Part One – Inside the Circus
I loathe Donald Trump.
Please don’t hit me with the TDS shit or I will straight up ask you to show me where on this doll Obama touched you.
Now that we got that out of the way…
Back to my story.
I loathe Donald Trump.
I’ve got my reasons. I’ve done my research. You can’t change my mind.
I know who I am because I follow my own thoughts through to their conclusion.
I’ve also never heard the man speak in real life.
Never been to one of his rallies.
Didn’t attend his university, buy his tennis shoes or eat his steaks either.
But all that is for another time.
Today, I’m going to talk about something I don’t think enough people have the balls to do anymore.
I went to a Trump rally as a citizen instead of a fan.
Tried to, anyway.
Here’s how it turned out.
Monday
0530
I woke up like I do every Monday.
Grabbed my phone.
Made the mistake of looking at social media before my brain had completed its startup procedure.
And immediately noticed something weird.
A post I’d written the night before about Pete Ricketts had more than 300 shares.
Well…
Shit.
I’m used to people reading my stuff.
I’m used to people agreeing.
I’m definitely used to people telling me I’m a fucking idiot.
That’s the internet.
But 300 shares on a long political post about a Nebraska senator?
That’s different.
People weren’t just hitting the monkey-dopamine button and moving on.
They were sharing it.
That mattered to me because I’d put actual work into that piece.
I wasn’t just screaming:
“RICKETTS BAD.”
I went through his record.
Property taxes.
Prisons.
Medical cannabis.
Local control.
Political spending.
The shit he’d actually done.
Receipts.
Context.
Then I gave people my conclusion.
Apparently that resonated.
By 0630, Kate and I were headed out for gas and coffee before separating for work.
Just another Monday.
Except that post kept moving.
And there was another little detail hanging over Grand Island.
The President of the United States was coming to town.
Donald Trump was coming to Grand Island to campaign for Pete Ricketts.
The exact guy I’d just spent all that time writing about.
Funny how that works.
1000
Sometime that morning, the thought finally became unavoidable.
I spend a lot of time bitching about people living inside political bubbles.
Fox News tells one half of America what happened.
CNN tells the other half what happened.
Everybody gets pissed off.
Everybody retreats to their corner.
Nobody actually talks to the people on the other side.
And here I was.
Donald Trump was going to be a few miles away from me.
If I was serious about this whole independent-writer thing…
If I was serious when I said people should listen to each other…
If I was serious about following evidence wherever it goes…
Then maybe I should stop talking about it and go fucking do it.
I’m a mechanic.
If a driver brings me a truck and says:
“It loses power climbing hills.”
I don’t stand across the parking lot, look at the hood ornament and announce:
“Turbo.”
At least not if I’m doing my job correctly.
I listen to the complaint.
I ask questions.
I plug into the truck.
I look at data.
I test things.
Then I follow the evidence.
Politics should probably work the same way.
So I decided to go.
Not to protest.
Not to heckle.
Not to become the story.
My STOP THE EPSTEIN CLASS sign stayed home.
I have friends who work executive security.
Those aren’t people I have any interest in fucking around with.
And I don’t underestimate the power of ignorant and uninformed people in large numbers, regardless of which political team they’re wearing.
That standard applies to all.
So yes.
I’d behave.
I’d go.
I’d listen.
I’d take tedious fucking notes.
Then I’d write about it.
I went online.
Registered for four free tickets.
Then registered for four more.
Eight tickets.
Free.
The registration process required information, a phone number and a confirmation code sent by text.
I completed it.
Tickets secured.
Or so I thought.
1200
By noon, the Ricketts post had roughly doubled again.
Now this little field trip felt less like fucking around and more like something I genuinely needed to do.
I left work.
Talked it over with Kate and the kids.
Aaidan wanted to go.
Somewhere in all of this, I also finished registering to be a poll worker.
Because apparently Monday had become:
Chris accidentally participates in democracy day.
