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As election day approached in 2024, Donald Trump got a little wistful. Whether he won or lost, the end of the campaign would mean no more of the rallies he loved so much.
“It’s coming to an end,” he told an interviewer. “Nine years and now, you know … There have never been rallies like that.”
It didn’t come to an end, though. Trump never stopped holding rallies, so he could drink up the love of his admirers like a man lost in the desert, sucking desperately on the last few drops of water from his almost-dry canteen.
With less than two weeks left before the midterms, Trump is out of ideas; his approval ratings are dreadful, and his last-minute gimmicks — the promise of $5,000 checks, the hope that Vladimir Putin will lower diesel prices — have fallen flat. So all he knows how to do is the thing he has done so many times before: Return to the road, gather the acolytes, mount the spectacle, perform the ritual.
The Trump rally is the defining political event of this era; it is impossible to understand Trumpism without understanding what goes on when he and his most devoted cultists gather in person to reaffirm their commitment to the cause. But we are now witnessing its end.
Trump’s desultory midterm slog
For a while, it wasn’t a certainty that Trump would hit the road before the midterms, but now he has booked a full schedule. The first thing that jumps out about it, though, is that he is going almost exclusively to red states — not, for the most part, the places where there are key races that will will decide control of Congress.
Last weekend he was in Kentucky; he has recently been to Alabama, Alaska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Montana. Some of the states he is visiting, such as North Carolina and Georgia, are ones where Republicans have given up on Senate seats they hoped to win; others have no critical contests at all. And everywhere Trump goes, he may be doing his party more harm than good.
Take a recent visit to Youngstown, Ohio.
As Greg Sargent reminds us, Youngstown was ground zero for elite news organizations’ “diner safari” stories, in which they would send a reporter to interview red-hatted, salt-of-the-earth Rust Belters who would explain their love for Trump over a plate of ham and eggs, their devotional quotes filling up endless “In Trump Country, Trump Supporters Support Trump” articles. Yet even there, Trump’s favored candidates are struggling, and enthusiasm for him has faded away.
The Youngstown event was held at the Covelli Centre, home of the Youngstown Phantoms junior hockey league team. The arena has a maximum capacity of 7,000, far smaller than many of the places Trump has appeared over the years. Yet he couldn’t come close to filling it; Semafor’s Dave Weigel posted video of the half-filled arena and noted that with all the empty seats, “he didn’t do the ‘they’re lined up outside trying to get in’ schtick, as it visibly wasn’t packed.”
This is the story again and again as Trump tours the redder parts of the country: The venues are smaller, the crowds are less excited, and the man at the podium is weirder.
Even for the diehards who still come to see him, Trump’s rallies have become a slog as a sleepy president rambles pointlessly from one subject to another, like a musical act whose hit-making days are decades in the past, playing the old songs with little of the verve that made them popular in the first place to an audience that has to work hard to convince themselves they’re having a good time.
One of the purposes of Trump rallies was always so that they could be viewed by the rest of the country, to say Look at how beloved I am, how fervent is the love my supporters have for me. Trump still insists that’s true, even as he bleeds support among those who voted for him in the past.
“When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love,” he marveled at a rally in Tennessee. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”
That much is still true, even if those applauding are smaller in number than they used to be. But one can’t blame them for being tired, given how often they’ve had to perform their part in his show.
According to lists compiled on Wikipedia, he held 323 rallies during the 2016 campaign, 96 in the 2020 race, and 117 in the 2024 contest. At least if you were following the Grateful Dead or Phish in their respective heydays, you knew the set list would change from night to night. Trump, on the other hand, is more like a second-rate tribute band, playing the same songs over and over.
This used to work
When Trump began holding these rallies in 2015, they really were unlike anything we had seen before, simply because he was such a different candidate. Put him in front of a cheering crowd, and Trump is more himself than anywhere else — more vulgar, more cruel, more scattered, and more impulsive.
