The Crowd Loves Density
We trickled into Minneapolis by ones and twos, a migratory influx that grew as showtime approached.
In Las Vegas, sixty-nine-year-old Rick Snowden slipped into brown moccasins and loaded a few blue and gray pin-striped suits, a handful of repp ties, and a bottle of Paco Rabanne cologne into his 2001 champagne-colored Jaguar XJR sedan and headed for the airport. The Jag had 195,000 miles on its odometer and RAShis initialshand-painted on the front doors. The suits were Snowdens real signature, though. Sixty million dollars, he liked to say, had passed through his hands over a long career as owner and manager of a slew of strip joints from D.C. to Vegas. He made a point of always looking goodand smelling goodin case he met the president. (Hed had his photo taken with six commanders in chief.) This would be his fifty-sixth Donald Trump rally, and no one had him beat.
In St. Marys, Ohio, where a once-thriving business district had been rendered a ghost town by Walmart and other forces of global capitalism, Rick Frazier and Rich Hardings climbed into Fraziers SUV and headed north. Frazier, tall, angular, as thin as a two-by-four and as kind as a grandmother, was a sixty-three-year-old retired pipe fitter. With a high school diploma and a union card hed weathered a nine-month layoff back in the day and several long strikes, and by the time he retired after forty years, he was making $30 an hour, with double time on weekends and triple time on holidays. He had paid vacations, health benefits, and, now, a pension. He had a cat named Frank (after Sinatra) who slept on his chest. He played the guitar and favored the classic southern rock of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd and had once headlined a band called Sterling Foster (named after a beer sign hed seen). Frazier was as all-American as Budweiser before it was bought by the Belgians.
His friend, Hardings, also a pipe fitter at the same Continental Tire plant, was as round as Frazier was straight, and he traveled with a life-size cardboard cutout of the president. The two had been buddies for years. Both had been Democrats, Bill Clinton supporters, in fact, who had walked away to become fanatical Trumpians. This would be Fraziers twelfth rally and Hardingss second.
Further south in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, Dave Thompson briefly considered his choice of rides: the Chevrolet Suburban with the aluminum mag wheels and throaty growl or the classic 1983 Mercedes 240D? Both had a certain surprising flair for the fifty-eight-year-old deeply religious father of three. Lately, though, Thompson had been depressed. His ankle had swelled up for an unknown reason, and no matter how much he slept, he felt exhausted. He could barely muster enough energy to get through the day. But hed been thinking a lot about God and about Donald Trump. End-times might be coming. There was some serious Satanic stuff going on in this country, and in his mind the president had been placed on this Earth to prepare the world for the next stage, which was going to be big. In the end he decided to fly to the rally in Minneapolis. Thompson was filled with new energy. Purpose. He felt like a man again, you might even say, and for as long as the wife approved, he resolved to hit up every rally he could while holding prayer groups at each one that might move the whole end-times process along.
Then there was Randall Thom. He was a native Minnesotan, a fifty-nine-year-old self-employed house painter and dog breeder, a former Marine, big boned and goateed, who walked with a rolling gait and traveled with a bottle of whiskey, a battery-operated bullhorn, several large flags, and banners exalting Donald Trump. He wore a T-shirt heavily decorated with the Stars and Stripes and the tag #FRJ, which stood for Front Row Joe. Thom was not just a Front Row Joe, though; he was the Front Row Joe. When newspaper reporters and TV folks referred to the Front Row Joes, they had in mind an ideal-looking Trump fanatic who traveled from rally to rally and was always the first in line and, once inside, crowded the rail right up by the presidents podium. This archetypal Trump fanatic was big and loud and he definitely had a goatee; he wasnt very articulate and anything might set him off. While Snowden was in the front row at every rallyoften along with Thompson and Frazierthey didnt call themselves Front Row Joes. Snowden thought it was a bit too gauche. But Thom, he was that guy. The very one, and he wore it proudly. He would call everyone together for the plan, which usually involved trying to rally the rally goers with his bullhorn and not listening to the Secret Service or the police. Truth be told, many of his fellow superfans thought Thom was a boozing loudmouth. Though Thom said he was neck and neck with Snowden, claiming some fifty rallies to his credit, many doubted the number. It was Snowden who was the unofficial mayor of the line; everyone knew that and felt good about it.
This particular rally, Trumps four hundredth since announcing his presidential campaign back on June 6, 2015, was scheduled for 7:00 p.m. , Thursday, October 10, 2019, at Minneapoliss Target Center. By 1:30 p.m. Wednesday (a bit late compared to many rallies), Snowden, Frazier, Thompson, Thom, and a flock of others were lined up and ready. As an urban arena in an often-frigid city, the Target Center was surrounded by parking garages connected by enclosed, elevated walkways, which meant that the front of the line was inside a carpeted skyway. When they found it, Snowden and the others were in for a surprise: none of them were first. Instead, ensconced in a padded, top-of-the-line camp chair, his shoes off and placed neatly under his chair, was a scraggly-haired young man in a blue-plaid shirt holding a bible of sorts (though far longer)a collection of every tweet the president had ever made. Having recently survived cancer, Dan Nelson was seeing the world anew, which meant a fresh commitment to the actual Bible and to Donald Trump, who was remaking the world. This was Nelsons third rally, and he had a thirty-six-hour jump on his nearest competitor, which was worth admiring since it spoke to his fantastic stamina and commitmentboth valuable currencies in the arena.
As the afternoon wore on, fans trickled in, greeted each other with hugs and high fives, and claimed their grub stake with cheap, folding chairs, to be carried along as the line shifted and then abandoned when the rush for the door came. Rich Hardingss life-size cardboard cutout of Trump went up. People really dug that, liked to have their picture taken with him. A Black man arrived in a red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes baseball shirt, and no one commentedAfrican Americans were not just welcome at Trump rallies but encouraged. If you werent thinking too hard about it you might see the occasional Black face and think, huh, this is a surprisingly multiracial, heterogeneous crowd. This would be ridiculous, since even a huge Black turnout at a rally might be a hundred in a sea of twenty-two thousand.