Fine.
I’m in.
Then at 1510, another weird little thing happened.
Dan Osborn’s press secretary, texted me and invited me to participate with their LTE/Op-Ed team.
Interesting.
I’m not going to pretend I’m unbiased about that Senate race.
I’m not.
But that’s another reason I needed to be careful.
If I’m going to criticize people for carrying water for their political team, I can’t turn around and do exactly the same fucking thing for mine.
My guy doesn’t get a free pass.
Nobody does.
That’s the deal.
1610
Kate and I left the house.
Grand Island didn’t feel like Grand Island anymore.
South Locust was alive.
Local Democrats were out.
Law enforcement was everywhere.
Nebraska State Patrol.
Hall County Sheriff’s Office.
Grand Island Police.
Traffic control.
Barricades.
The kind of security footprint you expect when the President of the United States comes to town.
We worked our way toward Fonner Park.
At 1624, we parked at my mom’s house and started walking.
That turned out to be the correct decision.
Because Fonner Park looked like somebody had taken the State Fair, a political convention and a Secret Service fever dream and dumped them into the same parking lot.
There were cattle pots being used as barriers.
Entrances closed.
People everywhere.
And snipers visible on the Pinnacle Bank Expo Center.
Okay.
Message received.
Maybe leave the belt pliers at Mom’s.
The line was enormous.
Trump merchandise everywhere.
Hats.
Shirts.
Flags.
Vendors.
People dressed head-to-toe in MAGA gear.
And then…
just regular fucking people.
Old people.
Young people.
Families.
People wearing Husker gear.
People wearing nothing remotely political.
That surprised me.
Not because I thought every Trump supporter would have horns growing out of their forehead.
But social media does something weird to your brain.
Spend enough time online and eventually every political group becomes its loudest asshole.
Republicans become racist lunatics.
Democrats become blue-haired communists.
Independents become people everybody assumes are secretly Democrats or Republicans.
Then you actually go outside.
And there are just…
people.
Then There Was Kate
Kate wore a dark-blue shirt.
Across the front:
MEGA MEAT SALE.
Not MAGA.
MEGA.
MEAT.
SALE.
This is important.
Because apparently political literacy has now reached the point where some people can identify friend or foe from approximately three letters and a shirt color.
We started getting scowls.
Not threats.
Nobody confronted us.
Nobody tried to fight us.
Just…
looks.
Kate eventually covered the shirt.
Which was hilarious because the shirt wasn’t political.
At all.
It was a fucking meat-sale shirt.
But apparently the political Rorschach test had spoken.
That little moment stuck with me.
Because nobody asked her what she believed.
Nobody asked why she was there.
Nobody knew anything about her.
They saw a color.
They saw letters.
They filled in the rest.
Remember that.
It becomes important later.
The First Thing I Got Wrong
I expected hostility.
Lots of it.
Didn’t happen.
People were mostly polite.
They stood in line.
Talked.
Waited.
Bought merchandise.
Took pictures.
Did normal people shit.
There were certainly loud people.
There were angry people.
There were people I’d probably rather not spend Thanksgiving with.
Welcome to Earth.
But the caricature wasn’t there.
At least not in the way I’d expected.
And that’s important.
Because if I came here expecting to learn something and the first thing I learned was that one of my assumptions was wrong…
then that’s part of the story.
I’m not going to hide it because it makes my political worldview less convenient.
Lap Two
We kept walking.
I wanted to see everything.
Not just the rally line.
Not just the Trump people.
Everything.
That’s when I noticed the purple signs.
RICKETTS PARDONED HER RAPIST
JODY NEVER GOT A SAY
That went into the notebook.
Not because a sign makes something true.
Signs are claims.
Claims get checked.
We’ll come back to that.
The story behind the sign: Jody Snogren’s account, and Ricketts’ response.
There were also Ricketts signs everywhere.
Which made sense.
