Trump’s Final Days on the Campaign Trail

Medical emergencies happen often at Donald Trump’s rallies. It is not uncommon to see supporters collapse in long lines outside arenas or in the audience after they get inside. Most of the health scares seem to take place in the hours of waiting before Trump takes the stage, but, if someone goes down while Trump is mid-speech, he will usually pause while medics tend to the rallygoer, and the crowd sometimes spontaneously starts singing the national anthem to fill the silence. At a town hall in Pennsylvania in mid-October, two people passed out about a half hour in, and Trump paced onstage while the doctors worked to revive them. “That looks a little bit bad,” he said at one point, peering into the audience. The group fidgeted in hot, stale air, and Trump told the guys backstage to play “Ave Maria.” “Would anybody else like to faint? Please raise your hand,” he joked, getting ready to resume the Q. & A. He went on, “You know what we could do, though, if my guys could do it? How about we’ll do a little music. Let’s make this a musical fest.” He had spoken for thousands and thousands of minutes over the past months, campaigning every day; he decided he didn’t need to talk more that evening. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said. “We’re going to win.” He told his deputy campaign manager to put on “Ave Maria”—again—and instructed people to sit down and just listen to music. “I think it would be beautiful.”

For visual accompaniment, he asked for the immigration chart that he had turned to look at in Butler, when he was shot. It was his favorite chart; “I’m in love with it,” he often says. Then for the next fortyish minutes he played his favorite songs, standing onstage and looking out at the room. Lighters aren’t allowed inside, so people waved their red hats to “Time to Say Goodbye” and “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Trump stood for “November Rain,” by Guns N’ Roses, all nine minutes, swaying back and forth, a slight pout on his lips, during the guitar solo. It was three weeks to Election Day, and outside the town hall, people said he was demented, exhausted, deranged, unfit. Onstage, he was basking.

The past three months for him had been, to use a campaign-season word, “weird.” He had a new opponent. After two assassination attempts, he couldn’t golf anymore. At outdoor rallies, he stands behind bulletproof glass; a barrier is now kept in each battleground state where he campaigns frequently. (I heard a supporter who hoped to see him outside a Georgia rally say they should just bring him out in a Popemobile at this point.) Iranians had hacked his campaign. Trump was talking more than usual about foreign interference and enemies within, his sense of being under threat so intense that his campaign asked for a military jet. He didn’t get all the protection he asked for, but, he said, “we have to do it anyway.” He had started off the year worrying that historically cold weather and frozen roads in Iowa might keep people home and take away his seemingly assured win in the caucuses. Now natural disasters were coming up a lot in the closing weeks of his campaign. In California, he mused about whether landslides would send his Trump National Golf Club crumbling into the sea; in North Carolina, the deadliest hurricane since Katrina had swept away infrastructure in a place where he badly needed votes. During many of his digressions, which he calls weaves, he would end up on the topic of atmospheric disturbance. Tsunamis “are the worst,” he said recently. “The ocean just lifts up, and a lot of bad things happen, in terms of the level.” At sites of environmental ruin, he brought the Reverend Franklin Graham to pray with—and also for—him.

Exactly one month before an election that has been endlessly described as the most important political contest in American history and that Trump refers to as the “final battle,” Trump’s campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita was standing in the Pennsylvania field where his boss was shot twelve weeks before. “It’s going to be a grind all the way to the end,” LaCivita, wearing a light-blue blazer, said. Trump, LaCivita continued, “doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t need to sleep. On our way somewhere he’ll be going over the speech, line by line. On our way back, it’s watching a fight on TV.” The campaign in its final stretch, LaCivita told me, is a “mentally and emotionally challenging environment . . . one I hadn’t experienced since I was in combat with the Marines.” He went on, “And I’m a lot older now.” (Another adviser had described it to me as “getting shot at, having Iranians try to get us every day—then there’s the haters, then there’s the drifters who still haven’t found their way back in, who are lobbing grenades.”)

Several yards away, the adviser Corey Lewandowski, who managed Trump’s campaign in 2016 and had recently been brought back on, was speaking to a small group. He had slipped into the press pen so stealthily that, combined with his black sunglasses and style of suit and poker face, I nearly mistook him for Secret Service. LaCivita clocked Lewandowski’s presence and kept speaking. Someone asked him if his team felt they needed to remind voters about the threats to Trump’s life. “You have a former President who is tied in the polls thirty days ahead of an election, and you have an Administration downplaying that a nation-state, Iran, is trying to kill him. In 1993, after an Iraqi plot to assassinate George Bush, Clinton sent cruise missiles.” The Trump campaign had come back to Butler to stage its own retaliation, an over-the-top reminder that its candidate was defiant in the face of death, and possibly preordained for the Presidency.

