, and continued to write on the presidential race for other outlets, including the Voice. As the year wore on, media groupthink intimidated me into downplaying Trump’s chances once he became the nominee. My March 2016 self thought Trump could be the next president. By November, I was shocked like everyone else, though I shouldn’t have been. I saw enough of Trump up close and I understood, in our polarized political system, a party winning three straight presidential elections wasn’t going to be easy. I stand by what I wrote in the aftermath of that election. Trump’s victory was a story, first and foremost, of elite Democratic failure. A different Democrat—Joe Biden, Martin O’Malley, 2016’s Elizabeth Warren, or Sanders—could have eked out the victory.

Last week, I watched the Yankees demolish the Mariners in the early afternoon and hopped a train to nearby Crotona Park, where Trump was holding a campaign rally. The dynamic of that day would have been unfathomable to most people who were following politics in 2015 and 2016. Trump was there as a former president and polling leader. The conventional wisdom has flipped on its head; many people now expect Trump to defeat the Democratic nominee in November. That nominee, of course, will be the incumbent president, Biden, who has aged drastically since passing on that 2016 run. Ostensibly, Biden decided not to run then because his son, Beau, had died of brain cancer. In reality, it was Obama and Democratic donors rallying around Clinton and forcing him out. Biden wanted to run but his path was blocked by Clinton, even though he was the sitting vice president. Biden, then, was still the man who thrashed Paul Ryan on the debate stage, not the doddering, blank-eyed octogenarian who thought Beau died in Iraq. I still think Biden can defeat Trump again, mostly because Trump, for all his apparent advantages, is deeply alienating to many voters, and there will be a sizeable number of Americans who show up to oppose him. Like Biden, he is very unpopular. It’s not much more complicated than that.

Liberals never tire of invoking fascism when discussing Trump. It’s the same kind of thinking that led some to believe Jan. 6 was a nigh successful coup attempt and not a riot of deranged, delusional, and internet-addled human beings spurred on by hustlers and lunatics. If Trump becomes president again, there is a real threat he will try to remain in office when his term is up. But Trump is not savvy or cutthroat enough to hold power in such a manner. He is not Putin, he is not Xi, and American democracy is not fledgling and new, as Germany’s was in the Weimar years. Trump doesn’t have it in him to become a world-historical dictator, cowing the military-industrial complex and transforming the entire CIA and FBI into his personal army. Liberals want to believe otherwise, either out of a disingenuous need to elevate their own position—think of all the Twitter followers Timothy Snyder and Michael Beschloss have racked up over the last eight years—or a more genuine hatred of Trump borne out of a misreading of history. Or, more accurately, a misunderstanding of what America is—a federalist republic that will never, for better and worse, be dominated by a centralized form of government. Consider the thicket of laws decided by states, cities, counties, towns, and the like, or that the federal government can barely determine what happens in the public schools or in the courts. Fascism is coming here? MSNBC better hope so, if they want their ratings back.

A Trump rally itself, as I rediscovered in the Bronx, is not an exercise in fascism, either. It is more like a fan convention or an assemblage of otaku, with manga and anime obsession swapped for Trump devotion. Trump has been a politician long enough now for his rallies to belong to their own cinematic universe, with regular chants, callbacks, and in-jokes. Trump fandom is on the darkest edge of however MCU or anime fandom might manifest itself; other fandoms don’t carry the same unsettling undercurrents, but they all belong to enclosed worlds. While Trump himself might imagine his faithful as chiseled alphas, many of them come off as geeks cosplaying as alphas, with “Fuck Biden” cotton shirts draped over lumpy torsos. White men were a plurality at the Trump Bronx rally, but it’s inarguable he has his Black and Latino fans, and plenty of women showed up. If Trump greatly exaggerated the crowd size, boasting 25,000, it wouldn’t have surprised me if 10,000 were there, many of them stuck behind a snarled security checkpoint. Finding no media entrance, I waited on line with the Trumpers, sweating profusely in the humidity. It took me close to an hour to get inside, with a few smarmy young Republican types waving in small clusters of attendees to the security checkpoint. I overheard a man talking loudly about how he thought Trump would blow up the world in his first term and when he didn’t, he decided to support him. Orthodox Jews milled about, as well as men draped in American and Trump flags.

What Trump has going for him is that he is unchanged from 2016. He is diminished from the 1980s, when he was a somewhat articulate TV conversationalist, but he is no different than his sixty-eight year-old self. Biden does seem much older than he did at the end of Obama’s second term. On stage, Trump is a showman and insult comic, like a less disciplined Andrew Dice Clay, and he’ll speak for hours. He is both intentionally and unintentionally funny. I was most amused when Trump rambled on for an indeterminate amount of time about how he renovated Wollman Rink in Central Park when Ed Koch was mayor—he couldn’t stop talking about the concrete—and the MAGA faithful struggled to figure out the applause lines. Another meandering anecdote about meeting Bill Levitt, the developer credited with founding Long Island suburbia, was intended to be a lesson, Trump said, for children: never give up, and more importantly never cede your “momentum” since Levitt, in Trump’s view, walked away from real estate too early in life. (Gone unmentioned, of course, was Levitt’s blatantly racist housing policies.)

Trump sprinkled in the old hits. There was a brief nod to the “fake news” in the press pen, where I remained when I wasn’t wandering the grass, and chants of “lock her up” when Hillary Clinton, for reasons I cannot recall, was briefly mentioned. “Build the wall,” naturally, made an appearance, and Trump had to, once again, read “The Snake.” More notable to me, but not new at all, was Trump’s boast about opposing the Iraq War—no Republican candidate would have ever done this prior to 2016—and his insistence his “peace through strength” foreign policy would keep the world from immolating. Trump hardly mentioned Israel at all, other than to claim Hamas never would have attacked if he were still president. Not talking about Israel might be, strategically, the most wise decision Trump has made in 2024. Israel hawks celebrate him anyway because they remember his first term, when policy in the Middle East was farmed out to Kushner, his Orthodox Jewish son-in-law. The progressives furious at Biden can forget that Trump would actively encourage the Israeli far-right to do whatever it wants with the Palestinians without even the pretense of an opposition.

The much more relevant question about Trump is not whether he is a fascist but what a Republican president with full control of Congress might do next year. There is a chance this happens—and a chance, too, that Democrats flip the House while Trump storms to the presidency. Trump is erratic and proudly ignorant of policy; he doesn’t think hard about any of it, and never will. He lies constantly. The danger, as always, remains in who he surrounds himself with, not what rhetoric he spews on the stump. If Tom Cotton, as rumored, becomes his vice president, Trump’s isolationist instincts could be overridden by a deeply conservative politician who has dreamed of new land wars in the Middle East and China. On the domestic front, Trump has slowly wrenched his party away from its longstanding allegiance to austerity and supply-side economics, but that can always return if he staffs his White House differently. Trump, as president, was a conventional conservative on many fronts, appointing all of Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society’s judicial nominees, gutting environmental regulations, and passing a tax cut for corporations. He tried and failed to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Given a second term, he would undoubtedly pick more right-wing judges and try harder to crack down on immigration. He may stoke inflation with new tariffs. He would, unless prodded by certain conservatives like J.D. Vance, shred Biden’s antitrust and pro-consumer agenda. Trump’s economic populism is mostly illusionary. He’ll care far more about empowering the Justice Department to chase his enemies. There’s a dark path there, and one that drags the United States closer to the f-word. But if that’s the case, Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids and George W. Bush’s post-9/11 surveillance state were fascistic, and spoiled the American experiment long before Trump raged onto the scene. It, perhaps, already happened here.