Looking for Trump Country in Green Bay

With Wisconsin central to the 2020 race, the President descended on my hometown.

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Driving north to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where I grew up, from the state capital of Madison, where I now live, I pass dozens of barns and maybe as many old factory buildings. There are three homes displaying wood pallets painted like the American flag, two roadside signs stating “Driving on Pills Kills,” and one billboard imploring drivers to keep their babies.

When I get within range of the local country station, Kenny Chesney wails over the speakers: “Paint a wall, learn to dance, call your mom, buy a boat, drink a beer, sing a song, make a friend, can’t we all get along.”

This must be what the Trump campaign meant in the email from this morning?

“We look forward to seeing you TONIGHT at President Trump’s Rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin,” it read. “We’re expecting a MASSIVE crowd to help us show the radical left and the Fake News media that Wisconsin is TRUMP COUNTRY!”

Trump Country: that new name for the place where I am from. Where my parents and their parents and their parents detasseled corn and fed chickens and navigated gravel roads in blizzards. Where we bought boats and drank beer and sang songs. I never knew anything about it that made it President Donald Trump’s until three years ago.

That’s around the time I moved back home to Wisconsin. I’d been living in New York City working as a member of the Fake News media, when I realized that if my homeland was indeed Trump Country, I’d better go check up on it.

Fast-forward to the 2020 campaign season now underway. Thus far in 2019, Democratic presidential candidates Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders have all already made stops in the Dairy State. The Democratic National Committee has decided to hold its convention in Milwaukee. Now Trump is hedging his bets here, too. Wisconsin, as The New York Times put it in early April, has quickly become “ground zero for 2020 politics.”

I arrive in Green Bay, and after a quick zip around the Trump rally venue, pull into my dad and stepmom’s driveway. They too, have a wood pallet painted like the American flag hanging outside their house.

“TRUMP LIED TO WISCONSIN WORKERS,” reads a Bernie Sanders campaign ad at the top of the front page of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, for which my dad works as the editor of a small weekly subsidiary. He’s got a copy in a towering pile on the coffee table.

Over burgers at a local bar, my parents ask how I plan to interview people at the rally. “Oh, um,” I say, caught off guard. “I just want to go and observe.” And write about the experience, sure, but . . . come to think of it, what if I did introduce myself? As a reporter? For The Progressive? Soundbytes of Trump inciting violence against the press played in my head. I had never before been made to feel unsafe in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“You don’t look very Trump-ish,” my dad says as I prep to leave for the big show, eyeing my hipster glasses and lime green scarf. We hop in the car so he can drop me off.

The line to get into the rally is already thousands of people deep, and I can’t help but stare at every one of them. This is what a Trump supporter looks like? Sure, there are the usual suspects: people wearing flags as capes, a cartoonish Uncle Sam, old white men in camouflage, a sea of red MAGA hats. But there are also girls in ripped jeans and skate shoes, a mixed race couple with two tall teenage boys, an older Asian couple. Young dads in MAGA hats, eschewing traditional gender roles, wear babies in chest carriers as they bounce their way down the line. The crowd is overwhelmingly white, but then so is Brown County, which went for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 by eleven points.

Swap the MAGA hats for cheeseheads, and it could be the crowd for a Green Bay Packers game.

Swap the MAGA hats for cheeseheads, and it could be the crowd for a Green Bay Packers game. The rally is taking place at the Resch Center, across the street from legendary Lambeau Field, and next door to the team’s practice field. Like on game days, “We Will Rock You” blares over loudspeakers while locals wave cars into their driveways, charging $20 for a parking spot.

A montage of Trump propaganda plays on a Jumbotron above the line as it snaked around four turns. Before we get inside, it runs back-to-back clips of Rachel Maddow, Trevor Noah, Elizabeth Warren, and President Obama, all saying some version of “Donald Trump will not be elected President.” Then, a cut to the election results and the declaration of his victory. The crowd, dampened from standing an hour outside in the cold, nonetheless cheers. As a callout of the media and “the other side” for sheer incompetence, it is obnoxiously effective.