By now we were used to hearing about how Trump had been saved by God, but his return to Butler was meant to cement his image as a martyr and a hero. The imagery was not subtle; billboards around town flashed Trump as Jesus, and a man dragged a cross up and down the side of the highway. The return to hallowed ground was also just like any other rally—people bopped around to Kesha and the Killers and napped on the grass or waited in line for funnel cakes. Occasionally, I would hear a cry of “Make a hole! Make a hole!” so that first responders could push their way through the crowd with a stretcher for someone who had passed out. Jumbotrons played a video of Trump telling people to go vote. “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and, frankly, it’s the only thing they do well,” his recorded voice boomed through the crowd of thousands. I looked up as skydivers draped in American flags jumped from Cessnas and billowed down to the ground to “Back in Black,” by AC/DC. Trump also likes to make an entrance from the air, often flying over his rallies as a preliminary greeting. While a group of local sheriffs endorsed him from behind the bulletproof glass, Trump flew over the field, and then a few minutes later, as a singer performed an original song he’d written for the rally (“This land is your land, this land is my land, bigger than a Deep State island . . .”), Trump returned for a second flyover. People were screaming in unbridled delight, trying to film Trump Force One on their phones. Outside the fairgrounds, billboard screens read “Democrats drew first blood.” “While Biden and Harris are still in office, they’re going to keep trying to take him out,” a woman, who was in the audience with her aunt, told me. Would he be safe if Kamala Harris wins? “Of course not,” she said.

“As I was saying,” Trump said in opening the rally, pulling up the immigration chart that was onscreen when the gunfire started. The smash cut to July was meant to take everyone back to a time when their win felt inevitable, re-starting the clock and eliding all the ups and downs of the past few months. “We have an evil world. We have a very sick world,” Trump said. “We all took a bullet for America.” They had bled together, and then they had come back. “I will never yield, not even in the face of death itself,” he said. At 6:11 P.M., exactly twelve weeks to the moment when the bullet grazed his ear, he asked for a moment of silence for Corey Comperatore, the man who had been killed at the rally. A tenor came out to sing “Ave Maria” for the moment of silence; Trump ended the commemoration by telling the singer, “Now that is what you call a voice.” Trump went on to say he was not as worried about an outside enemy—Russia, China, North Korea—as he was about an enemy from within. “Kamala’s an alcoholic!” someone shouted, near me. “Frack her right in the mouth!” the guy next to me yelled. Another person cried out, “Where we go one, we go all,” the QAnon slogan I hadn’t heard in a while. Before the rally, three women who had travelled together from Boston had given me a large gingerbread-cookie model of Trump as a thank-you for helping them charge their phones. Once speakers took the stage, though, and talked about, for example, how the media is to blame for the attempts on Trump’s life, people rotely stood up and shouted “It’s your fault!” A guy in a white polo shirt got up, turned around to holler “You suck!” in our general direction, and then sat back down to keep watching.

“Don’t be mistaken: when push comes to shove, this is the side you want to be on,” the guy next to me said. “You know what I mean?” What did he mean? “Well, you got all the patriots here that understand what this country is founded on. We understand the Constitution. We understand what our power really is. So we’re hoping and praying everything is settled at the ballot box, and I’m not going anywhere beyond that, but it is the right of the people to throw off a tyrannical government.” He went on, “I mean, you have lawmakers coming out and saying, We’re never going to let Trump take power. They’re going to do everything they can not to let go of power. So you see what I’m saying? You can only push for so long.”

Elon Musk joined Trump onstage, his midriff showing as he jumped up and down, wearing a black MAGA baseball cap. “They want to take away your right to vote,” Musk told the crowd; he then told them to“vote, vote, vote.” Once all the special guests had come and gone, after the opening acknowledgements to blood and God, Trump eased into his usual rally speech. Earlier, he had told the crowd to stick around after he finished, because the tenor would be back to serenade them. As Trump made his way through the normal talking points, such as his claim that three hundred and twenty-five thousand migrant children were missing or in slavery in this failing nation, people around me slowly started to stream out. It had been a really long day. I left early, too, wanting to avoid the pileup of thousands of cars. Once Trump concludes, it’s usually a mad dash to get out when people leave all at once after he says his final “We will make America great again.” Walking over the trash-strewn fields at nightfall, I wondered if, had I stayed until the bitter end, I would have seen a man singing to an empty airfield in the wind.

