The Evolution of the Trump Rally
One of the first indications that Donald Trump was a viable presidential candidate were his rallies. In the summer of 2015, the host of Celebrity Apprentice, whose campaign initially seemed to be a publicity stunt, drew thousands of people to events in Iowa and New Hampshire, even tens of thousands to an Alabama football stadium.
Since then, live events have defined his political career. It was at a rally in Sioux Center before the Iowa caucuses in 2016 where he boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” An early whiff of violence came during clashes with protesters as Trump marched toward the Republican nomination, culminating in a Chicago rally that was canceled before he even arrived after brawls broke out among attendees. His inauguration, which was functionally a rally, set the tone for the new administration: Trump falsely insisted that it was the largest inauguration crowd in American history. When White House press secretary Sean Spicer repeated the claim, he became an overnight national celebrity as well as a laughingstock. Then, in June 2020, for his first rally since the start of the pandemic, Trump held an event in Tulsa that typified the administration’s lax attitude about COVID. A small crowd showed up, and one prominent guest, Herman Cain, died of the virus soon after. The following year, on January 6, he called for a rally on the Ellipse in Washington to protest his election loss, just before the mob attacked the Capitol. This past summer, he was nearly killed at a rally in Pennsylvania, then turned the near-death experience into iconography when he shouted “Fight” with blood running down his face. And, of course, at his big recent rally at Madison Square Garden, a comedian described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” — triggering a wave of backlash.
The crowd inside the First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Saturday night was meager compared with some of the venues the former president has filled in the past. The entire upper half of the 22,000-person-capacity arena was blocked off, as were several sections in the rear. Trump’s remarks blended into a morass of hundreds of other rallies he has held for the better part of a decade — absurd claims like he was winning New Jersey and problematic comments like when he celebrated a heckler who suggested that Kamala Harris had worked as a prostitute. Such moments are so commonplace now that the reporters who fly around the country to follow him to each event barely stirred to tweet.
It was not always this way. When Trump started, he sneered at politicians who would use a teleprompter and his speeches were a form of free association; he would roam from topic to topic, taking long digressions and frequently settling into familiar riffs against a host of political adversaries. It made for irresistible television. It wasn’t just that the speeches were newsworthy — after all, any presidential candidate’s remarks inherently are — but they were also entertaining. “Is anything more fun than a Trump rally?” he often asks. The free publicity was worth millions.
After becoming the Republican nominee in 2016, he accepted the tyranny of the teleprompter in an effort to avoid the comments that excited cable-news producers but alienated swing voters. He has long since developed a method of riffing where he starts on message until he feels the urge to go off on a tangent — such as his recent aside about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis at a rally held in the golfer’s hometown — then riffs freely before eventually returning to his script. The result is a structured improvisation, like a Grateful Dead show, as he veers from reading off the teleprompters on each side of the stage and ad-libbing as he faces dead ahead.
The rallies are also a sort of rhetorical laboratory in which Trump tests out new material and sees what policy position or phrasing appeals to his audience and what doesn’t. Sometimes he even does crowdwork. In Greensboro, he praised the costume of a man dressed as Uncle Sam while also admiring the well-muscled forearms of an attendee sitting in the front row. “Holy mackerel, look at him!” Trump exclaimed. “I always wanted to look like him, I just didn’t want to do the work.”
At events like these, Trump’s base comes to pay personal homage; he draws fans, some from hundreds of miles away, who wait hours to see him, and traveling vendors come to sell MAGA merchandise to the faithful. The impending end of the campaign was evident on Saturday with a sign advertising a discount of “Everything 2 for $30,” as people browsed shirts with messages like “You Missed, Bitches” — in reference to the two assassination attempts against Trump. Another shirt read “No to the Hoe” beside a picture of Harris with a slash through it.
The line outside the arena snaked across the parking lot, where fans could rent a beach chair for $20 and buy a bottle of water for $2. (Petition gatherers were working the line on behalf of Elon Musk’s super-PAC, encouraging people to sign up for his daily $1 million raffle.) Lori Davis had rented a chair and was being shaded from the sun by her red, white, and blue visor. This was her fourth rally going back to 2016, and she had arrived at 11 a.m. on Greyhound bus from her hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia. “I don’t really come to listen to everything that he has to say. I just like him as a person mainly, and that’s what draws me here. He’s a celebrity on top of a former president.”
It was Lisa Pruitt’s third Trump rally, and she had gotten there even earlier, at 6 a.m., after the hourlong drive from her home in Carrboro, a liberal enclave adjacent to Chapel Hill. She had waited more than ten hours in a parking lot on an unseasonably warm day “because he’s worth it.”
Rochelle Richardson, better known as Silk — the right-wing online personality who along with her late sister straddles the line between Trump surrogate and Trump superfan — said what made his rallies unique was “the energy of love and happiness.”
“I find it fascinating how people, whenever they are here at a Trump rally, it gives them hope,” she said. “They’re not depressed anymore. It gives them hope, and it gives them something to look forward to, especially in life. And whenever they hear President Trump speaking, they’re like, Oh my God, I can obtain the American Dream.”
The rallies may be coming to an end, though. In a moment of rare public reflection when speaking to Tucker Carlson last week at an event in Arizona, the 78-year-old openly contemplated the inevitability that the Trump Show will eventually close. “It will never happen again,” Trump said before looking forward. “In four years, somebody is going to be running. It could be J.D. … he’ll have competition no matter what, but when you have a rally, they are going to have 250–300 people. If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead, at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he’d have 250–300 people in a ballroom someplace.”
Trump went on to say that he only started thinking about this recently. As he told the crowd in Greensboro only three days before the election, “We’ll have three big ones on Sunday and four big ones on Monday and then we shut it down and it will never happen again.”
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