The Last ConventionThe real story of today’s Republican Party wasn’t found inside the RNC convention center.by Jeb Lund & Dan O'SullivanMondayEveryone had their own personal journalist. Or almost everyone.
They came streaming down W. Superior Avenue toward Settler’s Landing Park along the curve of the Cuyahoga down in The Flats. The rubber-soled Rockport duck walk of khakied male print journalists, the toe-stepping birdlike anxiousness of women TV reporters in stylish shoes, the full-length boot stride of camera guys and freelance shooters, the nervous Hunter Thompson–knockoff serpentine of poseur war hacks and bloggers — The March of the Lanyarded.
It was Monday morning, the first full day of Republican National Convention festivities outside of procedural votes and intra-party legalese. Time for D-list celebrities and conflict, the battle of Fort Sumter in the new Civil War, and the troops had come upriver on Harley Davidsons.
The unspoken admission at the heart of everyone’s eagerness to see the Bikers For Trump was the desire to see if hell had come with them. In the shade of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, across the river from a rusting drawbridge angled skyward, they parked their hogs and stood awaiting the charge of shooters and boom mics. They couldn’t have been happier.
A few hard-bitten men in leather vests who looked like two-pack-a-day smokers stood among the Trump gang, outnumbered by plump Boomer types showing off their waxed toys for the cameras. A blonde man with a high-and-tight haircut stood with his arms crossed, wearing a red shirt emblazoned with the words “I Am Trump.”
Past the truck with the customized chrome “TRUMP” bumper stood a beautiful salt-and-pepper horse named Danny Boy. It was unclear what Danny Boy was doing there; he was not, after all, a motorcycle. He was harnessed to a pretty Disney princess open carriage: ivory white wagon wheels, American flag bunting, red embroidered seat cushions, floral and pine-needle garlands.
More than one biker sheepishly asked for permission to pet him. A middle-aged woman and older man, “Volunteers for Trump,” sat atop the perch.
“I like Trump because he can’t be bought,” said Dominic LoCoco, an avuncular gentleman with a mustache and glasses. “He’s got common sense.”
“I work two jobs, and I’m raising my kids. I’m a daycare teacher, and I also do this,” said Diana Von Loewe of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, holding Danny Boy’s reins. “I believe there’s still enough time to turn around the country … I like being able to make a difference, any way that I can. So I make a difference in the lives of my kids, and of the children that I teach as a pre-school teacher, but I also make memories and dreams come true with the horse and carriage.”
“She works at Small Hands, Big Dreams, taking care of about a hundred kids,” added LoCoco, chuckling at her modesty.
“And he,” she added with a smile, “is voting for Trump because he doesn’t want to see our country going backwards anymore, and having our guns taken away. The times of people taking advantage of the American people should definitely be … punished!”
Coming around the corner of a bridge pylon was Hector Vidal, a thirty-six-year-old Puerto Rican machine operator at a South Carolina textile plant who drove to Cleveland overnight to attend his first-ever political rally. With his wavy black hair, wire-rimmed glasses, trim tee, and “LATINOS FOR TRUMP” sign, you could spot him from fifty yards away. Everybody did.
Vidal excitedly defended Trump as half a dozen photographers rushed to take his picture.
“I’m supporting Trump because he wants to close the border, keep the drug dealers and criminals out. I speak to Mexicans everywhere, they say he’s racist. He’s not racist. I think Trump is very multicultural.”
Originally from Park Slope, Brooklyn, Vidal had moved south after 9/11 — “That’s when I woke up” — but he was always uneasy with the state of America.
“Ever since I was five years old, I knew something was wrong with this country. Look at pollution. We have technology that’s renewable and clean, and we’re not doing anything with it.”
Vidal saw a two-party system dominated by elites unconcerned with real problems and Trump as an outsider unafraid to take them on. Trump could go off the script of politics as usual, and he would be better on jobs.
For all his support, however, he wasn’t optimistic. Hillary was “going to get in because of voter fraud,” leaving people like him to look elsewhere for a movement.
As an Alex Jones listener, he thought his next destination was “the flat-earth movement and the conspiracy libertarian movement. I think it’s picking up steam, because the singularity’s coming closer and closer. AI [artificial intelligence] is actually dictating how we live.”
