All Saints’ Day is important for me: I was ordained a deacon on that day in 2005 and I baptized my son three years later while my daughter played peakaboo with my chasuble. This year, I said Evening Prayer for this great feast day in a corner of the Fiserv Forum in downtown Milwaukee, the location of Donald J. Trump’s fourth rally that day, four days before Election Day. This was the event with the infamous microphone problems in which Trump made sexually inappropriate gestures with the microphone stand that were so noteworthy they made it into the cold open the following night on Saturday Night Live. It was a night I won’t soon forget.
As the Executive Director and Publisher of The Living Church Foundation, I was granted a press pass. The result was my first political rally. I went not to cover the event as a traditional reporter (since, as the Publisher, I am not a journalist and I do not write news stories) but as the Publisher of the oldest continuous publication in the Episcopal Church, based in Milwaukee since 1900. I went as a priest (dressed as a civilian), as a theologian, a Wisconsinite, as a husband, and as the father of a daughter and a son.
I have lived in Wisconsin longer than anywhere else in my adult life. My family has come to love this place, and it is as much my home as anywhere. In 2016, my wife and I randomly passed Trump’s motorcade not once but twice, both times traveling on a highway in the opposite direction. It dawned on my wife and me that we happened to be living in a state that might matter in the election, and it turned out that we were right.
A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with a friend who lives in Pittsburgh, and he pointed out that both of us were part of that special demographic of approximately 150,000 voters who will likely decide the 2024 election.
When I heard that Trump would be in my city just days before the election, I couldn’t help but feel that I had an opportunity, maybe even an obligation, to see this thing that has come to pass, to try to understand why both the state and the country where I live are so compelled to re-elect someone I had always associated with Home Alone 2 and The Apprentice.
Aquinas taught that the human creature “is a debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so it belongs to piety, in the second place, to show reverence to one’s parents and one’s country” (Summa theologian II-II.101.1. corpus). I have come to love this state and this place that I call home, and I felt compelled to understand better the love and fervor in so many of my fellow Wisconsinites that so far had eluded me.
What I Saw
If you’ve never been to a modern political rally, the volume is similar to a professional sports game, at least at first. But it only grew progressively louder and louder as the night went on. During one of many long intervals, I watched older folks sitting there, covering their ears with pained expressions on their faces, the bass vibrating the empty chairs next to them. I caught a shot of Senator Ron Johnson checking his watch (see below) as they waited and waited for Trump to land after more than 15 politicians gave warmup speeches.
I had little sense of how long these events are: I arrived at the venue around 4 p.m. as thousands were queuing outside, and left at 11 p.m. Television media had to arrive at 8 a.m. to stake out their camera locations, and I joined with them and the print journalists when they returned to the press section in the afternoon at the opposite end of the basketball court from the stage. People filed in to Guns-N-Roses, Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” Toto’s “Africa,” and other pops hit (no Taylor Swift, mind you). The lines from Leonard Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” hits slightly differently at a Trump rally: “Watergate does not bother me; does your conscience bother you?”
The event began with a prayer from a local pastor, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the singing of the National Anthem. The pastor prayed God’s blessing on the candidate and his running mate, asking that they be “covered in the blood of Jesus.” The prayer concluded like this: “And I just pray, Lord, and I thank you Lord, for what’s going to happen on Tuesday, Lord, because Wisconsin will be a red state! In the Name of Jesus. Amen. Amen!”
During the long intervals between groups of surrogates stumping for the former president, I walked about the floor, photographing people and talking to those willing to speak with someone with press credentials. In the wake of Biden’s comments that Trump’s supporters were garbage (itself a response to a comedian calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” during the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27), many of those in attendance were wearing reflective vests and some were wearing garbage bags (see the photo below). Nearly every surrogate, and Trump, returned to this comment throughout the evening, along with Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” gaffe from 2016.
There were more teens and young adults that I expected. Nearly everyone was kind, to me and to each other. Many of the young men were in blue suits, white shirts, and extra-long red ties, usually with a MAGA hat with 45/47 on the side. There was a woman wearing a shirt emblazoned with “Puerto Ricans for Trump” as she turned and made a 360-degree video of the rally with a look of pure joy. There was a Trump lookalike walking around taking pictures with folks, as well as a guy wearing a wall suit who got a shoutout from the Republican nominee (a reference to Trump’s emphasis on immigration and his promise in 2016 to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it).
T-shirts ranged from the standard-issue rehash of political yard signs to slightly more colorful sentiments: “I’m voting for the convicted felon”; “Miss me yet?” with an image of Trump hugging an American flag; variations of Trump looking like different versions of a hypermasculine figure — a cowboy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a boxer. A few had shirts that looked like football jerseys with “Amendment” as the faux last name and 2 as the number. Slightly darker was “Say no to the hoe,” with a picture of the Vice President inside the O (see below). There was also the more typical patriotic swag found at most July 4 fireworks displays, augmented at times with a MAGA hat with a blond mop of Trump-like hair coming out of the top (see below).
The Experience
I spoke with several friends beforehand about how to approach the experience. I sat with the fact that I felt much more comfortable attending under the auspices of the neutrality of a press pass rather than being part of the crowd.