Trump wasn’t in Grand Island because he suddenly developed a burning desire to inspect our municipal infrastructure.
This was a campaign rally.
Pete Ricketts was one of the people he came here to help.
So I started looking at cars.
License plates.
Where were these people actually coming from?
By the highly respected methodology of the Moore Institute of Looking Out the Fucking Window, I noticed something.
Nebraska plates everywhere.
But not overwhelmingly Hall County.
People had driven in from around the state.
That impression was later backed up by local reporting, which interviewed attendees who had traveled from places including Ainsworth, Scottsbluff, Sutton and Columbus.
That’s important too.
A packed building in Grand Island does not automatically mean:
GRAND ISLAND LOVES DONALD TRUMP.
It means a lot of people wanted to see Donald Trump in Grand Island.
Different claim.
Small distinction.
Important distinction.
Context.
1723
Then came 1723.
Doors closed.
We weren’t inside.
And we weren’t getting inside.
Eight tickets.
Used:
Zero.
Well…
shit.
Later reporting put approximately 5,800 people inside the Pinnacle Bank Expo Center.
The Grand Island Fire Department says the building’s maximum capacity is 5,800.
So this wasn’t some elaborate conspiracy to prevent the Gun Loving Hippie Dad Who Fixes Stuff from conducting groundbreaking political journalism.
The fucking building was full.
Fair enough.
I’m a mechanic.
Not a fire marshal.
I’m not suggesting they should’ve stacked another thousand people in the rafters so Chris Moore could hear Donald Trump say things in person.
But once I started thinking about it…
something bothered me.
Why did you give me a ticket?
The Ticket Wasn’t Really a Ticket
Kate and I didn’t just hear Donald Trump was coming to town and wander toward Fonner Park hoping somebody would wave us through.
I registered.
Through the official Republican event system.
There was a process.
Information.
Phone number.
Text message.
Confirmation code.
Tickets.
The official page allowed as many as four tickets per signup. It advertised doors opening at 1:30, the program beginning at 4:30 and presidential remarks at 6.
I registered four.
Then four more.
Which means somewhere there was a number.
Maybe not a reliable attendance number.
Obviously people register and don’t show.
But there was a registration number.
Electronic systems tend to be pretty fucking good at counting.
And they knew the other number too.
5,800.
The capacity wasn’t discovered at 5:22 Monday afternoon when somebody finally thought to ask the fire marshal.
Before the event, the Expo Center’s executive director was publicly saying the building could safely accommodate nearly 6,000 people.
Even more interesting:
Organizers reportedly expected only 3,000 to 4,000 to attend.
Instead?
Standing room only.
Maximum capacity.
Reuters reported organizers were bringing out hundreds of additional chairs as the building filled.
Okay.
Maybe turnout blew their projections completely out of the water.
Entirely possible.
But now I want another number.
How many tickets did you issue?
Not how many people got inside.
We know that.
How many people did your registration system tell:
You’re registered.
6,000?
8,000?
10,000?
20,000?
I don’t know.
And I’m not going to make up a number because a bigger one would make this paragraph sexier.
But the number exists.
So I’d like to know it.
How many registrations were accepted?
What no-show percentage did organizers expect?
At what point did registrations exceed the building’s maximum capacity?
Did registration continue after that?
How many registered people ultimately got turned away?
Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Historical no-show rates.
Security planning.
People reserving four tickets and using one.
People like me reserving eight and using zero.
Hell, I’m part of the no-show statistic.
Fine.
Tell me.
Those answers would tell us whether Monday was simply an unexpectedly successful turnout…
or whether disappointed ticket holders were always part of the math.
Until I have those answers:
I don’t know.
You’re going to see those words around here.
A lot.
Because I don’t know yet is considerably more useful than making shit up.
But here’s what I do know.
Free tickets aren’t free.
Mine didn’t cost me anything.
Going did.
I took the afternoon off work.