He allowed that it was sometimes difficult to explain this to people. “It’s complicated. [The earth is] not really flat like in Thor, the movie, it’s more like a spherical electromagnetic bubble, but the surface of the earth is flat.”
Asked whether he worried he’d thrown away his limited time off to drive to a party that might be crashed by protesters, Vidal seemed confident that things would remain orderly.
I don’t think Black Lives Matter really wants trouble, because they’re in the wrong, and they’re being paid fifteen dollars an hour to be here by George Soros. Not directly. I’m not racist, I love everybody, we’re all human, but I think this world has rulers that are not human. I think Soros is human, but he thinks God is Satan. But I don’t mean to sound crazy.
Vidal smiled and set off from the overpass to the green verge of Settlers Landing, a gentle slope running down from a sidewalk and a sparse line of trees at the top, to a black stage erected down on the riverfront sidewalk, in front of the wide, white ring of the disabled Cuyahoga fountain. He was excited to finally see Alex Jones.
In the meantime, a man with a Fu Manchu mustache, wispy beard, and a few missing teeth was waving down incoming journalists, with a cheery “Need any help?” and a handshake complete with curling skeleton rings cool to the touch.
Richard Morrison, a forty-eight-year-old from El Paso, Texas, was there with his wife Lorraine, the chief administrator of Truckers for Trump. Morrison had hauled livestock as a kid and driven a fire truck as a paramedic, and was now doing anything he could for the Trump campaign.
“When Trump announced his presidency, I was like, you’re kidding me … Before last year, before he decided to run, when I looked at the American flag, it was just an American flag. It was a disgrace,” he said. “Now I see an American flag … he’s brought it back. I’m in … I’ve been on his trail ever since last year.”
Morrison was animated and welcoming, and it was impossible to tell if someone had assigned him to greet the press or if he couldn’t help himself and did it by default. He also said something repeated frequently throughout the week: that as much as he’d found Trump on his own, the Republican Party had also driven him into Trump’s arms.
These liars … feed you the sugar … to get you to go for them, and then when they’re in there, all they do is throw you crumbs. They don’t really care about us … When they look at you and they tell you a lie, and you know it’s a lie, do you respect the person after that? I don’t.
Below, emcees were nearly ready to hit the stage. It belonged to the America First Rally — named after a nativist black spot on American history without a shred of irony. A triumphant press release originally listed an organization named Eternal Sentry as a sponsor, before its leader was exposed as a white nationalist and anti-Semite.
The rally’s roster of speakers were household names to the kinds of paranoiacs who tape foil on the inside of their windows. The most recognizable name was the main sponsor’s, Alex Jones of InfoWars.com.
The event’s star speaker, Jones believes (among other things) that children are being kidnapped by Child Protective Services workers, 9/11 was an inside job and that “the bankers are putting poison in our food and water… [and] carrying out New World Order.” Jones’ crackling Texas snarl and tendency to go verbally nuclear at regular intervals make him sound like a cross between a Marlboro commercial voiceover and a fatal embolism.
The problem with Alex Jones is a problem shared by Trump: thirty percent of what he says is not insane.
When he shrieks about “false flag” attacks on children’s elementary schools, he is a lunatic. When he says the National Security Agency is spying on all Americans, the economy is rigged, and our military engages in a borderless war across the planet, he is regrettably correct.
It had been a very good Obama era for Alex Jones. Once a garden variety “Waco n’ Mexicans” Lone Star conspiracist, mustering patriots via Austin PACT/ACTV public access television, Jones’ brand of paranoia gained new resonance with 9/11 — an inside job, just like Oklahoma City, Sandy Hook, and the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords in Arizona.
His message carried the day: Jones’ newfound legitimacy had extended all the way to a December interview with Trump himself, apparently arranged by mutual friend and Nixon-era ratfucker Roger Stone. It was a new age, all right.
America First felt like it had been assembled by a satirist laying on the patriotic irony a little too thickly. The woman who sang the national anthem lacked the range and botched the lyrics three separate times.
After umpteen minutes of railing at leftist incompetence, another woman was unable to perform her song “I’m Ready to Make America Great Again” because she couldn’t explain to the sound guys that they had unplugged her computer.
