Under the Spell of the Crowd

On Sunday afternoon I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, stood in view the whole time, a few hundred feet away. Snipers perched on high-rise rooftops and a pair of drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but word reached us from the front that tickets weren’t being checked—they were a ruse for the campaign to snag fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled off, the clock was outrunning us.

I’ve been in Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiarly scuzzy and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political throng wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were a lot more Black and brown people, and a lot more Orthodox Jews, than you’d see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened all afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. To exit through the crush sideways and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or cup of coffee would take a major effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his 20s who held a tiny American flag in one hand. He said that he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a world-famous, progressively orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lonely dissident. One of about three? No, he said—there were secret comrades in warehousing. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, whatever the result. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats alone were guilty of demonizing their opponents, because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no.

An hour later and 100 feet farther along, I was standing beside Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps, who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and lack of international respect; also, The Apprentice. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide—would even take deep-blue New York City. (There’s a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it was harder to hold on to the thought that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 o’clock—after two hours of standing, and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been an ordinary Manhattan traffic jam, the blare of car horns would have been deafening. But the crowd remained shockingly patient and pleasant, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters for a local betting market tossed out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance to win, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors took up a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator was barking, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone was laughing. Being fellow Americans together, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to prevent things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only a political tribe—the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street—creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock, we hadn’t moved in well over an hour. With this motionlessness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Wedged between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I was living in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful outbreaks of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming”—all these tokens of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here any longer, I might go under the spell too, like a lost climber who sits down to rest in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I squeezed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; at Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy-theory mongering, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.