A couple of weeks later, Trump was in North Carolina to address a group of pastors. By this time, he had weighed in on eugenics (“We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”), stood in front of signs that said “Occupied America” to propose returning to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and worked the fryer at a McDonald’s drive-through. Earlier that day he had been praying at an Asheville disaster site, at a lectern in front of a car wrapped around a tree. “The power of nature, nothing you can do about it,” he said. “We’ll see what happens with the election.”

At an Embassy Suites hotel in a suburb of Charlotte, I stood with a pastor in a carpeted ballroom. “This is God’s county,” he told me. “The pastors need to step up for our country.” The event was billed as the “11th Hour Faith Leaders Meeting,” but it looked like any other Trump rally. We would have hours to stand around. I asked what was at stake in the election. “If you really understand? Everything,” he said. “Our role is not just telling stories from the Bible.” He asked if I was familiar with the Black Robe Regiment. “It’s time for us to pick up our muskets and bring the country to war.” (The tale of the supposed regiment goes that Peter Muhlenberg, an eighteenth-century Lutheran minister in Virginia, told his congregation that there was a time for peace and a time for war, then threw off his clergy robe to show a military uniform before heading off to join the fight.) A pastor named Peymon Mottahedeh walked up and explained that his role was to lead his flock to Trump. “A lot of plans are made in Heaven,” he said. “If the election’s honest, Trump can’t lose.” (And “if Trump’s in, it’s peace.”) Mottahedeh gave me his card (“free YOURSELF from IRS deception, robbery & slavery”) and told me he could teach me how to avoid paying taxes for my whole life.

When the pre-program started, I was confined to the metal barricades of the press pen, so I talked to a man standing next to it. “I hate Democrats,” he told me. “They’re demons.” He went on, “I can’t say for sure Trump is a Christian. I don’t really care,” he said. “I’ve done some really bad things—violent things, armed robbery, thirty-year sentence, escaped, jumped parole, out on parole violation for fifteen years. I wasn’t doing anything except trying to be free.” He, like many rallygoers I’ve met since the summer, said Trump was not safe, because he had threatened to “drain the swamp” of “the F.B.I., the C.I.A.—really evil people.” He went on, “They’re gonna kill us. They’re gonna put the U.S. military all over the country in cahoots with law enforcement. They’re not going to allow him to win. Trump’s not joking when he says we’re in a fight for survival.” Did he really think this was the final battle? “This isn’t a movie, this is a reality,” he said. He went on, “I’m almost sixty-three. I didn’t think I would live to be twenty-three. I never really cared about life—it didn’t mean that much to me. If they want to do this, go ahead.” I asked for his cell-phone number. “If I give you that, I’ll end up in the gulag.” In parting, he told me, “I’m not a Christian, but God help you.”

Jimmy Buffett’s “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere” played while “NO TAX ON TIPS” and “THE FINAL BATTLE” flashed on big screens playing campaign advertisements. The audience joined in a call-and-response chant of “Fight!” A guy in an Uncle Sam hat told me, “The country’s divided. You’d better have plenty of toilet paper and ammunition no matter who wins.” Eric Trump came out to discuss variations on the theme of God saving Trump, about Trump having been put here by God, how only God can intervene against the various dark forces against Trump. Peter Navarro, Trump’s former trade adviser who had recently emerged from prison to join the Trump road show as a surrogate, quoted Matthew 5:10—“Blessed are those who are persecuted,” he said. “Democrats are waging a war against you.”

It was Trump’s third speech of the day, and his voice was tired, softer. “These people are very sick people,” he rasped. “And the fact is they’ll be coming after you soon.” He was low-energy, but it didn’t matter to the crowd. When he lethargically made his usual comment about America being a failing nation, a group of guys in the crowd screamed in reply, “Jesus is love!” Trump alluded to ambiguous persecution from all sides—it could be God, it could be the voting machines, it could be the weather. “Lots of strange things take place in politics,” Trump said. “We have to rely on the gambling. Great Christians don’t gamble, do they?” Trump asked. “A little bit!” one guy responded.

Trump seemed to be avoiding talking about abortion with this particular group, so he decided to tell a story about going to a church in Manhattan when he was young—the pastor, he said, was Norman Vincent Peale, a radio host who wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking.” “Some people could use a little positive thinking now,” Trump said. The crowd’s manic energy didn’t match Trump’s quiet tone. He described being at Peale’s last sermon, when Peale was old and exhausted. “He stood . . . and he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ That was it,” Trump said. He warned that America was suffering from a lack of cohesion. “It was a religion that kept our country together for many years.” And now what—him? “Who would want this?” He asked quietly. “The enemy!” someone shrieked.

