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Peggy Noonan describes a Trump rally with 100,000 people!

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A New Jersey Friend Is Sticking With Trump

‘It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK,’ she says. And ‘he’s very funny and sarcastic.’


By Peggy Noonan, WSJ

May 16, 2024 6:12 pm ET


I have a friend who lives in western New Jersey near a lake. Dee is middle aged, works in sales in a service industry, had been a politically independent moderate most of her life, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, less fervently, 2020. When I last saw her, in February, she and her husband felt drawn to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. but that feeling has cooled. She didn’t like it that his family endorsed Joe Biden: “That was weird.” She has also concluded the 2024 election will be close. “I think I’m not willing to take a chance, to experiment at this point.” So they are back to Donald Trump, with revived enthusiasm.


Last Saturday she attended her first Trump rally, on the beach and boardwalk of Wildwood. That rally fascinates me because it has been the biggest of the 2024 presidential cycle, drawing 80,000 to 100,000 people in a Republican area of a deep-blue state, according to a local official’s estimate. From all the coverage the crowd looked raucous and entertained as Mr. Trump played his greatest hits. “We want strong borders, not open borders, we want the American dream, not the Biden inflation nightmare. . . . We want safe communities, not defund the police.” He led the crowd in chants of “Bulls—!” and insulted his foes in the usual manner. He spoke for an hour and a half, and in every video of the event the crowd seemed to stay with him and listen, not drift off.


I asked Dee what she saw and experienced. This is what I heard:


Trump may scare you, but he makes her feel safe. “It was like he made you feel everything’s gonna be OK. The economy’s gonna get better; everybody’s freaking out about the border, but he’ll get it stopped.”


At the rally she felt part of a rebel army, yet she also thinks the rallygoers represent the mass of regular Americans so maybe they’re not the rebels but the majority.

She finds him hilarious. When he riffs about Al Capone and Hannibal Lecter he’s goofing with the crowd and being comical because he’s an entertainer. “He’s very funny and sarcastic,” Dee says. “It’s like a husband sometimes.”


She does not trust the press, nor does she hate them. She just thinks they lie because they have preconceived notions and agendas: “They think we are smelly Walmart shoppers with no teeth.” She says this not with bitterness but as a dry descriptor.

Why did she go? “I thought no matter what happens, it’s history. I was curious. I get to tell my grandkids.”


It went all day. “You’re on line at 8 a.m. for a 5 p.m. start. There were thousands on line with us. We made a bunch of friends. Everyone was friendly, peaceful.” A 17-year-old Hispanic kid named Andrew and his single mother, a nurse, sat nearby and posed with Dee for a picture. His T-shirt said “Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president.” Dee: “It’s not just white people were there—a total mix, also in the speakers.”


“Secret Service was fantastic—they weren’t jerks to us, they checked bags, wanded you, metal detector, but all very respectful.”


Most politically significant, it seemed to me: Dee lives in an affluent suburban community with little crime, but “I have a lot of concern for my safety.” She locks the door when her husband puts out the garbage. At the rally, “there was no drugs, no people smoking weed, no violence.”


Late in the afternoon Mr. Trump flew over the crowd in his plane. “It was spectacular. He flew low enough for you to see it close. Everyone freaked out.” She thinks he landed in Atlantic City. His motorcade arrived at the rally late. “When he came out everybody went crazy.”


The message she took from his speech: “Everything’s going to go back to the way it was. He’ll put things back in order.”


She doesn’t see Trump as an evangelical Christian might, a fallen sinner redeemed in Christ and transformed in leadership. “We grew up with him in the East,” she says. “He’s a celebrity—TV, real estate.” Now he’s a politician. “It’s a rough-and-tumble business. . . . At this point most people don’t care about all the insanity—Stormy, Michael Cohen. It’s so tawdry and disgusting, yuck.”


I asked her to characterize previous figures of the Republican Party, such as both Presidents Bush. She said, “A bunch of uptight white guys, not necessarily honest. Them, Obama—I don’t think Trump is better or worse than any of them. They don’t have the moral high ground, not in hindsight.”


When the crowd started to build, people went online to see how big it was. The press seemed to be low-balling it. “A lot of us think a lot of the news is fake,” Dee says. TV cameras showed Trump on the stage and the people behind him but not the size of the crowd. Trump accused them of bias. “We started chanting, ‘Turn around, turn around!’ for the cameras to scan the crowd. So the Trump campaign put drones up, and later on social media we saw the video.”


Dee says: “I noticed—in the crowd you get these crazy people in their over-the-top outfits. The press flocks to them, to make us all look like white trash.”


I asked about Jan 6. Why didn’t that change her view of Trump? I, and many others, understand it as a singular event. Breaking in, smashing doors and windows, beating cops, threatening the vice president’s life—this was a violent assault on an institution that was also an assault on the Constitution. Doesn’t it threaten or imply something about the future?


She said she understood but sees it differently.


In Wildwood, “we had a bunch of Jan. 6 people in the crowd around us. Middle-aged white women—grandma. . . . The thing about Jan. 6 is we see it as a two-part story. His speech that day was a Trump speech, the crowd was a Trump crowd, it was kind of normal. Part 2 was the people up at the Capitol. But the people just at the speech, they quietly left, they got on the bus, they went home. There was the speech and the insanity up the street. We talked, I heard people say, ‘We left.’ ”


“There were some bad people and some agitators. They shouldn’t have gone in there. Some people broke windows, shouldn’t have happened. And some old ladies go to jail!”

“A lot of what happened at the Capitol—a lot of that was created. A constant narrative to make Trump look as bad as possible at all times.”


I mentioned the testimony under oath of people around Mr. Trump in the White House that day who said he enjoyed it, thought Mike Pence deserved it, refused for hours to tell the rioters to stop, watched it on television, did nothing.


We were on the phone but I could feel her shrug.


“Jan. 6 wasn’t even on our radar,” she said of the people at the rally. “The only thing that made us a little nervous—if there was any trouble, it would be some pro-Hamas thing would cause trouble.”


She thinks Mr. Trump will carry New Jersey and win the election. What will happen the day after? She sighed: “I don’t know. Gonna be bumpy.”

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