A third song by “legal immigrated” teen Kate Koptenko, “Political Correctness/Make America Great Again!” garnered applause for what sounded like a t.A.T.u. side project about keeping out the goddamn Chechens.
Young men Periscoping from iPhones mounted atop six-foot poles recorded it all, looking like someone had cloned a creature named Gandalf the Vlogger.
The mistake most New York/Beltway journalists make in writing about Trump rally attendees — perhaps because it’s their first time seeing human beings like those in attendance — is vastly overstating their danger.
Trump rallies pale in comparison to the low-level aggressive hum of regular events, like SEC rivalry football games. They’re closer to boomer rock concerts: older white folks outside on a weekend, looking to feel good, get fired up, and hear the material they’ve learned by heart. When they weren’t mad at the things being castigated from the stage, they were enjoying a sunny day out.
The concert vibe explained the pastiche of Jones’ star appearance. He launched into a medley of his worn-out hits. Black Lives Matter was directed by George Soros, one of the globalists who directs everything else. “The answer to 1984 is 1776,” then, screaming: “Seventeeeeeen Seventyyyyyyy Siiiiiix!”
A “Hillary For Prison” chant, attempted twice, left two-thirds of the crowd with their mouths closed. “Hillary is a foreign agent of the Communist Chinese.” Government tyranny, cops on our side. “Donald Trump … has been absolutely over-the-top amazing.” “Thank you … for coming out here despite all the threats.” Turn tape over to hear Side Two.
Jones was well on his way to delivering a set more low energy than Jeb Bush asking the waitress if he could have the salad dressing on the side when Eric Andre, comedian and host of an eponymous Adult Swim television show, bailed him out by looming by the stage with a boom mic.
Jones invited him onstage to distract from the milquetoast set and badgered him about being from The Daily Show.
“You seem like you’re upset,” Jones said.
“I want you to have sex with my wife,” Andre replied, before offering him a hotel key. Then, moments later, “Why does my peepee come out yellow?” Maybe it’s funny on TV.
Andre rescued Jones with two lines that thudded to the stage dead. But instead of egging him on and letting Andre win the flop-off, Jones immediately launched back into his greatest hits, labeling him an “agitator trying to shut down free speech.”
It threatened to go on forever. It would take another day for Jones to have any impact on the RNC, unwittingly using his face. But for day one, it was enough. Jones had convinced a couple hundred people that the globalists had co-opted everyone on stage but Trump and funded every leftist marching outside.
For the true believers, everyone they met and every message they heard after walking past the merchandise tables in the back was, by definition, illegitimate.
They kept the swag back up the hill. Card tables offered “HILLARY FOR PRISON” shirts, and a cardboard box teemed with “THE SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP” signs.
A young vendor holding a sign reading “US FLAGS – $1 OR $5 FOR 4” eyed a TV interviewer, while Ohio native Jewel Kingsley manned her concession tables, offering the most reasonably priced item for an outdoor political event — two dollars for a twenty-ounce bottle of water.
Kingsley had volunteered for McCain, and her husband had toured with the campaign doing audio, but she “really didn’t even support him. [He] was just the lesser of two evils.”
Hillary Clinton was not an option for her, but she wasn’t sold on Trump, instead following her constitutionalist heart and leaning more to libertarian Gary Johnson. But the Trump and Jones message were getting through.
“My husband didn’t want me coming down here without body armor and open carrying, because of the paid agitators.” She claimed that earlier that day her husband had been stopped at a closed intersection when, just as cops opened a barricade and waved him through, “lefty protesters” threw a spike strip under his car, and he “had no choice but to drive over it.”
Her experience had been better. “I’ve been here since 8 AM, and it’s been great,” she said, but she didn’t know what would happen to everyone in the crowd if Trump didn’t win. “I feel like it’s all falling apart. I think they’re going to be angry and support the next GOP person, honestly. I think the whole situation’s pretty grim.”
While Jones barely held onto the crowd, Roger Stone’s country-club outrage delivery started hemorrhaging it, his speech a tepid old wheeze that might have sounded scandalous around the Beltway but felt like a lifeless dad cover band compared to Alex Jones. Reporters streamed back up W. Superior Avenue in search of
anything, pulling InfoWars fans in their wake.