I watched Donald Trump’s supporters walk out on him. I couldn’t have been more wrong about the reasons why

NEW YORK — On Sunday night at Madison Square Garden, in the heart of midtown Manhattan — perhaps the most nakedly phony 20 blocks of urban glitter ever put up by man — I learned something new about Donald Trump.
I must admit this came as something of a surprise. I’ve been covering Trump for almost nine years. I’ve sat with his crowds. I’ve watched him in court. I stood through his inauguration. But when I saw the audience streaming out during the second hour of Trump’s speech Sunday — the same audience that had, in many cases, lined up for four or more hours that morning, and cheered through five more hours of racist, often bizarre warmups before Trump appeared — it finally struck me: At some point, somewhere between Iowa and here, the myth of Donald Trump had begun to separate from the man.
He has always been a fabulist, Trump, a salesman and a confidence artist with an unusual talent for shameless reinvention. But the Trump that exists now in the imaginations of his most fervent supporters — tens of thousands of whom gathered in New York Sunday for what was billed as the pinnacle of Trump’s campaign and decried as a festival of Nazi-lite fascism— can no longer coexist with the actual man. He is too embarrassingly mortal in person, too human, too vain.
He rambles and shuffles. He goes on and on. He is an old man, in other words. And MAGA-world wasn’t there to see a man. They were there to see a messiah — and that’s one thing Trump, in the flesh, can never fully be.
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In the aftermath of Sunday’s event, a triumph of MAGA-world logistics if nothing else, most of the headlines focused on the warm-up acts. (“Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks,” to cite one example from Politico.) That in itself was unusual enough. In all his years in the spotlight, Trump has rarely if ever allowed himself to be out-outraged on stage. But it happened Sunday. And the fact that it did signals a broader, more dangerous shift for both America and the world .
By the time I arrived at Madison Square Garden Sunday morning at just after 10 a.m., there were already thousands of people lined up outside the stadium. I joined one of several pens on a blocked-off 32nd street. Soon the crowd had filled in behind me. Standing on my tippy-toes and staring back, all I could see was a river of Red MAGA hats, like salmon stalled running up stream. In front of me, a child in a Make-a-Wish Foundation sweater started a “U.S.A.!” chant.
One man, standing near me in the crowd, kept remarking on how peaceful it all was. “No one’s screaming. No one’s getting filled in. Nothing’s burning. It’s cause you’re around normal f—-ing people,” he said. Moments later, a man appeared on the sidewalk, pausing every few feet so a new group could cheer him and take pictures. He was holding a sign that said “F—- Kamala. We ain’t voting for that hoe.”
The event began more or less on schedule, as the last of the nosebleeds were still filling up. I had been to Trump rallies earlier this year that felt deflated, like the audience at a cover band’s show. There was none of that in New York. The flinty aggression of eight years ago was back Sunday, amplified and distorted. The boos for the “fake news media” — perfunctory in Iowa and New Hampshire — seemed filled again with genuine animus. Howls erupted anytime Kamala Harris’s face appeared on screen. “She’s a hyena!” one man yelled in front of me at one point. “I wanna punch her in the f—-ing face!” another screamed later on.
It’s hard to sum up exactly what happened on stage Sunday. Not because it’s difficult to describe really; it was not an unfamiliar scene. There was just so much of it this time, so many speakers and so much alarming specificity; it’s hard to pick out any one detail that feels representative of the whole.
Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian who once called his own warm-up act a “filthy little f—-ing (racial slur)”, joked that Puerto Rico was “literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” He pointed out a Black man in the crowd and said the two had “carved watermelons” together at a party. He said Travis Kelce, an NFL tight end and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, could be “the next O.J. Simpson.” Simpson murdered his ex-wife, see. That’s the joke. And Hinchcliffe was just the first speaker.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s infamous family separation policy, told the crowd “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Radio host Sid Rosenberg, alarmingly tanned and angry, called Hillary Clinton “some sick bastard.” Former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani went on an obscenely bigoted rant about Palestinian children, claiming they are all “taught to kill (Americans) at two! Years! Old!”
There was overt racism: Businessman Grant Cardone claimed Harris, a Black woman, had “pimp handlers.” There was casual racism: every speaker, to a person, made a point of mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s first name. There was jokey bro racism: Tucker Carlson mocking the idea Harris could win legitimately by saying she would have to convince people “she got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive as the first Samoan-Malaysian, low I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
Most disturbing of all, there was the pervasive, endless racism of demonization, as speaker after speaker painted Hispanic asylum seekers as murderous rapists overrunning the border and destroying America.
When it wasn’t racist, it was crude. (Chants of “Tampon Tim,” e.g.)
When it wasn’t crude, it was boring. The campaign announced 30 speakers before the event began; several more turned up unannounced.
