This will be an abnormal post for The Rundown. The topic we’re coving is too small to be covered to the point where bias actively effects media perspective of the event. It will be more of an opinionated account on my part, and there will be a bonus episode of Pod Save CHS that will also break typical form alongside the article.
This past Friday, September the 21st, my friend Adam and I attended a Make America Great Again Rally in Springfield Missouri. We went in to the event with high hopes to find common ground with a group of people we disagreed with and open minds. While we didn’t exactly get what we wanted out of the experience, it was certainly eye-opening on several levels, as well as a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the leader of our nation in person. While I can pretty easily say this particular leader of our nation wouldn’t be my first choice had I had the opportunity to choose, it doesn’t make it any less of a privilege.
The main point of the event was to campaign for and come out in support of Josh Hawley, the republican running for senate in Missouri. Hawley is the current Attorney General who has received lots of verbal and financial support from Mr. Trump in the last few months.
The rally was held at JQH arena on the campus of Missouri State University. Upon approaching the campus, we were met with swarms of traffic. Street corners blocks and blocks away from the event center were decorated with rip-off Trump merchandise stands. As we got closer and closer we saw more and more people there for one reason or another. Protesters decked out in rainbows and angry signs addressed towards Trump as well as those sporting MAGA hats and the colors of our flag. The block around the stadium wasn’t just crossed off from traffic, but barricaded with snow plows and police cars. Finally getting up to the mass of people was way more stressful than we assumed. We waded through a group out of a few hundred protesters in one huge clump, only to see the absolutely massive cluster of Trump supporters, over 11,000 people there total, in a discombobulated tangle of lines in every direction, none exactly looking to go into the building.
We fell into the line with the mass and waited for what seemed like forever due to the all but hostile seeming environment. The people around us were less than friendly. In between selfies and loud exciting conversations, shouting “blue lives matter” at every cop that walked by, and complaining about liberal snowflake protesters, there were not-so-subtle murmurs and whispers addressing a topic we could only assume was us. Even after dressing to the event, we stuck out like sore thumbs. We just looked “off”. We weren’t the only ones, but all of us were sticking out.
As we approached the doors, we really started to get nervous. The event had already started and all we could really hear were loud “woo”s and “boo”s, as well as murmurs around us that the security that would soon check our bags and scan over our bodies was actually being pulled from the Springfield airport and confusion about if shoes needed to be taken off or not.
After being hurriedly pushed through security, we followed the guidance of an event staff member to a section of seats, only for people to be running, better yet sprinting, through the outer rim of the JQH arena shouting the name of a different section. We followed the rushing pack of people, all the while hearing the distorted voice of our president murmuring in the background. We rushed up some stairs to our section and that’s when I first caught a glimpse of the man that is responsible for our country, for our great nation, for America. It was surreal at first, but pretty much only at first. There were far too many other things that we found much weirder and more captivating that the leader of our country.
We found a couple seats with pretty decent view and sat down to actually begin to listen to the speech he was giving. The speech itself had much less of an impact on me than the people’s reactions to it. While there were some things he said that would incite applause, the crowd cheered after every mediocre sentence. All it took was a general overview or mention of something the Trump administration has done, is planning to do, or who’s party is planning/going to do, to invoke earth-rattling cheers and simply the mention of Nancy Pelosi or Claire McCaskill to illicit thundering boos. The speech was merely a list; a very long list with very big, very plentiful applause breaks in between.
Easily, the worst part of the rally was when Trump said something along the lines of “A vote for Claire McCaskill is a vote for tons of people flooding across the border”, after which, the man sitting next to Adam yelled “down with the browns!” In that moment I didn’t quite process it, although when it hit, I didn’t have much time to really react anyways due to forcing myself to clap, cheer, and boo for the safety of Adam and myself.
A different subject, however, made national news for a fraction of the weekend’s cycle. During his speech, Trump essentially suggested that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could and would be fired. Rosenstien recently made what he says were mostly sarcastic comments about recording Trump in his office.
Trump said, and I quote:
“These are people, I really believe -- you take a poll, I've got to be at 95 percent -- but you've had some real bad ones. You've seen what's happened at the FBI. They're all gone. They're all gone. They're all gone. But there's a lingering stench and we're going to get rid of that too”
The lingering stench being in reference to Rosenstien.
Rosenstien's future is still not exactly set in stone one way or another, however, Trump had planned and postponed a meeting set for Thursday. The Deputy Attorney General has been expecting to be fired and looking to quit. He's in charge of the Russia probe involving the president that we loosely covered several months ago.
The sources I used in this post are as follows
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