On Monday, August 17, at about 4:30 p.m., President Donald Trump landed in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Stepping off of Air Force One, Trump started his flyby rally—billed as “Joe Biden’s Failures on Jobs and the Economy”—blasting Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight” in the hangar where 1,500 of his supporters had gathered.
Oshkosh, a battleground city in a battleground state, is about eighty miles north of Milwaukee, where the Democratic National Convention was slated to be held.
Unlike his two other campaign stops on Monday (in Mankato, Minnesota, and Yuma, Arizona), Trump’s hour-long stump speech in Wisconsin held a particular strategic role for a President beleaguered by the coronavirus pandemic and, now, credible accusations of attempting to rig the national election in November. Oshkosh, a battleground city in a battleground state, is about eighty miles north of Milwaukee, where the Democratic National Convention was slated to be held, before officials decided to hold a virtual event out of concern for spreading COVID-19.
Trump scheduled his last-minute campaign stop in Oshkosh to highlight Biden’s conspicuous, if justifiable, absence from the state. But the President’s rally in Wisconsin had another effect: to sow division and stoke racist violence. “We’ll call it a peaceful protest,” Trump told the crowd, referencing the wave of anti-racist protests that have been taking place across the United States this summer, “that way we [can] do whatever we want.”
Earlier that afternoon, in a Kwik Trip parking lot a few miles away, a cluster of about one hundred counter-protesters prepared to march toward the airport. As they unfurled banners, chatted, and handed out granola bars and water bottles, a bright orange and white United States Coast Guard helicopter circled above.
Three white motorcyclists pulled up nearby, revving their engines and surveying the crowd. “We’re here to watch the monkeys,” said one of the bikers when we approached the group for an interview, adding that he didn’t understand why anyone would vote for Biden, who “could barely string a sentence together.”
“I’ve been to thirty-one protests around central Wisconsin. Seventeen of them were in Oshkosh. It’s like a home base for me right now,” said Salazar Kendrick, a Black Lives Matter activist from Waupaca, a small town about forty miles northwest of Oshkosh, who we met next to the Kwik Trip.
Kendrick explained that he had been one of the handful of demonstrators who brought the Black Lives Matter movement to Waupaca in a series of protests, which he said have drawn an average of twenty to thirty people each. The reactions to the BLM demonstrations, said Kendrick, have been “really, really bad. There were people with guns all over, yelling at us.”
Salazar Kendrick
Salazar Kendrick, who lives in the small town of Waupaca, Wisconsin, leads an anti-Trump march through the streets of Oshkosh.
Kendrick has been protesting since early June, not long after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and viewed the march against Trump as a continuation of his previous activism—a cause that he and his friends would need to show up for. “Our job isn’t done. I have a feeling that there’s going to be ten inches of snow, and I’m [still] going to be marching.”
Oshkosh, like many in Wisconsin, is a city divided. In Winnebago County, the constituency that elected former President Barack Obama twice, before shifting dramatically to elect Trump by eight points in 2016. And Trump’s descent into the community on Monday, which stoked a backlash from the left, also emboldened the reactionary elements that his presidency has come to symbolize.
“It’s red, white, and blue,” yelled a guy from his car as he passed the crowd. “Not black, not yellow.”
Trump supporters lined up on either side of the street to taunt and jeer as the march made its way through Oshkosh. “It’s red, white, and blue,” yelled a guy from his car as he passed the crowd. “Not black, not yellow.”
It’s precisely Trump’s willingness to conduct outreach almost exclusively to his rightwing base that has become a focus of the speeches recorded for the Democratic National Convention. As John Kasich, the former Ohio Governor and one of Trump’s opponents in the 2016 GOP primary, admitted in his unlikely appearance at the DNC, Trump’s “current path” has only “led to division, dysfunction, irresponsibility, and growing vitriol between our citizens.”
And just as the spectre Trump loomed large at the DNC, providing a common rhetorical enemy for keynote speakers who otherwise diverge politically, Trumpism and opposition to it dominated the rallies in Oshkosh. Protesters focused on demands for economic and racial justice, highlighting the racist policies and expressions that Trump has encouraged while his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, garnered little attention.
“I’m here [as a] voice for the immigrant community of Wisconsin,” said Daniel Gutierrez, a DACA recipient from Green Bay, who came to the rally representing Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin-based immigrant and worker justice organization. “I’ve had to live with the reality of being a priority for deportation. That’s always a fear I’ve been living with, and it’s been even more these past four years.”
While urban uprisings have primarily invoked a disproportionate response from the police in cities across the United States, the BLM protesters in Oshkosh aren’t just standing up against the state—they’re also up against their neighbors.
“I’m continuing to see hate in my community, which has definitely been tough and has definitely taken a toll,” said Gutierrez. “But I think that we need to continue the fight, to continue the struggle. Because, honestly, lives are at stake.”
Sue Konetzke
“We’ve already lost so many processing centers over the years, and I think this is the final push,” said Sue Konetzke, a retired USPS worker who attended the counter protest. “Right now, the Post Office is needed for people to vote.”
In the leadup to the November election, Biden—an establishment Democrat with a conservative bent—has, for the most part, quietly refrained from campaigning or even making public appearances. With the backing of anti-Trump Republicans like Kasich and the muted support of progressives like New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former Vice President has come to represent a politically neutral alternative to the current administration, if nothing else.
So far, it appears, Biden’s “strategy” seems to be working: As the pandemic rages on and the U.S. economy contracts, polls show him eclipsing Trump in most swing states.
But, if Oshkosh’s fractured community is at all representative of the state, the Biden campaign will need to compete to win the heartland.