“And now, the end is near/ And so I face the final curtain.”
Before a roaring crowd on Monday, Donald Trump summoned sons Don Jr and Eric, daughter Tiffany, daughter-in-law Lara Trump and son-in-law Michael Boulos to the stage. Their faces threw the orangeness of the family patriarch into stark relief. Trump insisted that his son Barron and daughter Ivanka were watching from afar. “She loves the whole thing,” he said, not very convincingly.
It was election eve and the former US president gazed out at thousands of supporters gathered at an ice hockey arena in Pittsburgh and apparently ready to follow him through the gates of hell. Like a child awakening to mortality, he suddenly seemed to realise that The Trump Show was coming to an end.
“It’s sad because we’ve been doing this for nine years,” he said, as the family looked on. “We’ve had hundreds of rallies, hundreds. Actually numbers that are not even conceivable. I’ve heard 800, 900 – I don’t know – but we don’t even count ’em. And they’re all like this, all these magnificent, magnificent rallies.”
This would be his last one in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania with one to follow in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Remember, the rallies are the most exciting thing. There’ll never be rallies like this. You’re going to have some leading candidate come in in four years and, honestly, if they’re successful they’ll have 300 or 400 people in a ballroom some place. This is never going to happen again.”
Yes, Donald Trump is already comparing his crowd sizes with whoever runs for president in 2028.
Still, was this a rare moment of wistful self-reflection from the man whom the New Yorker writer Mark Singer once memorably described as leading “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul”?
Well, up to a point. In a characteristic brain swerve, Trump, 78, went from sweet nostalgia to a rant about “Barack Hussein Obama” as a “very divisive guy” whose wife, Michelle, was “hitting me” in a recent speech. Then he decried the Russia “hoax” and how Don Jr had been unfairly caught up in it, which led to letting rip at the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff as “watermelon head”, “evil” and “human scum”.
Trump’s children laughed at the insults – hardly an uplifting closing argument just hours before polling day. The former president then gave his stream of consciousness full rein, talking fast as he freely associated from his economy to Covid, from the military to Isis, from the border wall to transphobia. It was vintage Trump, like a final episode recap of a long-running series.
But after his family departed – Lara giving a heart sign to the supporters wearing miners’ helmets – Trump pondered the passage of time again. “We have people that have come to hundreds of the rallies and we all love it. They all love the country. They don’t come to our rallies if they don’t love the country.”
There might be something achingly poignant and elegiac about it – a lion in winter departing the stage – but for the fact that Trump is a twice-impeached malignant narcissist with a knife at the throat of democracy.
Like Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd, the rallies were always more natural territory for this carnival barker than sitting behind a desk in the Oval Office. “Is there anything more fun than a Trump rally?” he has often asked rhetorically, even though some people flee before the end (and did again in Pittsburgh).
These are gaudy, raucous spectacles that combine cult-like worship of a demagogue with a church-like sense of community, the vibe of a rock concert with the fired-up “us versus them” quality of a sports event.
The rallies are gathering places for the “Make America great again” (Maga) faithful who wear the team colours – red and white – on hats, T-shirts and other merchandise, sold by vendors who tour the country. Monday’s sampling included “I’m voting for the outlaw and the hillbilly” and “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president”, plus a photo of Trump with the legend “Pet Lives Matter” – a reference to his false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
Greatest hits, and a few misses
One day a university academic somewhere will write a paper about the musical playlist at Trump’s rallies and what it said about the class, age and race of his crowds. On Monday it included Mr Blue Sky by the Electric Light Orchestra, Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, Nessun dorma by Luciano Pavarotti and It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World by James Brown. Other regulars are An American Trilogy by Elvis Presley, Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O’Connor and numbers from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
The rallies have produced some of Trump’s greatest verbal hits. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he told one in Sioux Center while campaigning in Iowa in 2016. None is complete without a swipe or two at the “fake news” media; the crowd turns and jeers as if playing a part.
