I emerged from the subway last Sunday into what seemed like a wall of people. Their chatter, shouts and laughter filled the morning air. Some had dressed in suits and ties; others wore jeans and sweatshirts. They sported patriotically sequined hats, American flags draped over their shoulders like capes and the red baseball caps that have symbolized Donald J. Trump’s political movement for nearly a decade.
This was the crowd I was looking for.
I was in Midtown Manhattan to cover Mr. Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his last events of the 2024 presidential campaign. I’d recently published a visual article, along with my colleague Ashley Wu, that involved watching broadcasts of the former president’s events to learn what elements defined a typical Trump rally. So I wanted to experience one in person.
What I saw helped me realize that it’s hard to truly understand a Trump event until you’ve been to one. More than just a political confab, the rally at the Garden had the chimeric quality of being many things at once.
One of those things was a party. Spotlights flashed and upbeat music blared as attendees filed into the stadium, taking their seats to Pitbull’s “Timber” and Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.” On the arena floor, a man in a Captain America shirt grooved to “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.
The rally was part carnival: As I left the section designated for journalists and strolled around, I noticed a man a few paces ahead dressed like Mr. Trump, complete with a boxy suit jacket and coifed blond hair. It was part social mixer, too: In the hallway outside the arena, young Trump supporters joked and flirted with one another.
For some attendees, the rally seemed closer to a religious experience. As Mr. Trump spoke, a woman a few rows behind me stood with her eyes closed, hands clasped and head cocked, as the arena’s red and blue lights bathed her face.
Collectively, the rally looked like America. Some people were old, others young. Most were white, but many were Black, Latino, Indian, East Asian. Some were alone, others with spouses and children. Some were bored. “He’s not going to talk until 5,” one man told his companion, glancing at his watch. “So we’re chilling.” (Mr. Trump took the stage after 7 p.m.)
And some of them channeled the dark vision of America that Mr. Trump has invoked on the campaign trail.
Charles Cunningham, a genial Virginia firefighter who said he had woken up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. to attend the rally, his first, insisted to me that he was not a conspiracy theorist. But he also claimed that “a lot of B.S.” had marked the counting of votes in 2020, that FEMA had limited hurricane survivors to just $750 in compensation and that outside “instigators” had egged on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack — narratives that have been proved false. “Do I smell a rat?” he asked. “Yeah, I do.”
As I threaded through the crowd, a man shouted about hating immigration, using an expletive. Merch emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” code for swearing at President Biden, abounded. When Mr. Trump called journalists “fake news,” attendees brandished their middle fingers at the press section, where I was sitting.
When you watch a Trump rally online, it’s easy to see his followers as an undifferentiated mass. But as I walked around the arena, a yellow-stringed press badge dangling from my neck, I met a much wider spectrum of supporters who brought different perspectives and backgrounds to Mr. Trump’s movement.
Many seemed to be staunch believers who accepted everything unfolding onstage. But some weren’t sold on all of Mr. Trump’s proposals. Mr. Cunningham, for one, said he “wasn’t necessarily thrilled” about opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.
Others shared aspirations for the country that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris. “I feel that, with Trump, there will be a unity that will come, bipartisan unity,” Yvonne Toste, a 72-year-old woman from Queens, told me. “If he comes in, I feel in my heart that there will be a uniting of the nation.”
A 29-year-old office assistant from Warwick, R.I., hoped that Mr. Trump would make health insurance cheaper but didn’t seem worried by the fact that he had tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and now has only “concepts of a plan” for replacing it.
And some at the rally reflected the tensions that have accompanied Mr. Trump’s efforts to court more voters of color. While I spoke in the hall with Ms. Toste, a longtime Republican who is Puerto Rican, a comedian onstage described the island as “garbage.”
When I texted Ms. Toste about the comments later, she called them “in poor taste, out of the blue and quite bizarre.” I asked if they had made her reconsider supporting Mr. Trump. “No, I am still a Trumpster,” she wrote, adding a smiley-face emoji.
What I saw said little about how the election may turn out. But I came away hoping that I had borne witness, using a reporter’s tools to reveal a more textured picture of Mr. Trump’s movement — a picture a laptop screen alone couldn’t provide.
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