Other people drove a hell of a lot farther than Kate and I did.
Fuel costs money.
Food costs money.
Taking time off work costs money.
Childcare costs money.
So if you’re knowingly issuing substantially more registrations than you have seats…
don’t call them tickets.
Call them what they actually are:
A chance to get in.
REGISTRATION DOES NOT GUARANTEE ADMISSION.
SEATING IS FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED.
REGISTRATIONS MAY EXCEED VENUE CAPACITY.
Maybe some version of that existed somewhere in fine print I didn’t see.
If somebody shows it to me, I’ll add it.
But that wasn’t the experience the process communicated to me.
I registered.
I confirmed.
I received tickets.
Normal people tend to interpret the word ticket as meaning something.
And that’s where this stopped being about me missing a Donald Trump speech.
Trust me.
I’ll recover. 😆
It became another question.
Maybe the spreadsheet predicted they wouldn’t show.
Maybe historically the spreadsheet is right.
But the spreadsheet doesn’t buy the gas.
The percentage doesn’t take the afternoon off.
The turnout model doesn’t drive an hour with their kid because they may never get another opportunity to see a sitting president.
People do.
And maybe that’s one of the problems with our political parties.
They understand voters.
They understand demographics.
They understand turnout.
They understand donors.
They understand polling.
They understand precincts.
They understand registrations.
They understand algorithms.
They apparently understand exactly how many human beings the fire marshal will allow inside a building.
I’m increasingly unconvinced they understand people.
There’s a difference.
1735
So we kept walking.
Down toward South Locust.
That’s where the protest crowd was.
And if the first crowd had challenged one assumption…
the second crowd challenged another.
There were teenagers.
Adults.
Older people.
Veterans.
Disabled veterans.
People in costumes.
Homemade signs.
Professional-looking signs.
Angry signs.
Funny signs.
And one giant Trump Pinocchio-style puppet that, if we’re grading exclusively on creativity, probably won the afternoon.
Kate became photographer/fiancée.
Which was good because I was taking notes and trying to actually look at people instead of experiencing the entire event through my phone.
I had also apparently promised her Dairy Queen.
Relationships are built on compromise.
She photographs the collapse of American political discourse.
I buy the sundae.
The crowd grew.
Cars went by.
Horns honked.
Some in support.
Some presumably not.
And standing there watching the protesters, I noticed the same thing I’d noticed around the Trump crowd.
Most of these people were normal too.
Again:
There were loud people.
There were angry people.
There were assholes.
Every sufficiently large group of humans eventually produces an asshole.
It’s practically a law of physics.
But mostly?
People.
People who felt unheard.
People who believed something important was happening to their country.
People who believed powerful people weren’t listening to them.
People who were worried.
People who were pissed.
People who wanted somebody to notice.
Sound familiar?
Because it should.
That’s When Something Clicked
The people outside the Trump rally and the people protesting the Trump rally weren’t as different as our politics requires them to be.
Their beliefs were different.
Sometimes radically different.
Their signs were different.
Their candidates were different.
Their media diets were probably different.
But the underlying human shit?
Pretty familiar.
They want their families safe.
They want to afford groceries.
They want their kids to have opportunities.
They want government to leave them alone in some places and help them in others.
They want somebody to hear them.
They want to believe they matter.
They think the country is going the wrong direction.
They just disagree about why.
And somebody makes an incredible amount of money convincing each group that the people across the street are the reason.
That’s the part I couldn’t unsee.
We keep getting told:
Those people hate you.
Those people are destroying America.
Those people are fascists.
Those people are communists.
Those people are idiots.
Those people are evil.
Those people are the enemy.
Then I walked across a fucking parking lot.
And mostly found Nebraskans.
1823
Then the sound changed.
You could hear it before you really knew what was happening.
People looking up.
Phones coming out.
Traffic reacting.
Horns.
