Itemoids

Linda

‘There’s People That Are Absolutely Ready to Take on a Civil War’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › trump-duluth-georgia-rally › 680354

Tucker Carlson’s eyes narrowed as he conjured the image. A Donald Trump victory, he said at a campaign event in Gwinnett County, Georgia, last night, “will be a middle finger wagging in the face of the worst people in the English-speaking world.”

Trump maintains that he’s running for president a third time to restore and unite the country. But many Democrats and even some Republicans have expressed profound concern for democracy and overall safety if the former president wins this election. Last night at the Gwinnett County event, sponsored by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, I asked Trump’s supporters to consider the inverse: What do you think will happen if Trump loses?

The more Trump rallies I attended, the more this question had been gnawing at me. He has framed this presidential contest as a “final battle,” and he may well win. But if he doesn’t, I wanted to know if he and his supporters would really go quietly. I heard a range of answers last night, from promises to accept the outcome to predictions of a new Civil War.

I approached the former Trump-administration official Peter Navarro, who was signing copies of his book The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform. Earlier this year, Navarro spent four months in prison. Like another Trump ally, Steve Bannon, Navarro had been found in contempt of Congress after failing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee on January 6. If Trump loses the election, Navarro told me that “the country will disintegrate,” and he warned of “very hard times.” I asked him if he thought something akin to another January 6 might occur. “By asking that question you’re trying to stir up shit, man,” he said. He told me that my query would be better suited for President Joe Biden and the Democrats. “Those assholes put me in prison,” he said. “Do you hear me?”

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

Another former Trump-administration official, Ben Carson, took a more conciliatory approach to my question. “I think we’ll have to regroup and try to figure out how we can save our country,” Carson said. He told me he doubted that another event like the storming of the Capitol would take place. “I think regardless of who wins or loses, we’ve got to tone down the dissension and the hatred that’s going on in our country, or it’s going to be destroyed,” Carson said.

Rank-and-file Trump supporters had varying opinions on the matter. I chatted with one attendee, Joshua Barnes, while he waited in line to buy strawberry smoothies for himself and his wife at a food truck outside the arena. The couple had driven four hours that morning from their home in Alabama to hear Trump speak live for the first time. “If she does become president, as much as I would hate it, you kind of do have to accept it,” Barnes said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He told me he did not want another insurrection to occur, but he acknowledged the possibility of something worse: a period of postelection unrest, or even civil war. (He pointed me to a Rasmussen survey from the spring that had shown a distressingly high percentage of respondents saying the same thing.)

A man from Gwinnett County named Rich who works in construction told me that this was his fourth Trump rally. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, and when people are trying to shovel me a load of garbage, it’s like, No, it stinks, okay?” he said of Harris and the Democrats. He predicted protests no matter who loses, but did not anticipate another January 6, which he referred to as a “situation” and not an insurrection. As for something closer to a civil war? “I think anything’s possible; I don’t think it’s out of the question, and I really can’t elaborate on that,” he said, adding only that he was hoping it wouldn’t happen.

In the parking lot, I met a man named Mark Williams, who told me he ran the biggest political printing business in Georgia. I took a seat in a folding chair behind his table of yard signs and other wares, and he offered me a red-white-and-blue can of Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right 100% Woke-Free American Beer. (“Eat steak, lift weights, be uncensorable, drink a little beer,” read the slogan.) Though Williams supports Trump, he was levelheaded about both the current election and the previous one. He did not believe Trump’s claim that he’d really won in 2020. “I think we’re more accepting than the media gives us credit for,” Williams said of he and his fellow Republicans. “The actions of a few get painted with that big brush,” he said, pointing to January 6. “So, yeah, there’s going to be some crazy people that do some crazy shit; that just happens. But the actions of most of us, I mean, we’ll bitch about it and scream at each other and all that kind of stuff, but we’re not going to break into the Capitol and stuff. I’m as big a Trump supporter as anybody, but I didn’t feel compelled to go breaking into the Capitol. And those people that did that did wrong. And I don’t know that all of them did wrong, but the ones that did, they needed to be punished.”

Williams told me he had never considered a new civil war seriously until he attended Kid Rock’s Rock the Country festival in Rome, Georgia, earlier this year. He described some of the chatter he heard at the festival, such as When we have to go out on the field and fight these people, y’all going to be there with us? “It did surprise me a little bit, the tone that some of these guys were taking; I think there’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war,” he said. “I think that if there was an overwhelming view of a crooked election or something like that—yeah, I could see it happening.”