And while there have been candidates before who held big rallies their supporters loved — think of Barack Obama’s in 2008 — there has never been a political figure for whom the rally was as central to their project as it is for Trump. His rallies were where his image was solidified, where his political style was demonstrated and modeled, where his enemies were identified, where his slogans and insults were tested and refined.
The rallies thrummed with the threat of violence — against protesters, against immigrants, and against the reporters there to cover them. As a result, they were irresistible to news organizations, which often just let the cameras roll for much of the event, amounting to billions of dollars worth of free media coverage that other candidates didn’t receive.
The theory wasn’t different than it is for any candidate. Rallies can have political benefits where they occur: Attendees can be energized and mobilized, and a visit from a president (or presidential candidate) will usually produce days of local news coverage before and after the event.
In fact, there was research (see here or here) on Trump’s rallies in 2016 showing that they did increase support for him in the surrounding areas when they occurred. But those effects disappeared after a week or so. Political scientists have found something similar about TV ads: They can persuade voters, but the effect tends to dissipate quickly.
But that was 10 years ago, when those rallies were new and fascinating. Today, Trump wants to believe that when he comes to town, the effect on Republican candidates is immediate and dramatic.
But of course, that isn’t true. Even if a Trump appearance will still be big news to the local media, the core problem is that he’s so desperately unpopular, even in most red states. The last thing most Republican candidates want is to be associated with him, especially when he is so resolutely determined to insist that the economy is great, the war with Iran has been a success, and people should stop complaining about data centers.
Trump’s allies understand this problem, which may explain why Fox has not been carrying Trump’s rallies live, much to his chagrin.
“Sad to see that Fox & Friends (Sunday) is not covering our packed house and incredibly enthusiastic (beyond!) Rally,” he wrote on Truth Social earlier this month. “Our people want to see our Rallies, and reports on our Rallies, on FoxNews, or they will very quickly stop watching (like I am doing right now!)”
When other news organizations report on the empty seats, he demands that the reporters be arrested.
At this point, almost no honest person in either party thinks that this election will be anything but terrible for Republicans; Democrats taking the House is a foregone conclusion, and they may take the Senate as well. But as Trump limps through the last two years of his term, it’s almost impossible to imagine him not staging more rallies, at least from time to time.
He doesn’t exist if the cameras aren’t on and he isn’t the center of attention, but it isn’t enough to just talk to reporters, those nattering nabobs who so rudely ask him questions about things that aren’t going well. He needs to feel the unconditional love of his people, and he can only go so long without standing before them to soak it in.
At the end of the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” the aging and mentally ill silent film star Norma Desmond imagines that she is acting in a movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille, when in fact she’s being arrested for murder.
“I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio, making a picture again,” she says to the police and reporters who are there to witness her demise. “You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else. Just us. And the cameras. And those wonderful people out there in the dark. Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”
Donald Trump may spend his final years enacting his own version of Norma Desmond’s delusion. He’ll stand in front of smaller and smaller gatherings at Mar-a-Lago or one of his golf clubs and address the dwindling group of admirers as though he was at one of those blazing 2016 rallies. He’ll drone on for an hour or two about nothing and everything, lapping up the forced laughter of the group at another lame joke, imagining that the height of his power and glory is right now, not in a past receding rapidly as he gets closer and closer to death.
That’s still in the future. Yet every Trump rally that takes place today is like a sad echo of the ones that really made a difference a decade ago. There will be more, but they will never be what they were. And even Trump himself knows it.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
This was a fair critique of the rallies. It almost sounded wistful. However there was a rally yesterday that turned violent and it was the second one in a week that did. Protestors were assaulted by other rally goers. Yesterday's was especially brutal. Most coverage didn't quite catch the assault, but it was bad.
"Put him in front of a cheering crowd, and Trump is more himself than anywhere else — more vulgar, more cruel, more scattered, and more impulsive." So true.
Said he, in SC, “Does anybody know the name of that peace prize? They gave the Pulitzer Prize to a young lady.”
Wondered Jim Acosta on his eponymous show if perhaps djt is "transitioning" with his comments on Husted's ass.