At approximately 1823, we watched what I wrote down in my field notes as Air Force One coming in.
Official reporting puts Air Force One’s landing at Central Nebraska Regional Airport at approximately 5:30 p.m., so my field-note timestamp and the reported landing time don’t match.
I’m leaving my original timestamp here because that’s what I wrote down Monday, but I’m not going to pretend my phone note outranks the documented timeline.
That’s another rule around here.
When my notes and independently documented facts disagree…
you get both.
I’m not Walter fucking Cronkite.
I’m a diesel mechanic with a phone.
Either way, seeing the presidential arrival unfold over Grand Island was pretty fucking cool.
I don’t care who occupies the office.
That’s the President of the United States.
There are moments where politics can shut the fuck up for thirty seconds and history can just be history.
That was one of them.
Then it was time to leave.
Kate had earned her payment.
Dairy Queen.
Caramel sundae for her.
Peach smoothie for me.
Democracy is exhausting.
Then I Went Home
And this is where the experiment changed.
Because I never got inside.
I’m not going to rewrite the day and pretend otherwise because:
I went inside a Trump rally
makes a sexier headline.
I didn’t.
I tried.
That’s part of the story.
So I went home.
Started watching.
Mike Hilgers.
Adrian Smith.
Jim Pillen.
Pete Ricketts.
Donald Trump.
Pause.
Rewind.
Write something down.
Search.
Open another tab.
Read.
Back to video.
Pause.
What the fuck did he just say?
Search again.
And suddenly I realized something.
Maybe not getting inside wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.
Inside, I would’ve had the energy of the crowd.
Noise.
Applause.
People around me reacting.
The spectacle.
At home?
I had a pause button.
And Google.
That’s considerably less forgiving.
The Thing I Didn’t Expect
I went out Monday expecting to write about a Trump rally.
That’s not really what I found.
I found people.
On both sides.
That’s important.
I don’t want anyone reading this and walking away thinking:
Wow, Chris discovered Trump supporters are human.
No.
Fuck that.
That would just be another version of the same problem.
Both crowds were human.
Both.
The Trump supporters weren’t the monsters some people imagine.
The protesters weren’t the America-hating lunatics other people imagine.
They were people.
Some informed.
Some uninformed.
Some thoughtful.
Some angry.
Some funny.
Some annoying.
Some probably completely full of shit.
You know.
People.
The strange part came later.
Because after spending the afternoon outside watching ordinary people coexist within walking distance of each other…
I went home and watched politicians spend hours turning those people back into teams.
Us.
Them.
Republicans.
Democrats.
Patriots.
Radicals.
Good people.
Bad people.
Our side.
Their side.
And suddenly Monday started becoming a much bigger story than the one I thought I was going to write.
Maybe our politics is more broken than our people are.
Maybe the people standing across the street from us aren’t actually the enemy.
Maybe the machine needs us to believe they are.
I don’t know yet.
But I know this:
Your neighbor is not the enemy.
And after watching the speeches Monday night…
I had a whole new pile of questions.
Because once you strip away the applause…
once you pause the video…
once you stop listening for the sentence your team wants to hear…
and start checking what these people are actually telling us…
things get interesting.
Really fucking interesting.
So that’s what I did.
Every speaker.
Every major claim I could identify.
What was true.
What wasn’t.
What needed context.
What was technically true but packaged like bullshit.
What I thought was bullshit and discovered wasn’t.
And occasionally:
Well, fuck. He’s right.
That’s next.
Next: Part Two — What They Told Us
Mike Hilgers.
Adrian Smith.
Jim Pillen.
Pete Ricketts.
Not what Republicans say they said.
Not what Democrats say they said.
What they actually said.
And what happened when I started checking the receipts.
Because bullshit travels light.
Context needs luggage.
Apparently I’ve decided to become the baggage handler.
Read the series:
Part One: Inside the Circus · Part Two: What They Told Us · Part Three: Donald Trump
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