Trump Is Crowned In Fayetteville NC — March 9
First surprise: at the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville NC, which was nearly full, I didn’t see a single Confederate flag the whole time.
And this in a town that General Sherman marched & burned his way through in early 1865. (A state park marks the spot where he blew up an armory; nobody goes there much.)
So why not? My guess: Most people here don’t have time for Dixie. Fayetteville today is an army town, defined by two of our defining institutions: one is the enormous Fort Bragg, which takes up 200 square miles. The other is Wal-Mart, which has five supercenters here (or is it six; I’m a couple years behind), and is one of the top local employers other than the army.
There’s symmetry to that: Fort Bragg and its warriors defend the system which makes it possible for its 50,000 soldiers and their modestly-paid families to stay in debt buying Wal-Mart stuff, or moonlighting there for chump change in blue vests.
If you keep your eyes open in this town, you’ll see a lot of what America is all about
As for Trump, his stump speech is like a well-worn deck of cards: give it a shuffle, start turning them over, and read whatever’s on top; after a minute, turn another card: China is ripping us off; we’ll kill all of ISIS; we’re gonna win, win, win; the wall will be beautiful; Hillary should be in jail; Ted is a liar, Marco is done for; etc. You’ve heard it all, I think. Does it make any sense? Only as a con man’s spiel; but you knew that too. (But don’t start feeling superior; con man spiels often work.)
And the familiarity is hardly even a criticism. All of the candidates repeat their same stump speeches nonstop. It’s basic to the business, and one reason I usually hate covering political campaigns: the joke that gets a real laugh the first time, turns the stomach queasy after the 50th repetition. It takes thousands of reporters working nonstop to perpetuate the illusion that this is a glamorous occupation.
I was more interested in the crowd: especially the vibes. Were they a nascent mob, ready to be unleashed on any of a long list of victims? Was there the goose-stepping, Nazi saluting fervor I’ve read about. A black friend (yes, I have one) came along: was he, as one of maybe a dozen black folk in the 10,000 crowd, terrified of being lynched?
The overall answer to these queries was “NO.” The crowd wasn’t an army but an audience. Trump asked for a pledge (not an oath) to vote for him, but the hands-up response was far from universal, and what I saw was much more like the waving of hands at an evangelical praise service. Mark me down with a shrug.
The protesters were well-programmed: outside, they chanted a doggerel movement couplet: “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
Inside, they spaced out their shouting at five minute intervals. (Click here for a selfie video of an ejection.) Trump’s sneers made his talk even more rambling. Most protesters were too far away to be seen from my nose-bleed seat, but news videos showed one getting socked, and others being manhandled by sheriff’s deputies.
[UPDATE: Thursday a Trump supporter was arrested and charged for hitting a protester named Rakeem Jones, who was being escorted out by deputies. Jones had not struck anyone or resisted his removal..
John McGraw, charged with assault and disorderly conduct the day after the rally, was quoted in numerous media reports as saying he threw the punches, and told a reporter later:
“You bet I liked it. Knocking the hell out of that big mouth,” he said of punching 26-year-old Rakeem Jones. Asked why he chose to throw a punch, McGraw, said, “We don’t know if he’s ISIS. We don’t know who he is, but we know he’s not acting like an American, cussing me. If he wants it laid out, I laid it out.” And on whether Jones deserved to be hit, McGraw declared, “Yes, he deserved it. The next time we see him, we might have to kill him. We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist.”
Cumberland County Sheriff Moose Butler made the arrest after cellphone videos surfaced which showed A) McGraw moving from his seat to the aisle to strike Jones, who did not strike back but was then tackled by four deputies, who curiously later said they did not see McGraw hit Jones. Butler also said he was making an internal inquiry about his deputies’ conduct.
A sidebar from the rising young political observer-activist Amber Dawn Fager (yes, we’re related) who was sitting on the opposite side of the coliseum from me:
Notwithstanding the assault on Rakeem Jones, it could have been much worse. How do I say this without incurring the wrath of the righteous? — if the crowd was the kind of frenzied fascist mob they were fantasizing, the protesters would have been stomped flat in two minutes, and strung up in three more. (Check the old photos of southern lynchings for a fair comparison.)
On the way out, when I stopped to take a photo of this gentleman hawking his anti-Trump shirts, as the crowd streamed around him, I asked if he’d had any trouble.
“None so far,” he said. “Kinda surprising.”
But after that evening, maybe not so surprising. An audience: customers. That’s what they were. Not for their Wal-Marts, but instead at one of Trump’s now belly-up casinos. After all, Trump’s career has been built on selling, not only his name, but also on making his name synonymous with the gambler’s pipe dream of being an instant winner.
And it looked to me like that’s what the crowd came for: to buy (one more time) the promise of making America, not “great” again, but making it (and them) instant winners. As Trump told ABC news:
“We win, win, win,” Trump said to ABC News. “We will win with the military, knock the hell out of ISIS, win with the vets take care of our great veterans, and win at the border.”
Win, win, win. Pull the right lever, and the bells will ring, the colored lights flash, and the coins, or the chips, will come pouring out and piling up.
(You think you’ll stop this phenomenon by telling them that almost everyone in those places loses almost all the time? Then you haven’t been to Vegas.)
That kind of gaming is a passive “sport,” with its “action” an (expensive) illusion. Las vegas is full of losers, but how many times have you read about the losers forming armies to rampage through the Vegas casinos, demanding their lost money back? (Me neither.)
All that talk about authori-tarianism is probably true; and maybe Trump is more dangerous because he knows one of the real keys to its success: sell the illusion, and make it flashy. America will become Las Vegas writ large (and we’ll quickly be trained to forget about the dismal fate of Atlantic City).
Of course, hate was plentiful at the Crown last night, much of it sexual; but visible mostly in the souvenirs and shirts. (And I suspect most of them were made in China; but I didn’t check.)
Next up: Hillary.
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