Othering, DC, January 19, 2025
Sunday January 19, 2025
Today my plan was to attend the Trump “Victory Rally” at the Capital One Arena. For the past twenty years, through all our Election Retreats in Oregon, California, Nevada, and Wisconsin, I’ve had almost no contact with Republicans — for the simple reason that our work was laser-focused on getting out the Democratic vote. Back in the day I never met any Tea Party people, and I’ve never been to one of Trump’s rallies, nor have I ever been in a crowd of MAGA supporters. I’d always thought of them as adversaries, if not outright enemies. So today I decided I’d go undercover and take a walk on the wild side. There would be the Trump spectacle of course, plus I’d have a chance to look into this friend-enemy dynamic.
I should have been more cautious about this. We’d all seen what happened on January 6th. We’d heard about reporters who’d been harangued and harassed and even beaten by the MAGA crowds; and the woman who was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; and the kid who shot protestors in Kenosha. But I thought I could pull it off: after all, I look like I could pass for a MAGA guy. I’d keep a low profile and go along, just watch and listen. There would be speeches. We’d be entertained by Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood and the Village People. The program was scheduled to begin at 3:00 and Trump would make his remarks at 5:00. I went online and got a ticket. We were told to get to the Arena by 10:00 AM. For a 3:00 program? You can’t be serious. I’ll go at 2:00.
At 1:30 I walked down to the Metro station and took the train to Judiciary Square, six blocks from the Arena. When I got out to the street I saw the line — already six blocks long. I headed toward the end of it, which I thought would be around the block. It was beginning to snow, small pebbly snow like hailstones. The wind came up and slipped through my coat. People in line were surprisingly patient, there were a number of small children whose parents had brought them to see President Trump, an experience they’d remember for the rest of their lives. Most everyone seemed to be working class, many with red MAGA hats with “45-47” embroidered on them, some with cowboy hats, many with t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with Trump slogans: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, “Keep America Great”, “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my President.”
I kept walking. The snow was falling more heavily and the sidewalk was slushy. Several times I nearly slipped and fell. There were a few Black men in line, decked out in Trump paraphernalia. A loud man with a megaphone stood off to one side and hectored us about sin and damnation and the word of God. I kept walking, now two blocks from the Metro station and eight from the Arena. The people in line were talking to one another and making friends. I kept on: four, five, six blocks beyond the Metro station. I finally found the end of the line at the Museum of the American Indian, on the other side of the Mall, a full mile from the Arena. People kept coming and filled in behind me. I was surrounded by half a dozen earnest young men. I could easily have struck up a conversation and asked what they liked about Trump, but it didn’t feel like the right time or place, and I didn’t want to reveal myself as a “libtard” spy. I stood quietly by myself and wondered out loud whether we’d ever make it inside. We didn’t seem to be moving.
Eventually a police car drove up, and an officer got out and announced on his megaphone that the Arena was full to capacity and that no one else would be getting in. We could leave the line. We all looked at one another sheepishly and shrugged. We headed off in different directions. I needed to eat. One guy said he was going to go look for a bar and warm up. He walked away and I instantly regretted not going with him, it seemed like such a made-to-order “meet-cute”. I could have talked to him for hours about who he was and how he came to become a Trump supporter. A missed opportunity.
I walked back over to the Arena area anyway, to see what I could see. On the street in front, people were wandering around with vacant expressions on their faces, stupefied by the cold, like bees at the hive stupefied by a smoker. The snow was falling in big flakes now, like fluffy pingpong balls, and it felt like scene out of Brueghel or Hieronymus Bosch. There was a Black woman dressed up as Lady Liberty, with a cardboard torch, her face painted pale green and a blond wig and a bikini top (in 20 degree weather). She was shouting back and forth with four young white men about Donald Trump’s character, and whether he’d stand up for the little guy. A police officer gave directions to public transit and restrooms. People were disappointed and confused, adrift in the intersection, wondering what to do with the rest of their day.
I found a burger restaurant and went in and shook off the snow and found a seat at the counter. I ordered a veggie burger that had peas and barley in it. I struck up a conversation with a Jewish guy from New York City. He thought Trump was a good businessman and could fix the economy. This guy was a wholesale jobber and made his money gathering lumber and concrete and fasteners for construction projects. A middleman. He was wearing a red and blue beanie with a red MAGA hat perched on top at a casual angle. He said he knew all about how Trump stiffed his consultants and tradespeople, but that didn’t bother him. I didn’t try to argue. He was friendly to me even after he learned that I was from Berkeley and voted for Kamala. He told me he’d gotten up early this morning and and had come down to the Arena and gotten in line at 9:30 — but he still didn’t make it inside. That made me feel better. I probably wouldn’t have gotten in anyway, even if I’d waited in line for five hours, freezing my ass off. My guess is somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 people were turned away.
I talked for a long time to a Black Republican who’d grown up in DC. He had a security business and was also a spin doctor for Republican lawmakers who needed their images burnished. We differed on just about everything, starting with the basic facts about the world we live in. He was scathing in his criticism of Biden, and especially Kamala. He said she was unprepared and unpersuasive, and should absolutely not have hidden behind the lame excuse that she was “only the Vice-President.” He said every politician should instantly be able to name three things he or she had accomplished that were reasons to elect them. I have to admit the “lamestream liberal media” is indeed protective of Democratic candidates and only mildly critical of them, while Fox News and the rest of the right wing mediaverse are over-the-top in their critiques, and equally in the thrall of Trump and his allies. This dynamic of dueling news worlds, Optimus Prime v. Megatron, King Kong v. Gozilla, neither side willing to be measured and objective and reasonable, impoverishes all of us. I told him I thought mass deportations would have a disastrous impact on the economy, and that led him to talk about his school district. He’s the president of his local PTA. His two boys are in fourth and sixth grade. There are lots of undocumented kids in his school, whose parents weren’t counted in the census, so as a result their district is significantly underfunded. Student teacher ratio is 39 to 1. We shared a concern about tariffs and inflation. I told him about the $880 billion defense budget, which blew his mind. We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to meet up in the Bay Area when he comes out for a business trip in April.