Many of the Trump supporters I interviewed sounded worried about future political violence. Some identified as pacifists. Others believed that unrest was almost a given. A 23-year-old named Ben told me he had skipped his classes at the University of Georgia to attend yesterday’s rally. I asked him if he thought January 6 could happen again in the event of a Trump defeat. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’ll be real this time.” He told me that he wasn’t sure what he, personally, would do if Trump lost. “I wouldn’t want to act on instinct, but I would be angry,” he said. He volunteered that he believed that Church and state needed to be remarried. “If Trump was dictator, I would support him,” he said. He insisted that he wasn’t trolling me.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

When Trump addressed the crowd, he made no secret of his authoritarian aspirations. He raised the possibility of suing 60 Minutes over its editing of an interview with Harris, and made the baffling claim that gang members were taking over Times Square with weapons that the U.S. military doesn’t have. (“But we have guys that want to confront them, and they’re gonna be allowed to confront them, and we’re gonna get ’em the hell out of here.”) Once again, he promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in history. He also said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which would grant him authority to detain, relocate, or deport foreigners deemed an enemy, and called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.

That last point is a particularly charged issue in Georgia. A 63-year-old attendee I met named Linda told me her daughters had been in the same sorority as Laken Riley, the 22-year-old student who was murdered earlier this year while jogging. Riley’s alleged assailant is a man from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally, and her death has become a conservative rallying cry, especially for Trump, as it was again last night. (“I feel like we’ll be more like Venezuela if the Democrats get in there,” Linda told me.)

After losing Georgia in 2020, Trump tried to overturn the state’s election results. In the four years since, he’s only grown more unstable, and he’s predicated his 2024 campaign on retribution. This time around, Trump has been encouraging his supporters to vote early, and he’s pushing a new catchphrase: “Too big to rig.” He’s not thinking about what happens if he loses; he wants a landslide victory.

The Donald Trump Way of Courting Women Voters

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › donald-trump-lover-women › 680282

Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience. “FEMA was so good with me,” he said at one point. “I defeated ISIS,” he added later. “I’m the father of IVF,” he claimed, with no further explanation.

The former president set a boastful tone early. The Fox News moderator, Harris Faulkner, told Trump that the Democrats were so worried about the town hall that the party had staged a “prebuttal” to the event, featuring Georgia’s two Democratic senators and the family of Amber Thurman, who died after having to leave the state to access abortion care. “We’ll get better ratings, I promise,” Trump replied, smirking. (Finally, someone willing to tell grief-stricken relatives to jazz it up a little.)

This event was supposed to involve Trump reaching beyond his comfort zone, after he had spent the past few weeks shoring up his advantage with men by embarking on a tour of bro podcasts. But these women were extremely friendly—suspiciously so. CNN later reported that Republican women’s groups had packed it with Trump supporters. Still, even in this gentle setting, the former president blustered, evaded questions, and contradicted himself.  

[Read: The women Trump is winning]

This election cycle has been dominated by podcast interviews with softball questions, but the Fox town hall reveals that the Trump campaign still believes that the legacy media can impart a useful sheen of gravitas, objectivity, and trustworthiness. If a candidate can get that without actually facing tough questions or a hostile audience, then so much the better. Why complain about “fake news” when you can make it? Thanks to Fox, Trump could court female voters without the risk of encountering any “nasty women”—or revealing his alienating, chauvinist side. (Fox did not respond to CNN’s questions about the event.)

This has been called the “boys vs. girls election”: Kamala Harris leads significantly among women, and Trump among men; in the final stretch of the campaign, though, each is conspicuously trying to reach the other half of the electorate. Hence Harris’s decision to release an “opportunity agenda for Black men”—including business loans, crypto protections, and the legalization of marijuana—and talk to male-focused outlets such as All the Smoke, Roland Martin Unfiltered, The Shade Room, and Charlamagne Tha God’s radio program.

