The line stretched for half a mile from the La Crosse Center, a small arena in western Wisconsin, to a park along the Mississippi River. A volunteer wearing a cheesehead hat, spray-painted with “MAGA” in red letters on the front, ushered the crowd of thousands as they slowly made their way toward security. Vendors sold MAGA merch—including a popular t-shirt printed with the photo of Donald Trump shaking his fist in the air immediately after the assassination attempt.
Despite the heat, made worse by a phenomenon known as “corn sweat,” plenty of the people who had waited hours for Trump to arrive were ecstatic to be there among the fellow faithful.
“Too often you feel like you’re the only one, and you can’t talk about it,” an older woman from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin told a former combat medic standing behind me. “I work with basically good people, but they don’t get it.”
And yet, for all of the expectation and concert-like energy, the night would end with Trump appearing onstage for a little over half an hour—spending much of that time clapping back at Democrats’ calling him and his running mate J.D. Vance “weird” and rambling about topics tangentially related to climate change, immigration, and the economy.
Billed as a “town hall” in the city of La Crosse, it wasn’t clear how the event would differ from a regular rally until it began, and a handful of evidently vetted voters took their seats onstage.
Typically, town halls are a forum for candidates to respond to concerns voiced by audience members or voters selected by a presumably neutral third party like a university or news organization.
That wasn’t the case for the Thursday evening event, which was designed by the Trump campaign, moderated by ex-Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and built around questions that served as cue cards to keep Trump on-topic.
Whatever the idea may have been, Trump quickly proved that he wasn’t going to follow the script.
“I figured I was going to come here and make a speech. I had the speech all ready for you,” the former President said shortly after taking the stage following a stump speech earlier that day in Potterville, Michigan. “They said, ‘Sir, you’re actually doing a town hall.’ ”
He was also surprised that it wasn’t being produced by a media outlet: “Why doesn’t somebody tell me this stuff? And I don’t even have any idea who we’re doing it for. Is it for a network or what?”
These comments came after Trump was introduced by Gabbard, who relayed a personal story of how she had tried years ago to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to start a family with her husband. The treatments, which she said were costly and difficult to arrange, ultimately failed. Gabbard’s story was moving, and provided Trump an effective lead-in to announce his new, as-of-yet unspecified policy of making government or insurance companies pay for IVF.
Trump’s shift on IVF is in direct response to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that classified frozen embryos as children—potentially allowing for someone with a similar experience as Gabbard’s to be held liable for wrongful death. Trump is desperate to distance himself from the ruling, given that around 70 percent of Americans support keeping IVF accessible.
Gabbard, after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bowed out of the presidential race, is the second former Democrat to endorse Trump in the last week. Like RFK Jr., Gabbard—a military veteran who represented Hawaii in Congress from 2013 through 2020—once held a place within the left wing of the Democratic Party. Now, she’s betting what’s left of her political career on a spot within a second Trump Administration.
Throughout the event, Gabbard was only able to get Trump to take questions from the audience on four occasions. The first was from Amber, who was worried her son, a student at a trade school, would have job opportunities taken by immigrants (which is a false dynamic); the second was from Luke, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, who brought up the rising cost of groceries; the third was from Danielle, a Minnesotan mother of two, who asked what Trump would do to “turn back the rise of crime” (crime rates in Minnesota hit a sixty-year low in 2023); and the fourth was from Bernardo, a father of eight who believed the country is “more vulnerable now than ever” to “radical Islamists” (Trump, in response, repeated the debunked claim that terrorists are crossing into the country from the U.S.-Mexico border).
In each case, Trump’s answers veered far off-topic. For example, with Luke’s question, the only query that wasn’t implicitly based on xenophobia or racism, he started off strong (“They say you vote with your stomach”) before pivoting to energy prices and how he would’ve stopped inflation by selling oil-drilling leases on a wildlife refuge in Alaska.
Gabbard tried to reign him in by mentioning the price-control plan that Vice President Kamala Harris has said she would support.
But Trump rapidly dismissed it as a “Communist plan” that “has never worked,” and proceeded to riff on climate change (“People don’t want to hear it. They want to live a good life”) which then led to a rant on the threat of nuclear destruction. The point here being that, as Gabbard later elaborated on, we shouldn’t be worried about climate change because Democrats are pushing us “toward nuclear war and World War III.”
It was unclear why worrying about one would be mutually exclusive with being terrified of the other. But like so much of the MAGA universe, nothing needs to make sense; it’s all about conveying fear.
From the conservative young men who are afraid of being canceled to white retirees who believe Trump when he says South American countries are “dumping criminals” into the Midwest, they turn out because being in a crowd of the equally scared is a form of comfort—and maybe even, as one rally-goer told me, “heartwarming.”