Undertaker enters the ring: Trump’s (very late) appearance in Traverse City
Solidarity, excitement, mistrust and disappointment among the MAGA crowd
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
By the time Donald Trump arrived three hours late in Traverse City for a campaign rally at a hangar near the airport on Friday, Oct. 25—11 days before the presidential election—the thousands of MAGA faithful gathered there were cold, tired and hungry.
Toddlers dozed in their parents’ laps or curled like branches around their shoulders. Two women huddled together against a lamppost outside the hangar while they puffed on cigarettes. An exhausted couple lay on the cold concrete near the press area, eating corndogs. Hundreds left when they realized that Trump wouldn’t arrive any time close to his 7:30 scheduled appearance; he lingered for three hours in Austin, Texas, for a podcast interview with Joe Rogan and didn’t arrive in northern Michigan until 10:20 pm.
Some of those who filed out before Trump landed were pissed off. “Where’s Trump?” yelled one. “That was a waste of a day,” said another, according to the Daily Mail. People had begun lining up near the Traverse City airport in the early afternoon, with gates opening at 3:30 pm.
The exhaustion in the crowd may have led to at least three medical incidents (two while Trump spoke, and one before he arrived), with people falling and needing help from doctors and first responders. During the third incident, the ex-president and Republican standard bearer asked an aid to play Pavarotti’s “Ave Maria” over the sound system—a score he has used before at campaign events when he tires of talking policy at the lectern.
The crowd gathered in Traverse City represented a cross section of northern Michigan. Some had driven across several counties to get here. There were medical workers, realtors, food service workers, and a few college students. They were very young, middle aged, and old, some very old. They were able-bodied and they also came in wheelchairs. Some had bodies that were military buff, others looked worse for the wear. Most were white, a majority were men, but there were people of color there, too, including a Middle Eastern immigrant to Michigan I talked to who enthusiastically supported Trump. The vendors of Trump merchandise beyond the security perimeter were disproportionally people of color. They supported him, too.
The crowd wore faded blue jeans and sweatpants, Carhartt and ski hats, and they sported a sea of MAGA red. One man dressed in a Santa Claus beard; another wore an orange suit that resembled a brick wall. For much of the afternoon and early evening, they were joyous, energetic, and optimistic about Trump’s chances on Nov. 5. As night fell at the airport, I watched a fit, blonde-haired, red MAGA hat-wearing mom do exercises with her children as Van Halen’s “Jump” played over the loudspeaker.
They showed kindness and compassion to their fellow attendees. When an exhausted and dehydrated person fell over, strangers raced to him and offered support, water bottles, and encouragement. When an elderly man needed a folding chair, several offered him their own seat. Anyone looking to demonize these supporters of Trump might have struggled to square their stereotypes with acts of civility evident in the crowd.
Nevertheless, a sense of caution, even mistrust, undergirded some at the rally. An event volunteer cautioned attendees about parking in certain lots, lest others might vandalize their cars if they saw pro-Trump paraphernalia through the windows. A shuttle bus driver wearing a MAGA hat told her passengers—without any factual basis—that “liberal businesses” at a local mall would tow people’s cars if they parked there for the event. The same driver pointedly asked her passengers “Is anyone here not a Trump supporter?” Suspicious eyes stared at a couple White Pine Press student journalists on the bus who weren’t adorned in MAGA red.
Those same student journalists attempted to record interviews with nearly a dozen attendees at the rally but were consistently turned down. One man agreed to an interview and then deflected each question with the repeated line, “I’m excited to hear from President Trump.” The reporter later heard his wife tell him, “You did a good job.”
The mistrust (of government, of institutions, of the political class) came from the podium, too. Onetime gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who failed to unseat Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022, railed against Democrats in the state; Michigan GOP party chair Pete Hoekstra sank deep into the weeds with a hard-to-follow story about the Gotion battery plant in Big Rapids with ties to China—even though Hoekstra once lobbied on behalf of a Chinese lumber company; Congressman Jack Bergman bragged that he had led a Trump rally crowd in 2016 in chanting “Lock her up!” in reference to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the presidential race eight years ago.
At 8:45 pm, more than an hour after Trump’s scheduled start time, organizers sent Dixon back up to the podium together with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for what was billed as an “interview.” Instead, Burgum talked in great detail about energy policy and the weight of EV batteries, as he criticized Democrats’ environmental policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Burgum’s tone and content was well suited for a white paper on energy policy, or perhaps an episode of NPR’s “Science Friday.” A pep rally to entertain the dwindling crowd as they waited, and waited, and waited for Trump, it was not.
Ominous entrance
Trump’s plane finally landed after 10 pm, taxied right behind the rally’s stage before reaching the end of the tarmac and circling back. Clad in a dark jacket, a gold-colored tie, and a dark ballcap with gold “Make America Great Again” lettering on it, he exited onto the tarmac and walked on stage to spooky, ominous music punctuated by a series of gongs. It was the walk out song for the professional wrestler The Undertaker.
Trump walked toward the lectern but stopped and for nearly eight minutes he pivoted and faced the crowd in each direction, his body frozen, his face, shadowed by the MAGA hat, contorted in a smirk.
I looked at still photos of his face after the rally, and what I saw were the words, “You worship me.”
In that moment—and perhaps throughout his campaign for president—Trump revealed himself as less a political leader or a commander in chief, and more as a cult leader, a would-be god to his devoted followers.
And then in an instant the audio changed and the speakers began playing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”—a song that has long been red meat for Republican candidates on the campaign trail.
Trump’s wide-ranging, meandering speech lasted a little more than an hour and covered Michigan’s auto industry and tariffs, dark claims about immigration and the transgender community, and a standard push to get out the vote. He used crude, juvenile humor at times, intentionally mispronouncing his opponent Kamala Harris’ first name and calling CNN anchor Anderson Cooper (who is gay), “Allison Cooper.” To encourage Michiganders to vote early, he said, “You big slob, Harry, get off the couch.”
Trump took shots at the media, as he does at almost every campaign appearance.
“I figured when I got here there’d be like 20 people,” he said as he scanned the bleachers around the stage that were still packed with people. Then he motioned to the TV cameras in the press area. “They never show the crowds,” he falsely claimed.
Meanwhile, cold and exhausted MAGA supporters, many carrying sleeping children in their arms, left through the open tarmac as Trump rambled on, accusing Democrats—without factual basis—of instituting a mandate for electric cars. He blamed immigrants for the country’s woes and insinuated that violent crime is on the rise (it’s not) and that undocumented migrants are to blame (violence such as school shootings and domestic abuse are disproportionally committed by naturalized, and white, American males).
Trump and the videos his team occasionally played on two giant screens above the bleachers, appealed to bigoted language that attacked gay and trans communities while claiming he would get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.” That was an applause line. The same crowd that, hours earlier, had helped the elderly find chairs and the exhausted find water now cheered.
A video montage likely targeted at young, military-age men—a key demographic for Trump—interspersed aggressive scenes of basic training from the Vietnam-era movie Full Metal Jacket with scenes of a drag queen performing. “This was the military under Trump. This is the military under Biden,” the video pitched.
Shortly before midnight Trump wrapped his speech with a standard “Get out the vote” pitch with a Nov. 5 election looming that, polls tell us, is locked in a dead heat.
As we filed out of the airport hangar into a bitter cold night and passed the pop-up Trump merchandise booths, I heard a vendor yell, “Get your ‘Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go’ shirt right here!”
The female student journalist walking next to me winced. The patient compassion and civility I had witnessed earlier in the crowd had been replaced by vindictive anger and attack language that most of us wouldn’t use in a school, or a church, or among people we love and respect.
