Rallies are the fuel that drive Donald Trump. They are his lifeblood

Open this photo in gallery:

Carl Hoffman is a journalist based in Washington and the author of Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.

Doctors, journalists and pretty much everyone who isn’t a hardcore Donald Trump supporter were aghast when, just 48 hours after being admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for COVID-19, the President broke quarantine to seal himself in an armored Chevy Suburban for a quick drive past throngs of cheering, flag waving supporters – many of whom had come from hundreds of miles away – camped out in front of the hospital.

“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” tweeted James P. Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Emergency Medicine and attending physician at Walter Reed. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theatre. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theatre. This is insanity.”

As someone who spent four months in late 2019 and early 2020 travelling through the United States from rally to rally, there was nothing surprising about Mr. Trump’s mini-rally in front of Walter Reed, for that interplay between president and fans is everything to the man and to his power.

Open this photo in gallery:

Indeed, just minutes into my first Trump rally in Minneapolis, Minn., back in October, 2019, it had hit me. The lights were hyper bright, the sound deafening as 22,000 fans chanted his name – men and women who’d waited hours, days, some of them, to see him and hear him, to be close to him. I didn’t want to see it or feel it, but I did: an immense strength. He was relaxed and confident. A big man. A strongman. A force that echoed Mobutu or Franco and that would plough through anything in its path. He was dazzling that night, there was no question about it, because he was shameless; guilty of nothing, he was willing to say anything as the crowd shouted its love for him.

Over the course of four months I drove thousands of miles, spent nearly 200 hours tailgating and camping out in arena parking lots with his most ardent fans, and watched the creation and nurturing of a strange and particular alchemy, a living, breathing animal that had a life of its own and that Mr. Trump understood had to be constantly fed and refed. And as he did so, that animal grew; it grew in size and density, and it was the core of his power and its very lifeblood. As I witnessed the dynamics of his rallies, I understood the obsequiousness of onetime rivals such as Senator Ted Cruz and Mr. Trump’s fearless march through the impeachment trial, and it explains his breakout from Walter Reed on Sunday evening.

Open this photo in gallery:

It was all brought home to me again in the past six weeks, starting when he defied restrictions on physical distancing to claim the GOP nomination before some 1,500 closely packed spectators at the White House on Aug. 27. For months he’d been lagging badly in the polls as the coronavirus burned through the U.S. and his rallies were cancelled. He tried everything. Said the virus was no worse than the flu. Said it would disappear. Gave long-winded daily briefings – about hydroxychloroquine and bleach and blood plasma – that some likened to those vaunted rallies. But they weren’t rallies at all, were nothing like them. Instead of 20,000 believers, he was face to face with cynical, skeptical journalists. As the jobless rate soared and tens of thousands of Americans died and the journalists blew away the smoke and mirrors, he looked feckless. He flailed. You could see it, we all could, and by “we all” I mean the whole country, the GOP included. He shrank before our very eyes and as he did so, the presidential race almost seemed over. Suddenly pundits and people I knew spoke of a Joe Biden landslide.

But then came the GOP convention and there Mr. Trump was up on the podium again in front of all those people at the White House, virus be damned. He rose. Began to inflate again. And sure enough, despite the virus still killing 1,000 Americans a day, the very next day he began a new round of rallies, mostly outdoors at airports. He held 16 different rallies between his convention speech and Sept. 28, with growing attendance and growing numbers of people crammed together and camped out long before showtime, all until the bubble burst and the virus exploded at the White House and he was carted off to Walter Reed, to be pumped full of experimental treatments as his oxygen levels plummeted and his fever raged.

Open this photo in gallery:

The rallies are everything to a populist demagogue and narcissist like Mr. Trump. Beginning days before showtime, the fans, camping out in their MAGA gear, begin the chain reaction. Tension. Momentum. As it builds, the crowd hints at something, suggests something to us watching from afar and those within it: raw power. Power simmering. Power building. A mob of hungry emotion cooking in the heat or freezing in the cold – suffering is the prelude to redemption – yearning, eager, anxious to get inside. The spectacle becomes its own high-octane fuel, its own catalyst. Anyone who opposes the mob is opposing the mob’s power itself. It is unsettling and invigorating.

Once inside the arena or the airport gates, the lights are dazzlingly bright even when the President comes on; there is no dimming, no spotlight. Mr. Trump can see the throngs gathered for him, people who chant his name, TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, and scream out “I love you” when he pauses. The mob sees him, can see each other and we can see them all. Appearances count in politics as in life. The President in his element, feeling big, loved, a sort of Tolkien’s Gandalf-the-old man throwing off his cloak and rising in stature to become Gandalf-the-wizard. He grows before our very eyes, big and strong and forceful. It pumps him up, to those of us watching and to himself; imagine how he feels back in Washington after that adulation. Mr. Biden, if we notice him at all, appears small and old. A ghost. And once Mr. Trump begins speaking, the big man says anything he wants to his people, a stream of invective filled with sinners and saints, a broken world that only he can fix. “We don’t need socialists and we don’t need communists telling us how to run our country,” he called out in Pittsburgh on Sept. 22. “We need law and order! If they win, your cities will be like this. You’ll lose all rights. Your constitution will be worthless.” The crowd – unlike the press, unlike the cynics in D.C. – roars its approval. They love it and they love him. “I would walk behind him and pick up his poop if he asked me,” an older white construction worker in Tupelo, Miss., told me.

Open this photo in gallery:

There is another element of his rallies, less reported, though profound and all-important. There is always a court in the stands – some combination of the governor, senators and House representatives from whatever state the rally is in, plus the down-ballot GOP, plus assorted family members. At some point in his speech, the President pauses and introduces them. Calls them out, tells a little story about each one, praising them – praising their loyalty, especially, and reminding them of his victory, his conquest, before those tens of thousands of screaming fans. In Dallas, Tex., I watched him – as Mr. Cruz stood below him, literally – recount how Mr. Cruz had been the debate champion of Harvard, of Princeton, yet Mr. Trump had destroyed him and he could and would do it again to anyone who got in his way. Mr. Trump dangles GOP politicians like Mr. Cruz in front of his adoring mob. Stands over them. Take away the suits and the expensive haircuts and he might be a savage Viking warlord in a bearskin standing over defeated subjects whose lives he’d spared. It anoints them even as it threatens, for he who can give his blessing can take it away. “The autocrat’s only true subject is the man who will let himself be killed by him,” writes Elias Canetti, who fled fascism in Europe in the 1930s and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. “This moment of confronting the man he has killed fills the survivor with a special kind of strength. There is nothing that can be compared with it, and there is no moment which more demands repetition. … [W]ith each survival he grows stronger.” A strength that every GOP Senator and Representative intuits and fears.

Now, with just a few short weeks until the election, that show of force has been once again paused, his lifeblood interrupted. The big strongman hobbled, his voice raspy, his complexion pale. And yet the crowds came to Walter Reed, and if he could just rally them, could just be seen in front of them, he might begin to inflate again. To them, to himself, to the rest of the GOP that now depends upon him. In the world of Trumpism that he has created, he had no other choice. Which explained his campaign manager Bill Stepien’s response to the announcement on Thursday morning that the Commission on Presidential Debates would make the Oct. 15 debate virtual, to protect Mr. Biden, staffers, journalists – everyone – from a possibly still-contagious President: “We’ll pass on this sad excuse to bail out Joe Biden and do a rally instead.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Keep your Opinions sharp and informed. Get the Opinion newsletter. Sign up today.