When it wasn’t boring, it was strange. David Rem, a New York sanitation worker billed as Trump’s childhood friend (there’s no evidence they had ever met before a rally two weeks ago in Pennsylvania) waved around a crucifix, called Harris the “devil” and the “antichrist” then announced he was running for mayor.
And yet, from inside the arena, none of it felt particularly unusual. There was more of it, sure, and more people, too. But as they were happening, the moments that got endlessly clipped and quoted afterward just felt like more of the same.
What stood out instead was something that has changed since this campaign began in earnest. Trump has long been something of a religious figure to his most devoted acolytes. But sometime in the last 10 months his central narrative — the defining story the MAGA world tells about his candidacy — has become more explicitly messianic.
That’s why Trump the man seems so dotty and underwhelming when he actually shows up now. If you tune out the racist jokes what the audience heard for more than five hours before Trump appeared Saturday was the myth of a Christ-like figure, besieged by unbelievers but never beaten.
Two things happened this year to make this true. The first is that, instead of a campaign between the beginning of February and the end of May, we had literal trials. Trump was on television almost every week standing in front of civil and criminal courts. He was hit with judgments and rulings that seemed logical and proportional to the parts of the population that read court reporting in the New York Times and like outrageous overreach to many that don’t.
To Republicans hesitant about another round of Trump and loyalists growing tired of the schtick, the trials — which were legitimate, necessary and fair — came off like persecution. They fed the narrative that Democrats would do anything to take Trump down. As Susan Glasser wrote in the New Yorker, Trump’s conviction was a turning point for his campaign. He raised about $50 million at a big donor event that night. “Trump was fund-raising off his conviction with small-dollar donors as well,” Glasser wrote; “his campaign, which portrayed him as the victim of a politicized justice system, brought in nearly $53 million in the twenty-four hours after the verdict.”
And then came the shooting. It can feel at times, in some circles , like the assassination attempt never happened. It seemed to come and go in a matter of days in July. But in Trump-land, which comprises at this point, about 47 per cent of the electorate, it was the defining moment, not just of the campaign, but arguably of the past eight years. He was struck down and he rose again, bloodied but unbowed, ready to lead his flock onward to salvation.
That arc was everywhere Sunday. It was the pervasive message of the rally, more than the racism, more than the bigotry, more than the trans-panic, even more than the hateful and dangerous rhetoric about migrants.
There remains zero evidence that the man who shot Trump was a Democrat (he was actually a registered Republican) or even particularly political. But the Republicans have stopped even pretending that matters any more. “I’m not going to do conspiracy and I’m not, not going to do conspiracy,” Giuliani said. “But it’s kind of funny that they tried everything else and now they’re trying to kill him.”
“When they couldn’t beat him, they tried to bankrupt him,” Vance said in his speech. “When that didn’t work, they tried to impeach him. When that didn’t work, they tried to put him in federal prison. And when that didn’t work, they even tried to kill him. But as sure as the American flag still waves, Donald Trump still stands ready to fight.”
It’s no wonder Trump the man can’t live up to that. When he finally appeared on stage Sunday night at 7:15 p.m., the arena was still jammed. I don’t think I could have picked out more than a handful of empty seats in the whole place. But by 7:30, the aisles were already filling with walkouts. By 8 p.m., when Trump was still only about halfway through his speech, there were lineups at the elevators to the ground floor.
Think about that. Those people stood outside, for four, five, sometimes six hours or more just to get inside the arena. They sat through almost five full hours of repetitive warm up speeches, from b-level political celebrities and d-level comedians just for the chance to see this guy talk. And then, when he finally arrived, when he was still easing into the meat of his signature ramble, thousands of them decided, en masse, to go home.
The optimistic read on this would be that whatever dark political magic Trump has is waning now, that what we’re seeing is the last gasp of a historical blip. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think what we are witnessing instead is a much more dangerous, much more lasting phenomenon.
What Tucker Carlson was trying to say, with his scrambled aside about “Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former prosecutors,” is that there is no legitimate way Harris can win —that if she declares victory, it will be an out and out fraud, just the latest attempt by Democrats to bring Trump low through dirty means. The danger now is that there are no facts that will convince the people in that arena that that is not the case.
Facts are not the point with religion. Faith is.
And right now, almost half of voting Americans have faith not in Donald Trump the man, but in his myth. That faith is not going to go away next Tuesday, no matter who gets the most votes or wins the most states. It’s not going to go away if Trump loses or dies or goes to jail, or even if he just goes back to golfing and committing quiet frauds.
Religions don’t end with messiahs. They start with them. It was only sitting in that arena Sunday, after almost nine years of watching, that I finally grasped the enormous, awful gravity of what Donald Trump has started here.