In late fall of 2019 Carl Hoffman spent months attending Trump rallies to see what it was like in the belly of the beast. He camped for days and nights in arena parking lots—52 hours at the BancorpSouth Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi, for instance, where he was sixth in line— falling in with a crew of people so in love with the rallies that they drove from one right on to the next, like Trumpkin Deadheads. It was in those long, intimate days and nights in the wind and cold that the superfans suffered for their hero, let down their hair, and conjured the wildest, most bizarre tales of Trumplandic fantasy. Herewith Chapter 12: HER PENIS IS SWINGING
In my first two rallies, in Minneapolis and Dallas, I’d arrived a day before only to find dozens of people already there. But I wanted to be a part of that original group, the most obsessive of the diehards, the first seeds of the mob. I parked my car in the sprawling, empty lot of the Bancorp South Arena in Tupelo, Mississippi, 51 hours before the next rally’s official start time. Two full days early. The air was humid and warm, a light drizzle falling from a gray sky, and beneath an overhang near the box office I found them: Richard Snowden sitting in a folding chair in a gray double-breasted suit, blue arrow-collared pinpoint Oxford, and purple tie, looking tanned and beaming; Rick Frazier and Richard Hardings in jeans and sweatshirts; Dave Thompson; a guy named Gene Huber, who’d driven up from Florida and had once been hugged by Trump, which had changed his life. “Hellooo!” called Snowden. “Congratulations! You are officially sixth in line!”
I had come prepared. I set up my camp chair, feeling amazed and nervous. I was deep behind enemy lines. But Snowden remembered the fact that I’d known the name of his D.C. strip joint, which gave me instant status. Cachet. I had pierced the inner sanctum of the Donald Trump superfans, and from that moment on I was a made man.