One friend told me about a theory he had heard somewhere that the media are the priests of the secular world: their role is to mediate truth to the citizenry. He wondered if my really being a priest, but attending under the media umbrella, might provide some new angle from which to observe and interpret.
There were two moments during Trump’s speech when he disparaged the media as a group, referring to “fake news” and “liars.” Both times, I happened to be in the very front of the press section, situated just behind the last row on the floor. Both times, people turned and shook their fists at us and made rude gestures. One locked eyes with me and slowly made “naughty” gestures with his index finger as he gave me a look of contemptuous disgust.
Most of the surrogates gave run-of-the-mill political stump speeches, the stuff in films about politicians. A few had real charisma, and one or two verged on being actually charismatic, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who drew wild responses from the crowd.
I had long wondered how charismatic Trump is in person. His persona did not fit into any category I had for a politician. There was never a sense that he was seeking our approval or that he was asking for our vote.
Just the opposite.
He was utterly clear that he already had our approval. There was no doubt in his mind that he deserved to be president, maybe even that the universe was bending toward this moment. We desperately needed something, and what we needed was him.
The former president’s speech was not out of the ordinary, at least for Trump. He wove between sentences that were clearly scripted from the Teleprompter and his infamous improvisations–“the weave.” The microphone problems (people in the upper part of the stadium were chanting “We can’t hear you”) led quickly to an angry response: “You’ve gotta be kidding. Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” to the roar of the crowd. The laughter in response to his mean jabs was a bit like how one might guffaw at the uncle who makes off-color comments at Thanksgiving. But the tone was often mean and he would return to his frustration at the incompetency of the people running the event. “I’m seething! Working my ass off with this stupid mic and stupid people.” The contrast with Barak Obama’s Sunday rally in Milwaukee was stark: when someone started booing after he mentioned the former president he stopped and pointed: “We don’t need any of that.”
I kept a list of Trump’s lines that stuck out:
Drill baby drill. Frack frack frack.
It will be a 1929-style Depression if she wins.
The most beautiful word in the dictionary: Tariff.
Isn’t it nice to have a president who doesn’t need a frickin’ teleprompter?
You know why I’m difficult? I want perfection for our country.
I have a very fertile brain.
When I take office, it will be the largest deportation day in American history.
Our country is occupied. Get these animals out of our country.
I’m calling for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American.
I believe she hates you.
The general vulgarity and regular use of mockery and scorn didn’t even land for a while because I have become to used to it. Not only was it deeply sad. It was profoundly troubling. The tone of the laughter in response to his profanity-laden zingers and insults was as if they were responding to a funny little anecdote or pun. And it was the disconnect between the darkness of the rhetoric and the lightness of their response that was so unsettling. If my children responded to such language in this way, I think I would be deeply shocked and grieved.
When he appeared on the catwalk that led to the podium — Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” playing — I could see as everyone leapt to their feet and raised their cameras in hopes to catch a picture of the former president, and I took a photo of my own.
When I went to look at it a few minutes later, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t that press were the priests of the secular age, but the politicians who have become our pastors. The feeling in that moment and the visuals of arms raised, music pulsing, the fervent intensity, all looking toward an elevated stage — it was was uncomfortably reminiscent of churches where I have worshiped and where many in this country still do.
It was clear that the shared sense in that room was that the object of their praise could actually save them and save this country. And in this one respect, Trump’s rally was maybe no different than the one headlined by Cardi B for Vice President Harris just a few miles away that same night.
As I served as the subdeacon on All Saints’ Sunday at my parish in small-town Wisconsin, it occurred to me that the steadiness and sobriety of the liturgy that morning was a religious experience of an altogether different sort. But almost immediately I had to acknowledge that such an insight does nothing to protect us from snobby self-righteousness that is one of the very seeds of frustration that lead people to look elsewhere, to someone who understands them, to someone who can give voice to the real grievances they have known. Nonetheless, the proverbial anthropologist from Mars who could be forgiven for struggling to distinguish between the political rally and certain forms of Christian worship services would never confuse the Mass with such a rally. In this respect, Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem.
As I sat in a not-so-quiet corner of the Fiserv Forum that night praying the Evening Office, I went back and read one of the most beautiful passages in all of Scripture, which had been appointed for the morning of All Saints’ Day. “And what more shall I say?” begins that great sweeping summary of those whose righteous deeds shine forth, even to our generation:
They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated—of whom the world was not worthy—wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Tuesday, November 5, is the last chance for Americans to go to the polls. The City of Man has always been a mixed body. It does not live by the order of the kingdom of God. In fact, it may not even know that one exists. St. Paul’s admonition in Romans 13 — “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” — must be read alongside the psalm the Apostle almost certainly knew by heart:
Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, for there is no help in them. When they breathe their last, they return to earth, and in that day their thoughts perish.
As you go the polls (if you haven’t already) or as you watch the returns (or maybe more wisely play Ticket to Ride), keep these few verses in your pocket and know that this is the truth:
You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
All photographs by Matthew S.C. Olver