Before leaving I had a quick conversation with a fifty-something suburban white woman from Virginia, pastel blue cardigan, salmon lipstick and matching nails. She had a high forehead and a pompadour, and ice blue eyes. She’d overheard I was a Democrat. She shared that all her liberal friends had canceled her because of her support for Trump, and clearly this was very painful for her. She said she would never disown any of her friends because of what they believed or how they voted. There’s an asymmetry to this: it turns out we liberals may be more likely to cancel Republicans than vice versa. This was news to me. The stories we tell ourselves about the J6 rioters and the violent racists might be our way of dehumanizing and demonizing our fellow citizens on the right — so we can cut them off.
Support for Trump has been expanding since 2016. After losing the popular vote to both Hilary and Biden, he outpolled Kamala by 2.4 million votes:
2016 2020 2024
Clinton 65.8 million
Biden 81.3
Harris 74.9
Trump 62.9 74.2 77.3
Trump margin -2.9 million -7.1 +2.4
This trend is surely distressing. Through all the work we’ve done on these elections dating back to 2004, and especially after the election and re-election of Barack Obama, we could never have guessed that the US would regress this much, that Trumpism would spread and flourish — to women and communities of color and even to Silicon Valley — and that the values that we cherish would be spurned by so many.
I don’t recognize my own country.
But hold on a minute: isn’t that on me? Didn’t I turn away from the truth of what my country is? And didn’t I convince myself that things were growing steadily better (the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice . . . )? Didn’t I shun friendships and contacts with the people who would go on to become the MAGA folks?
During her 2016 presidential election campaign, Hilary Clinton famously described half of Trump’s voters as a “basket of deplorables.” That resonated with me. In the 1970’s when we protested against the Vietnam War, my friends and I faced off against toughs and football players and auto mechanics and American Legion vets, and we yelled at them and they at us, and we deplored them. I confess that I’ve sustained and nurtured this disdain in the years since. I made life choices that systematically isolated me from that Underclass. I attended an Ivy League school, I have degrees in literature and music, and I aspired to an awareness of high culture. I moved to BERKELEY for God’s sake! I created a career that was based on knowledge, expertise, and savvy, and I dealt with power players in various realms. I admit it: there is a part of my identity that’s wrapped up in feeling superior to the hoi polloi. It’s my heritage. In my middle class Irish family, my mother imprinted on all her children the need to be better than Them, the working class, the uneducated, the unwashed. Some of my aunts and uncles have been unapologetically racist.
On Friday on the flight in from SFO to DC, the first class section had been filled with tech bros on their way to kiss the ring. (I feel superior to them too, but for different reasons). But my seat was at the back of the plane embedded in a MAGA posse, sheriffs and rural politicos from Modesto and other foothill counties, cowboy hats, boots and belt buckles, all descending on Washington DC to celebrate the victory of their champion DJT over the infidels and immigrants. I felt the old disdain rising in my gorge, leavened with a soupçon of fear, a natural and native antipathy, cat v. dog, cobra v. mongoose . . . I know as a longtime zen practitioner I shouldn’t be feeling this, but I do, it’s deep inside me, and somehow I keep clinging to it. I justify it on account of all their hate speech and how generally benighted they are, and how small-minded.
A few things leap out from that. My willful ignorance and lack of curiosity. My self-aggrandizement. My tribalism. My pettiness. All my ancient, twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate and delusion, born through body, speech and mind, I now fully avow. I believe there is a way back, for our country, for our Movement, and hopefully for me as well. We owe it to ourselves to get to know our fellow countrymen, to drop our beliefs and prejudices and open up. To study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas.
When I consider MAGA culture and the people who embody it, what I chiefly miss is what it feels like to be inside. We know about the grievances and the animosities — but this is a community-based, family-oriented, faith-based culture. Attending a Trump rally must feel a lot like what the Kamala rally in Milwaukee felt for me: relaxing into the warm embrace of my tribe, like laying back in a warm bath, the sweet release of belonging. Trump after all is a showman and has a sense of humor (crude and malicious though it may be), and there’s a lot of laughter. A parallel might be a Dead concert or Burning Man (or Zen!): the family feeling, the secret codes and private jokes and lore. To them we seem an bizarre and outlandish cult, and to look at ourselves through their eyes is to see own reflection as in a funhouse mirror. They identify themselves in opposition to us even as we identify ourselves in opposition to them.
By no means should we abandon ourselves to Trump’s brutal, heartless, and draconian policies. His personal brand, received from Roy Cohn, is to deny everything, always attack, never give in, insist on absolute loyalty, seek vengeance, lie about everything, and emphasize fear and hatred. Over the past 8 years this been spliced into the DNA of the Republican Party. We must ferociously resist the hateful tendencies of the most extreme of the MAGA cadre, the January 6 rioters whom Trump has promised to pardon, the Proud Boys, QAnon, Three Percenters, Oathkeepers and their ilk (for a rude shock, see the Southern Poverty Law Center’s jaw-droppingly long list of hate groups HERE). But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not all Trump voters share this view or this approach to the world. If we hope to offer an antidote to the intolerance and dehumanization so prominent among some of the MAGA crowd (the “maggots” as one friend calls them) then we would to well to recognize these tendencies in ourselves, and remedy them. The vast majority of Trump voters, of all classes, of all races, are people who are suffering just as we are, and just as worthy of our time, attention, care, and brotherhood.
