Trump makes last campaign dash to Kenosha, city stricken by pandemic and protests

Donald Trump’s late-in-the-game burst of energy – euphoric, panicked or enraged, or all of the above – took him to five rallies in four states on election eve. Number four was a frigid appearance just outside Kenosha, Wisconsin, site of some of this summer’s worst street violence after the shooting of Jacob Blake.

Take a walk through downtown Kenosha and at first, it looks like any nicely turned-out place shut down during a raging pandemic: most businesses closed, almost nobody on the streets, no sign of litter. Eerily quiet, as is much of the world.

Then you turn a corner and come across a parking lot packed with the remains of cars – torched, melted and smashed. Some are sprayed with the letters “BLM”. The stores nearby aren’t just closed; they’re boarded up, some of them after devastating damage. One hoarding carries two upward arrows and the words “PLEASE – KIDS ABOVE”.

The car graveyard is close to the point in the street where, on 25 August, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot dead two anti-police protesters with an assault-style rifle. Just  hours before Trump touched down for his rally, Rittenhouse, who was extradited from Illinois a few days before, faced an online bail hearing; his bond was ultimately set at $2m.

Rittenhouse has become a hero on a certain segment of the right, from Fox News at the more mainstream end to violent militia groups on Telegram and elsewhere. Fundraising groups are already being scrambled to get him out of custody.

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This is the place that Trump  – the “law and order”, “back the blue” president – chose for his penultimate rally of the campaign.

As they filter onto the concrete at Kenosha Regional Airport, people are in good spirits, determined to see the bitterly cold evening through. Some are wearing ski clothes; others are wearing MAGA hats on top of bobble hats, or three MAGA hats in a stack, or a backwards one over a forwards one.

Two older women pull away from the crowd, joke that they’re looking for a couch, and sit unfussily down on the freezing concrete. Families huddle together cheerily, the kids festooned in flags and scarves. There’s plenty of smiling, joking, jostling for views of the stage.

What’s missing is rage – the toxic aroma of grievance and schadenfreude that’s burst into full flower at many Trump events. As the crowd slowly warm up, or try to, the rally feels more like a trip to a school fireworks display than a closing-night event by a president clearly unwilling to accept the idea of losing this state. But then again, nobody I speak to seems to think he will.

One woman describes to me how if Biden wins, the damage to the economy will mean she and her husband will have to give up their plans to build a house. “We’ll be fine,” she says, “because I can give up my cleaner, one of my pool boys, maybe give my kids one private tennis lesson a week instead of two. But it’s going to hurt my cleaner, it’s going to hurt my pool boy, hurt the tutor.”

Nonetheless, she is confident. “I can’t believe Biden will win, looking at the numbers,” she declares. By “the numbers”, she means turnout at rallies, which has been spectacular on the Trump side – super-spreader concerns notwithstanding.

Another woman puts the coronavirus at the centre of her election analysis. “If it hadn’t been for the virus, it would’ve been a landslide,” she tells me. “The virus has changed everything. The Democrats have made everything about the virus, and they’re going to use it as an excuse to shut down opportunity.

“My mother was an immigrant from Italy. She kissed the ground when she got here. We have so many opportunities, and that’s what the Democrats want to take away with the socialism.

“The Democrats are so rude,” she goes on mournfully. “Apparently it’s all Trump’s fault. Well, I’m connected with a mission in Cameroon. Is the virus Trump’s fault there? Is it his fault in Sweden? Is it his fault in England? You know, if it isn’t, maybe it really is China’s fault.”

If the mood of the crowd is cheery, the dramaturgy of the pre-game is pure whiplash, as grim videos fortelling a socialist apocalypse are dropped into the campaign’s famously peppy rock-pop playlist. Sean Hannity’s supercut of Joe Biden fumbling his words, after which which the Fox News host calls him “a clear and present danger to this country”, is followed by Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”.

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Most of the songs barely get a response – not “Crocodile Rock”, not “Bohemian Rhapsody”, not even the Battle Hymn of the Republic. What does finally get some of the crowd going, just before Trump’s scheduled start time, is “Piano Man”. People on the bleachers start waving their phone torches like lighters. “He knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see,” sings Billy Joel, “to forget about life for a while.”

Trump, though, is nearly an hour late. A Mark Levin-Tucker Carlson-Laura Ingraham supercut about the terror of affordable housing coming to the suburbs is played a second time, and is met with a cheer. The frozen crowd bob along to “YMCA” and a few more songs, blasted louder and louder – and then, out of nowhere, they welcome the 45th president of the United States.

He begins his speech by battling a faulty microphone, but is soon in good spirits and hearty voice. With three rallies already under his belt today, he smiles and gushes ahead with a breezy recitation of his greatest hits: he created, he claims, the greatest economy ever, restored the military, and is now striking trade deals and peace deals like the world has never seen. The climbing coronavirus death toll – Wisconsin’s case numbers are rising particularly sharply – gets no mention.

The crowd respond merrily to all the standard applause lines; chants of “four more years”, “U-S-A!” and “back the blue” break out spontaneously, and whenever the president rambles on a little long or a little quietly, he yanks things back on track by suddenly introducing another favourite theme with a shout.

But even as he relentlessly mocks Joe Biden for his supposed slide into dementia, Mr Trump lacks focus. His only message is himself – and for most of the supporters who’ve shown up, that seems to be enough. They will inevitably vote for him, and a show of hands indicates most of them already have.

After his standard peroration about how he and the crowd have made America strong again, wealthy again, proud again, safe again and great again, Trump jets off into the night for his final campaign rally, a stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was his last campaign stop in 2016; reprising the visit, he tells the Kenosha crowd, perhaps has a whiff of superstition about it.

For the truly superstitious, it might not be the best choice, home as it is to the presidential library of Gerald Ford – a Republican one-term president.