At Madison Square Garden, nine days before the election, Trump’s rally opened with a video clip of the famous speech from the film “Patton,” where the Second World War-era general tells his men, “The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood.” It was a classic Trump split screen. Outside the venue, the event was being compared to a 1939 Nazi rally, and the D.N.C. projected “Trump Praised Hitler” onto the building; inside, it was, as Trump later put it, an “absolute lovefest.” (Harris’s campaign, he said, was one “of absolute hate.”) Still, as the clip of the general talking about shooting “the bastards” to “cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks” ran, I talked to two supporters who said that even though the snippet was really just about how much Americans love winning, it might not land for everyone. “We understand it, us in this room. But now they can use it against us. That five-second clip about spilling blood, our enemy’s guts—it just takes one person to say, Look, he incites violence.” The rallies feel like being in on a joke, but, for those not in the group, it doesn’t always translate; a long, winding, beloved story Trump often tells about sharks gets him called incoherent by TV hosts.

Trump was returning to New York City for a do-over, a narrative reframing after his embarrassing weeks there in court earlier this year; now, for the afternoon, he got to be the hero of the firemen, and the guy who built the skyline. He was joined by a long list of guests, including Rudy Giuliani, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk. (“Nobody even bothers to try to kill Kamala,” Musk said the night before, in Pennsylvania, talking about how, now that he’s involved in politics, his life is under threat. “It’s pointless. Why? They’ll just get another puppet.”) Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer who had lost one of his New York cases, danced to DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win,” shimmying in a red romper as she took the stage. In New York City, Trump told his supporters, as he often does, that they weren’t just up against Harris. “She’s purely a vessel,” he said, for the “machine.” He went on, “It’s just this amorphous group of people, but they’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them.”

“How weird,” Tucker Carlson said, when he came out to address the arena. “Just another day following Bobby Kennedy, Jr., at a Donald Trump rally in Madison Square Garden. What? That’s totally normal. Liz Cheney’s out there with Kamala Harris and there’s Bobby Kennedy calling to protect women’s sports at a Trump rally. It’s a realignment, it’s unbelievable.” Carlson was surprised he ended up campaigning for Trump alongside Tulsi Gabbard and R.F.K., Jr.; the guy I talked to at the rally in Butler told me how strange it felt that not just Trump but Musk, a former “Democrat darling,” now has “got to watch out for his life.”

When I spoke with LaCivita, the campaign co-manager, in Butler, he said he was “bullish” about what he called the campaign’s “sustained messages on immigration and crime and the economy.” (Of Harris’s narrative, he said, “It’s schizophrenic.” He went on, “They’re still looking for something to stick.”) Despite Trump’s weaves—“Your weave is getting wide,” the podcast host Joe Rogan cautioned him during their recent three-hour interview—and surprises, he usually says the same thing, and he’s been saying it for a long time. In 2011, when he first spoke at CPAC and teased his run for the Presidency, he said, “The United States has become a whipping post for the rest of the world. The world is treating us without respect. They are not treating us properly.” He went on, “Over the years I have participated in many battles, and have really almost come out very, very victorious every single time.” Still, he said, “I have always been told that a person of great accomplishment and achievement cannot become a politician or run for political office, because there are too many enemies. . . . This is war. Life is pleasant, but it can be war.” As he wrapped up the speech, he quickly summarized his political beliefs: “Just very briefly, I am pro-life. I am against gun control. . . . I will fight to end Obamacare and replace it.” He ended on “Our country will be great again.”

Thirteen years later, the audience has adapted more than the message itself. “There’s never been a coalition like this,” Trump said last week. I thought back to the man in the crowd in Butler who told me how he had come to believe that he was on Trump’s side in a new political battle. “What we’re seeing is that realignment, not left-to-right but vertical alignment, we have oligarchs and the establishment and the permanent political class, versus the people,” he said. “We’re coming together for the man, left and right, all around the world.” This is why the stakes were so high now. The horse race of a U.S. Presidential election felt almost irrelevant to him; Trump was now, at least to his supporters, something of a divine avatar for this new coalition, even as a President in exile. “There’s a lot of things I couldn’t have told you a couple years ago,” he said. “Think about all the things I wouldn’t have known.” ♦