‘Trumpstock’ brings peace, unity, and a ton of disinformation to Schnecksville

SCHNECKSVILLE, Pa. — Even 30 mph wind gusts whipping down from the nearby Poconos couldn’t move the bubble of Donald Trump-scented awe and alternative reality that descended on this hilltop village for about eight hours on Saturday.

And the thousands who waited hours in a single-file line that snaked around the fire department and a nearby technical college, like the endless headlights in the climax of Field of Dreams, did not want that bubble pierced by any stray jabs to remind them that Trump, who finally addressed the frigid crowd after sunset, is a criminal defendant, or that Joe Biden isn’t actually America’s worst-ever president driving the nation into crime and deprivation.

Ask the one man who dared try.

He was an older gentleman from New Jersey, bespectacled, wearing an “ARMY” sweatshirt and a red Make America Great Again hat to show the multitudes of passersby that he’d once been one of them. He wouldn’t give his name, and his cause — Trump was somehow to blame for the prison time served by the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionist Jacob Chansley, “the QAnon Shaman” — was inscrutable. But any questioning of Trump was too much for one man in a backward baseball cap brandishing a can of Michelob Ultra, who abruptly hopped out of the line.

“I don’t like that. Get that sign out of here!” he threatened, as several in the line echoed their support. “You need to leave the immediate area.” The New Jersey man eventually slid down the line.

This Schnecksville extravaganza was the fourth Trump rally in the Mid-Atlantic I’d attended since 2016. I go largely because I think the media still fails to understand America’s most important story of the last 10 years. U.S. democracy is staring out into the abyss not so much because of the narcissistic bluster of one alleged billionaire ex-president, but because of the people with fleece hoodies over their MAGA hats who spent hours in an April windstorm to see him.

These rallygoers are the vanguard of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020, and who still have him in a dead heat with Biden, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released hours before the event — despite or maybe because of the two impeachments, the 88 felony charges, or the Project 2025 blueprint for a “Red Caesar” dictatorship. If the American Experiment grinds to a halt after Jan. 20, 2025, it will ultimately be not the fault of Trump, but the everyday citizens I met Saturday who are so eager to put him back in the White House.

Things have changed a lot since I talked to folks outside Trump’s 2016 rally in Chester County, when they were intrigued by Trump’s not-a-politician bluster and his “get-’em-out-of-here” rage at liberal protesters. Eight years later, a Trump rally has become an Orwellian celebration of an upside-down world where the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years is actually the worst U.S. economy ever, the nation’s cities are cesspools of violence despite a plunging crime rate, and the only person wronged on Jan. 6 was not the scores of injured cops, but Ashli Babbitt, shot by “a Black police officer.”

In a sense, Trump himself is almost like the MacGuffin, the plot device that gives these characters an excuse to get together. “We already know what the spiel is, we know what he stands for,” one man, a middle-aged Canadian American executive, told me. So why wait in this massive line? It’s partly that a rally gives supporters a chance to get off the couch, shut down the TikTok app, turn off YouTube, and prove to themselves they are actually not alone in thinking that everything has gone to heck. But there’s an even more insidious reason for coming out.

“Look, they’re going to steal the election again,” said one friend of the Canada native, who, like many of the Trump voters I spoke with, didn’t want to give his name. “They need to see a larger number of people supporting a different kind of candidacy than the one they’re trying to throw down our throat.” They are smitten by the theory that the Big Lie that Trump actually defeated Biden in 2020 is proven by their mass willingness to stand in a line in a howling wind for four hours, while Biden couldn’t even fill a high school gym.

So who are these people? A new best-selling book blames Trump’s unshakable popularity on White Rural Rage, and that is something you might expect to see here in Schnecksville, where the urbane Eastern Seaboard melts into live bait shops, Baptist churches, and redbrick 19th-century homes. The only problem is that almost everyone I met scoffed at their Green Acres stereotype.

“We’re all executives here!” was the battle cry when I mentioned White Rural Rage to the Canadian American, and others in his posse piped up that they were from affluent Montgomery County, or were in college studying criminal justice. One wanted to make sure I knew that the father of her child is Black. Another said of her companion: “I brought my au pair, who is from Italy, so I could show her how we do things in America.”

The steady stream of protestations that today’s Trump electorate is more diverse had a modicum of validity. There were a few Black and brown voters smattered among the hundreds of white men who, with their gray beards and rapidly receding hairlines, looked too much like me for comfort. The most intriguing people I met in the line were three teenage first-time voters from the Lehigh Valley, a group that included a first-generation Cambodian American and a Latina.

“Trump, when he was in office, he really helped our union,” said Aidan Henry, a welder from Whitehall who is about to turn 19, wearing a Trump T-shirt from one of the dozens of merch peddlers who surrounded the rally. In a sense, one can understand why young voters would have rosy middle school memories of life before COVID-19.

But their parents? Most have constructed an elaborate worldview about what is happening in America today around the issues that matter most in Trump World, like the southern border or the part of the economy with high grocery prices (but not the part with plentiful jobs or a record stock market). Never mind the inherent contradictions, like the one 69-year-old woman from upstate New York who told me that “America looks weak” on foreign policy,” but also “not one more dollar for Ukraine.

I asked one gaggle in the line where they get their sweeping narratives, considering what they were also telling me about their contempt for the legacy mainstream media. “TikTok!” one immediately blurted. “There’s a lot of information on TikTok.” His neighbor quickly recommended YouTube, while others promoted obscure websites or the right-wing Patriot channel on satellite radio.

At that very moment, their hated mainstream outlets like CNN and MSNBC were crackling with reports of an Iranian missile launch toward Israel, the latest milestone in a world that seems hell-bent on marching into chaos. Even the cinema feels like little escape, with the dystopian Civil War about America under a fascist three-term president ruling the box office.

That’s why it was so jarring to see that the happiest place on Earth was this mile-long line in Schnecksville. It was a kind of “Trumpstock”: one night of manufactured peace, unity, and shared disinformation, while the gale-force winds of truth blew well above their bubble.