The Rally Turned Out to be Pretty Big News After All

You can probably chalk up 90 percent of Trump's appeal to racism and status anxiety among white non-college males. Some of that status anxiety is real. Non-college, non-urban white men are rightly worried that their kids won't do as well as they have, now that they have to compete with immigrants and minorities for the fewer and fewer high-paying production and manufacturing jobs. If they send their kids to college, they worry they'll get woke and become gay or trans or otherwise unrelatable. Trump might not have had an economic analysis, but he had meme-worthy synecdoches like "lock her up" and "Low Energy Jeb" that captured their rage at the status quo libs and establishment figures who didn't care about them, and he gave them an aspirational figure in his own person--rich, funny, powerful, over-sexed, and in-your-face confrontational--to identify with.Now there really is a crisis--a deadly contagion, massive unemployment, and a sea change in the cultural view of immigrants, blacks, the genders, the confederacy, and so on. Trump spent the first months of the pandemic on TV, either minimizing it or babbling about how great and misunderstood and unappreciated he is. Then he showed up in Tulsa and did the same. But first he demanded that his cultists pay tribute to him by not protecting themselves, like an abusive lover who demands that his partner prove their devotion by letting him not use a condom. He spent more time explaining why he looked feeble on the West Point ramp and bragging about how many TVs Air Force One has than explaining what he is going to do to ensure their children's prosperity. He proved, over and over again, that all that stuff about him caring about their hopes and dreams was just a grift--that what he's really been interested in from day one is what they can do for him. For most of them, the racism more than makes up for his narcissism. But if he loses even three percent of his hardcore support, then he may find himself speaking to a lot more empty stadiums in the coming months.