For Trump, the main strategic aim of the Georgia town hall was surely to reverse out of his party’s unpopular positions on abortion and IVF. The former drew the most pointed question. “Women are entitled to do what they want to and need to do with their bodies, including their unborn—that’s on them,” a woman who identified herself as Pamela from Cumming asked. “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

This was the only time the former president made an attempt at being statesmanlike, focusing on the topic at hand rather than his personal grievances or dire warnings about immigration. The subject had been rightfully returned to the states, Trump maintained, and many had liberalized their regimes thanks to specific legislation and ballot measures. Some of the anti-abortion laws enacted elsewhere, he allowed, were “too tough, too tough.” He personally believed in exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. This unusual clarity suggests that his strategists have hammered into him that the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has repelled swing voters. He took credit, though in a peculiar way, for saving IVF in Alabama after that state’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos should be regarded as children. In his telling, he was alerted to the situation by Senator Katie Britt, whom he described as “a young—just a fantastically attractive person—from Alabama.” He put out a statement supporting IVF, and the legislature acted quickly to protect it. “We really are the party for IVF,” he added. “We want fertilization.”

[Read: The people waiting for the end of IVF]

Others dispute Trump’s account, and his claims to moderation on reproductive issues yesterday weren’t entirely convincing. (Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term that was compiled by many of his allies, calls for a raft of restrictions on abortion.) But at least it was something close to a direct answer. The first questioner, Lisa from Milton—whom CNN later identified as the president of Fulton County Republican Women—asked Trump about the economy. She got the briefest mention of the “liquid gold” underneath America, which will allegedly solve its economic problems. Then Trump segued into musing about his “favorite graph”—the one on illegal immigration that supposedly saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

To give Faulkner some credit, she did try to return the conversation to reality at several points, with vibe-killing questions such as “And we can pay for that?” (That was in response to Trump’s suggestion that he would cut tax on benefits for seniors. Trump sailed on without acknowledging it.) He told Linda, also from Milton, that transgender women competing in female sports was “crazy,” ruefully shaking his head. “We’re not going to let it happen,” he added.

“How do you stop it?” Faulkner asked. “Do you go to the sports leagues?”

Nothing so complicated! “You just ban it,” he said. “The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.” Now, the U.S. commander in chief might oversee the world’s biggest military and its largest economy, but he or she is not currently charged with setting the rules of Olympic boxing.

Next up was a single mom, Rachel, struggling with the cost of daycare. She was visibly emotional as she stood at the mic. “You have a beautiful voice, by the way,” Trump said, to put her at ease. In response to Rachel’s question about how her child tax credit had decreased, he mentioned his daughter Ivanka, who, he said “drove me crazy” about the issue. “She said, Dad, we have to do tax credits for women. The child tax credits. She was driving me crazy.” (Typical woman, always banging on about economic freedom this and reproductive rights that.) “Then I did it, and I got it just about done, and she said: Dad, you’ve got to double it up.” He noted that fellow Republicans had told him he would get no gratitude for this, and then promised Rachel that he would “readjust things.”

[Read: Trump called Harris ‘beautiful.’ Now he has a problem.]

Audience members seemed not to mind that there was only the vaguest relationship between many of their questions and the former president’s eventual answers. (Contrast that with Bloomberg News’s interview the day before, in which the editor in chief, John Micklethwait, rebuked Trump for referring to “Gavin Newscum” and dragged him back from a riff about voter fraud with the interjection: “The question is about Google.”) Some solid objects did appear through the mist, however. Trump promised an end to “sanctuary cities” and a 50 percent reduction in everyone’s energy bills, and he defended his “enemies from within” comments as a “pretty good presentation.”

Much like a toddler, Trump occasionally said something insightful in a naive and entirely unselfconscious manner. Talking about Aurora, Colorado, where he and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have claimed that Venezuelan gangs are running rampant—a claim that the city’s mayor has called “grossly exaggerated”—a brief cloud of empathy passed across the former president’s face. “They’ve taken over apartment buildings,” he said. “They’re in the real-estate business, just like I am.” (So true: The industry does attract some unsavory characters.) Later, talking about the number of court cases filed against him, Trump observed, “They do phony investigations. I’ve been investigated more than Alphonse Capone.” Sorry? Had someone left a pot of glue open near the stage? Did the former president really just compare himself to a big-time criminal who was notoriously convicted only of his smaller offenses?

And then, all too soon, the allotted hour was up. Fox, according to CNN, edited out at least one questioner’s enthusiastic endorsement of Trump. Even so, it was obvious that the ex-president’s many partisans at the event enjoyed themselves. Before asking about foreign policy, the last questioner, Alicia from Fulton County, thanked Trump for coming into “a roomful of women that the current administration would consider domestic terrorists.” (“That’s true,” he replied.) But had undecided women watching at home learned anything more about Trump that might inform their vote? No. Did they at least have a good time? Probably not.