Inside, the arena gradually fills to near-capacity with more than 10,000 people. The woman next to me, maybe in her sixties, wants a photo of her group. I volunteer to take a few and, after a friendly clap on the shoulder and a “thank you!” we start chatting. She’s pro-life above all else, she says: “At first we were a little unsure about him.” But he has delivered on his promises, she adds.

A couple of hours pass with speeches from YouTube duo Diamond and Silk, U.S. Representatives from Wisconsin Mike Gallagher and Sean Duffy, and Donald Trump Jr. They mention that the President has skipped the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight in Washington, D.C., where the media annually rubs elbows with the political establishment it covers. A “big swampy dinner” Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, calls it during his turn at the podium.

“There’s no place I’d rather be than right here in the American heartland,” Trump says when he finally takes the stage.

There are moments over the next two hours that, while unsurprising, chill me to the bone.

To laughs and boos, Trump repeatedly mocks the photographers, camera operators, and reporters on the platform in the center of the arena floor. He describes the non-existent practice, supposedly favored by Democrats, of “executing babies” after birth, in which the mother and doctor “wrap the baby beautifully” before deciding whether to kill it. Mentioning the breaking news of the synagogue shooting in Poway, California that left one person dead, Trump says, “We forcefully condemn the evil of anti-Semitism and hate which must be defeated.” A woman near me screams “Yes!” in response.

But other moments crystallize for me just how this man—who lies as often as he speaks, who once bragged about sexually assaulting women—won over these people, who look for all the world like my aunts and uncles and high school classmates, gathered at the same venue where I saw the Goo Goo Dolls in concert as a teen, across the street from the football stadium where my mom moonlit as a server, running beer to the high rollers filling the indoor club seats.

“Can you believe I’m a politician?” Trump says to a big laugh early on. But he proceeds to talk like an expert populist, about “restoring government of, by, and for the people.”

“You know what I love?” the President says at one point, channeling Bernie. “Wages are rising fastest for the lowest-income Americans.”

In the room, it doesn’t matter that Trump has staffed his administration with the ultra-rich. It doesn’t matter that wage growth among the poorest began before he took office, or that his $1.5 trillion tax cut has deepened the economic gorge between rich white Americans and everybody else.

In the room, Trump explains the relocation of the United States embassy to Jerusalem the way a Wisconsinite might explain home renovations to a neighbor. “So we’re building a building in Jerusalem. I said ‘David, do me a favor: buy Jerusalem stone. You’re right there.’ We got it so cheap, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Can you believe I’m a politician?” Trump says to a big laugh early on. But he proceeds to talk like an expert populist.

In the room, he gives them all a little hope. Matter of fact, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe just told him today during a round of golf that Japanese companies will soon invest $40 billion in U.S. car factories. “They're coming back,” Trump teases. “They want to be back to Ohio, to Pennsylvania, to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and what’s the name of this special place? It’s called Wisconsin.”

Filing out of the Resch Center, more than one supporter comments that their voices are hoarse from all the screaming.

Just then, I flashed back to a “gender reveal” party my pregnant high school friend and her husband threw late last year, in their big house in the country just outside Green Bay. As we ate color-coded treats and chatted politics around the kitchen island, the father of an old classmate commented. “You know what they say about this place, right?” he said. “Hitler could win if he ran as a Republican.”

As the crowd disperses and unsold T-shirts flap in the night breeze, I think again about that Bernie Sanders ad in the Press-Gazette. “In a Bernie Sanders White House, we will end the corporate greed behind the Shopko closures, Kimberly-Clark layoffs and Foxconn scam.” I remember how Bernie beat Hillary by thirteen points in the Wisconsin Democratic primary. Maybe it won’t be Trump Country much longer. Maybe it never was.