A few weeks ago, Trump announced that he was making an impromptu visit to Colorado and would be holding a rally at the Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum in Denver -- a couple miles from my house. I felt like I couldn't pass up the opportunity to witness this strange moment in American history firsthand. So, I went on Trump's campaign website and reserved a couple tickets for his rally later that Friday night.
When I got home from work, I drank a beer and ate a few edibles because I thought that the whole Trump rally experience would be that much more mind-blowing if I was really high for it. I threw on my
Comrade Brewing t-shirt because I thought it would be sufficiently ambiguous that I could blend in with either the Trump supporters or the protesters. Do I share Trump's admiration for Putin or am I just mocking it? Who knows. As I was getting close to the rally, I hear police sirens and blue lights flashing in my rearview mirror. ####. I was not looking forward to performing roadside sobriety tests as those edibles were settling in. To my relief, it was just
Trump and his police escort. Phew.
I ultimately got to the venue about 10 minutes after the rally was supposed to start, thinking that my entry would be guaranteed given that I had a reserved ticket to the event. But, at that point, the fire marshal had already stopped allowing people into the venue because it had been oversold beyond capacity by the Trump campaign (
the same thing that happened earlier that day in Colorado Springs). How does Trump expect to run a country when he can't competently oversee a speech for a couple thousand people? Apparently, people had been lined up for hours to see Trump and about 600 ticketed people didn't get inside the venue.
It was
a nice night outside the Wings Over the Rockies museum, so I figured I'd have a couple beers at the beer garden next door and then check out the Trump rally scene after the speech. There were about 60 or so protesters outside the Trump rally, which were mostly
twenty-something girls and
hot girls with petitions. Maybe being shut out of the rally wasn't so bad after all.
After about an hour, a herd of Trumpkins began emerging from the museum. I was so in awe of witnessing Trumpkins in their natural habitat that I felt like I had to document it in photo essay form. The crowd consisted of a wide array of
old people,
creepy old dudes with a white supremacist vibe,
frat boy d-bags,
old white dudes wearing American flag shirts and "Make America Great Again" hats,
guys wearing InfoWars shirts, and
other assorted weirdos. At one point,
this frat boy Trumpkin walked out, threw his arms in the air, and yelled, "That's right! I do love his hate, baby!" A fairly common refrain from Trump supporters leaving the venue was "#### you! #### Hillary! You're all going to be looking for a job real soon."
Another old Trumpkin approached the protesters and proclaimed, "Who wants to debate me with reason and fact?!? Who wants to debate?!? WHY DO YOU HATE ME AND GOD?!??" In what was sadly the most conciliatory moment of the night,
that same guy befriended some black protesters with a "White lives matter! Black lives matter! Latino lives matter! EVERY LIFE MATTERS!!!" chant.
This video does a pretty great job of recapping the scene outside of the rally as the Trump supporters exited the venue. **SPOILER ALERT** Quotes from the video include: "New World Order! Chemtrails!"; "We got work tomorrow!" (even though it was Friday); "Lock her up!"; and "Hillary's a murderer!"
The protesters were an interesting group of people as well. There was a group of black protesters that were cracking me up. One guy just kept yelling, "Obaaaamaaaaa! Obaaaammaaaaa!! Obama comin' for that third term!" At one point, one of the black guys said, "Melania? How she gonna go hard for American when she Peruvian? Half-Peruvian or something." A couple girls had me laughing when one said to the other, "Let's do the sexist one. No, the racist one" and, without missing a beat, the other girl yelled, "GREAT JOB BEING RACISTS!!!" Another guy was just holding up his cell phone, on which he was displaying a picture that said, "Donald Trump hates cats."
And while I agree with this guy's message, he certainly wasn't an ideal representative of Hillary supporters. There were a number of well-intentioned, intelligent people out there that tried to engage in a reasonable dialogue with Trump supporters. I just don't think that anyone's mind was changed as a result of the conversations.
Overall, it was a really weird night. I was somewhat disturbed and dismayed about what has become of American politics, but I still retain some hope for the future. Trump has certainly captured a segment of the population that has been fueled by the right wing media's demonization of Obama and Hillary, fear mongering against immigrants, and alt-conservative conspiracy theories. Yet, while that segment of the population might constitute the plurality of the Republican party these days, I just don't believe that they will ever be a majority of the country. I think
the latest poll numbers indicating that Clinton has a 36 percentage point advantage over Trump with voters between the age of 18 and 34 show that Trump's brand of politics is not the future of this country.