What it’s really like inside a rally
Park City, Kansas: It takes a lot of time and effort to see Donald Trump. In Park City, just outside Wichita, Kansas, thousands of Trump fans line up in the morning for an appearance that will not happen until 7pm.
Those arriving in the early afternoon park cars and trucks across the freeway in a giant casino parking lot and trudge through grass and along the side of an arterial road for nearly half an hour to Heartland Credit Union Arena. There are no such things as footpaths here.
Rally-goers wait for hours in the full sun, while the Secret Service scans attendees painfully slowly. The venue does not fill up until minutes before Trump appears.
Kansas is the latest stop on the president’s midterm election tour; he is holding daily rallies, mostly in red states, to motivate his base to show up to the polls and vote for Republicans. “Pretend I’m on the ballot,” has become Trump’s midterm mantra.
In red Kansas, incumbent Republican senator Roger Marshall is in a tight contest with Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton, a pastor from the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. A recent YouGov poll had Hamilton ahead by 3 percentage points; others have it closer.
“I hate to say it, but you’re kind of trending towards purple,” Trump says at one point, referring to the colour designated to swing states.
Much ink has been spilled over these recent rallies. There have sometimes been rows of empty seats – which Trump angrily denies – rambling asides about men’s bodies or the appearance of attendees and, occasionally, flat delivery from a man who lives for the spotlight.
But on Monday in Kansas, the 6500-seat arena is basically full – at least when Trump starts. The president brings fresh energy to the stage, buoyed by an opening segment on the evils of mass migration as handily demonstrated by the riots in France.
“Just look what’s happening. A once-great nation that is being conquered, looted and burnt to the ground by migrants, jihadists and communists who hate Christianity [and] Western civilisation itself,” he says.
“Globalist left-wing politicians have treasonously imported millions and millions of Third World migrants who are totally incompatible with the West, and they are incompatible with Western values.
“They despise everything about France, and they’re destroying that country. And we’re not going to let that happen to this country,” Trump says to roars of applause and the customary chant of “USA”.
Fox News coverage of the French protests is shown to the crowd before the rally starts. The riots have given this fiercely nationalist leader on the other side of the Atlantic fresh ammunition, not that he needs it with this audience of MAGA diehards.
Emily Coello, a 47-year-old from Wichita, carries two small cardboard signs: one that says “no refugees” and another, “Justice 4 Jan6rs”, backing the Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“America is not the land for people to come around from the rest of the world and invade our country,” Coello says. “Just because they don’t like where they were born. It’s our country; it was created by our founding fathers for us. We just can’t afford morally or financially or culturally to be invaded any more.”
It’s a common refrain here, and one to which Trump returns several times as he rails against the illegal border crossings that took place under the Biden administration.
Some of his more inflammatory remarks prompt heckling from people in the crowd who are presumably not Trump fans. There are usually one or two at every rally, but tonight in Kansas, at least six are removed by law enforcement. Trump derides them as paid protesters who go home to their parents’ basement, though one is an older man wearing a cowboy hat.
The president lashes out at Democrats – Muslim congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – and the crowd laps it up.
He singles out many women, although he also spends a lot of time mocking Hamilton, Texas Senate hopeful James “Talafreako” Talarico and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whom he calls Mohamed.
Trump has turned this overt racism into a bit, which he now wheels out at every rally. “I’m the president, I can call him whatever the hell I want,” he says in Kansas.
“And then they sent me his full name, and actually, his middle name is Mohamed. One good thing – if you call somebody from that part of the world ‘Mohamed’, you’re about 65 per cent sure to get it right.” The mostly white audience laughs along.
But it is Trump’s tendency to say outrageous things others would not – especially at these rallies – that endears him to his biggest fans.
“I think we all speak a little bit real,” says Tracey Eberhart, 55. “And I think politicians that are polished, they’re lying to me half the time. So I like that he talks to me like he’s a real human being.”
Eberhart wears a pink T-shirt that says: “I would love a mean tweet and $1.79 gas right now.” She confirms it dates to the Biden administration, when conservatives rounded on the president for record petrol prices and skyrocketing inflation after COVID-19.
It seems an odd choice of shirt today, given petrol at the adjacent station is about $US4 a gallon and diesel nearly $US6. Indeed, fuel prices have become a lightning rod for backlash against Trump and the Republicans, who promised lower prices during the 2024 campaign.
Some crowd members acknowledge there are frustrations about this, but they do not blame Trump – not even for the US-Israeli war against Iran, which created the surge in global oil prices.
“The Iran war, I think that that’s necessary. I’ll take some high gas prices,” Eberhart says. “Thank God I’m not in California, where they have stupid high Democratic prices.”
People here are more likely to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Tonya Saum, 57, from nearby Goddard, praises Trump for trying to strike a deal with Vladimir Putin to purchase Russian diesel.
“I know what Putin is, but Putin I think has been better than Zelensky,” she says. “Zelensky’s a real slime-ball. He’s just walked around with his hand out, that’s all he’s done … He continues a war that he will not win. He won’t even hold an election.”
On Monday night, Trump again promises the Iran war will end soon – which he has said since it started. “We had to make that journey to the Middle East to stop them from having a nuclear weapon,” he says, before adding: “And I appreciate you putting up with it.”
Throughout the evening, the crowd laughs at Trump’s jokes and insults, and loudly cheers his top lines. Many stay standing, rather than get up every minute to applaud. Most wear MAGA regalia: a popular shirt showing Trump at the White House says “Daddy’s Home”, while some wear sparkly gold jerseys emblazoned with DJT.
There is no doubting their devotion. One protester outside the arena carries a cardboard sign that says: “Idol worshippers this way.”
But by the second hour of Trump’s speech, many start to leave. An arena that was full save for some areas obscured by the press risers now contains empty seats everywhere, including on the floor near the stage. One man pumps his fist for Trump as he walks out about 30 minutes before the president finishes.
Trump speaks for an hour and 40 minutes, finishing a little after 8.30pm. Even for his diehard fans, it makes for a long day. By the time he introduces Roger Marshall, the Senate candidate, many people have already gone home.
They likely wanted to beat the traffic, which, worsened by road closures for the president’s motorcade, makes exiting the precinct a lengthy affair.
But for those desperate to see their hero, it’s a small sacrifice. Ten years on, their adulation has not dulled. As Trump likes to say, it may have even strengthened.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.