It was at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, this summer that Trump survived an assassination attempt then, with face bloodied, raised his fist and urged his supporters to “Fight, fight, fight!” (A chant repeated by supporters in Pittsburgh.)
Having lived by the rally, he nearly died by the rally that day. And the rally might yet be his political undoing: what was once Trump’s greatest strength could prove his achilles heel. In Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he mused on the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis, giving fodder to critics of his mental stability.
When he fulfilled his lifelong wish to stage a mass rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, critics drew a parallel with a Nazi event there in 1939. A comedian described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage”, upstaging Trump and potentially costing him vital Latino votes.
As Democrat Kamala Harris stuck resolutely to the script at her rallies in the closing weeks, Trump’s self-destruction continued at his. He declared himself the protector of women “whether the women like it or not” and said the vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr would work on “women’s health”.
He said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2020 and joked that he wouldn’t mind if a would-be assassin had to “shoot through the fake news” to reach him. He revived a bizarre reference to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
When Trump questioned Harris’s college job at McDonald’s, an attendee shouted: “She worked on the corner!” The former president responded: “Just remember, other people said it … not me.”
In Pittsburgh on Monday, Trump could not resist lying about Harris’s crowd size at a duelling rally across the city. “It’s quite embarrassing, it’s all over the internet, she’s screaming and the people – there’s about a hundred people – they’re not moving, they just want to go home, just be done with it.”
Stretching his arms wide, he added: “It’s not quite this!”
These antics have combined with a hypermasculine campaign that seemed intent on alienating women, failing to disown extremists like Laura Loomer and entrusting his fate to campaign neophytes such as Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk and daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
Spare a thought for those Trump campaign managers who tried to run a more professional operation this time and stay focused on inflation and immigration. They are like riders on a bucking horse, clinging on for dear life but bound to be thrown off and trampled in the end.
All of it has led to Tuesday and an all-or-nothing crossroads in Trump’s life. Go one way and he returns to the White House in one of the greatest political comebacks of all time. Go the other and there is the ignominy of two consecutive election defeats – and the prospect of prison. Comedian John Oliver told viewers on Sunday: “Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where he’s no longer an active threat? Just an annoyance?”
And yet, and yet. A gaffe or insult that many see as disqualifying is merely a laugh line to a Trump supporter. He still drew a big, rambunctious crowd in Pittsburgh, as passionate and committed as ever, many waving “Trump will fix it” signs and one holding a placard that said: “Trump chosen by God.” The former president seemed to feed off the energy.
He broke the news mid-rally that he had been endorsed by the podcaster Joe Rogan. He was backed by an array of speakers including the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and rightwing media personality Megyn Kelly, who declared: “He got mocked by the left by saying he would be a protector of women. He will be a protector of women and it’s why I’m voting for him. He will close the border and he will keep the boys out of women’s sports where they don’t belong.”
Trump called Kelly “nasty” back in 2016.
Among the crowd, Michael Barringer, 55, a fifth-generation coalminer, was wearing a miner’s helmet. “I love this country,” he said. “You’ve got millions and millions of illegal aliens crossing the border. They don’t speak English. They don’t say a pledge allegiance to the flag. They freeload off of us. I’m all for legal immigration but not coming across the border illegally, taking American jobs, undercutting us.
“I believe that Trump, his first term in office, he renegotiated Nafta, he’s for the American people and that’s why I vote him. I think he’s one of the greatest presidents ever to run for office and hold office.”
Lydia Williams, 40, who works in the oil and gas industry, rejected the gender gap that sees Harris dominating among women. “Her stance on LGBTQ is anti-women,” she said. “I’m a middle school track coach and the fact that my female athletes would have to compete against a male is absolutely asinine.”
The big day is upon us. The nation is on edge. The pollsters’ crystal balls are cloudy. But win or lose, Trump says this is his last campaign and there will never be rallies like this again. Some people, previously disconnected from politics, will miss these cauldrons of love and hate. Others, wary of where rallies have led herds throughout history, will hope that a line can be drawn under a decade of demagoguery.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:
How the electoral college works
Lessons from the key swing states
What’s at stake in this election
