Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid has arguably been the most turbulent political campaign in U.S. history.
Over the past year, he has become the first former U.S. president to be criminally convicted, and battled three other indictments in court. His unpopular opponent was replaced mid-race. He has promoted QAnon conspiracy theories and pushed an outlandishly false claim that immigrants in Ohio are eating pet cats. He even picked a fight with the country’s most popular pop star.
For all that, the election remains deadlocked. In less than three weeks’ time, a relative handful of voters in just seven swing states will decide the race. The polling suggests that Mr. Trump stands a roughly even chance of defeating Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and returning to the White House.
And among several thousand of Mr. Trump’s supporters gathered in a small, post-industrial Pennsylvania city for one of his rallies last week, the most common explanations for their continued loyalty were the same as those that propelled the brash businessman’s storming of the Republican Party eight years ago: a fear of migrants coming across the U.S.’s southern border and a tendency to see Mr. Trump’s bombast as proof of his authenticity.
“He’s going to take the illegals out of the country,” said Justin Frank, 21, as he queued in 19-degree sunshine outside the hockey arena in Reading, where Mr. Trump was set to speak. “They’re coming in, taking jobs, killing, kidnapping, selling drugs, trying to make this a third-world country.”
Shawn Diehl, a 48-year-old truck driver, enthused that Mr. Trump “has backbone” and “doesn’t cave to political pressure.”
“The way our country is going, we need somebody that is willing to speak their mind and not be worried about what anyone else thinks,” he said.
A city of 95,000, Reading is centred on a downtown of red-brick commercial buildings and a tight grid of stately row houses built by Victorian-era prosperity in coal, railroads and manufacturing. That brisk growth came to a halt in the 1930s. The city suffered 60 years of declining population, a poster child for the lost American greatness Mr. Trump promises to restore.
In the same way the former president’s movement here seems unchanged despite the tumultuous politics of the past decade, the country’s deeply polarized electorate has exploded every adage about the importance of events in moving votes.
Virtually nothing in this year’s campaign has made much difference. Only the Democrats forcing President Joe Biden out of the race in July over concerns about the 81-year-old’s age and replacing him with Ms. Harris moved the polls slightly in their favour. The 59-year-old former prosecutor has since run a disciplined, largely gaffe-free campaign. But most surveys show the contenders statistically tied, both nationally and in every swing state.
Even two assassination attempts against Mr. Trump barely altered the contours of the contest. After the first, in Butler, Pa., in July, the former president’s campaign insisted he would use the ensuing bipartisan condemnation of political violence to unite the country. Instead, days later at the Republican National Convention, he swiftly returned to condemning the migrant “invasion” of the country and decrying “witch hunts” against himself.
In Reading, his supporters floated conspiratorial narratives that the Democrats had orchestrated the attempts on Mr. Trump’s life, stolen the 2020 election and manipulated the justice system to take him down. “They rigged the election and blamed everything on Donald Trump,” said Erin McVaugh, 53, who works in online marketing. “They are behind the assassination attempt, too.”
This has no basis in fact. Investigators have characterized Thomas Matthew Crooks, whose gunshots left Mr. Trump with a bloodied ear in Butler, as a lone wolf.
Nor was the 2020 election rigged. Nor are immigrants, including undocumented ones, more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Nor did Mr. Biden refuse to send help to victims of Hurricane Helene, the latest falsehood to become firmly embedded in Trump World.
The proliferation of these sorts of fictions helps explain why Mr. Trump has been able to insulate himself from political liabilities that would have ended other leaders’ careers. The former president was convicted in May of falsifying documents related to a hush-money scheme to cover up an alleged extramarital affair before the 2016 election. He faces further criminal cases for trying to overturn the 2020 election and for refusing to return classified documents after leaving office.
“The courts are trying to railroad him,” said Paul Olexsa, 65, a retired maintenance mechanic. “They’re looking for anything they can get their hands on.”
Kevin Berentson, a California resident originally from Westhope, N.D., came to Coachella to hear Mr. Trump, who told the crowd Ms. Harris was ‘turning us into a third-world nation.’
If Mr. Trump gets his hands back on power, he is vowing sweeping change. He’s running on a platform of firing thousands of civil servants and replacing them with political loyalists; rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants en masse; tariffing all goods entering the U.S.; and immediately ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which would almost certainly entail Kyiv ceding swaths of territory to Moscow. He has mused about using the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents.
Not long ago, much of this agenda, particularly the isolationist and protectionist impulses, would have been anathema to Republicans. Now, it is broadly accepted.
“These foreign leaders know he means business. On current foreign wars, Ukraine and Russia, he’ll take care of that,” said Jason Shueman, a 51-year-old construction product manager. “On trade, he’s going to put tariffs on things that are going to help the U.S.”
The rock-concert scene outside the rally showed how much of the party’s culture is now dominated by his personality.
Adoring fans waited for hours before the event, some drinking beer and highballs out of plastic cups. Ubiquitous vendors peddled T-shirts depicting Mr. Trump giving two middle fingers to his would-be assassins. “You gotta say no to the ho,” sang Scott Jefferson, 53, as he hawked merchandise bearing this slogan over a picture of Ms. Harris. One woman carried a homemade sign that referred to Ms. Harris as “Kameltoe.”
For many there, Mr. Trump is so compelling that they only go to the polls when he is on the ballot. “I never voted in my life before the last two elections, when Trump was running,” said Michelle Pearson, a 60-year-old home health aide. She referred to those arrested in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as “political prisoners” and said the entire attack “was a setup.”
It is voters like her who help make the race so unpredictable. While Democrats won Pennsylvania’s governorship by nearly 15 percentage points in 2022, they did so on voter turnout of less than 61 per cent. By comparison, the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections saw turnouts of 71 per cent and 76 per cent respectively in the state.
With few swing voters left in this divided country, the election will almost certainly be determined by which side can best motivate its supporters to cast ballots. Mr. Trump, notably, received over 400,000 more votes in Pennsylvania when he lost the state in 2020 than when he won it in 2016. The state only flipped because Democratic turnout went up even more.
One crucial factor will be Black and Latino voters. Ms. Harris still comfortably leads polls of both demographics but her margins are smaller than those Mr. Biden posted in 2020. Given Republicans’ advantage among white voters, Ms. Harris needs these other constituencies to turn out for her in droves.
Antonio Molina, 37, a Reading voter originally from Puerto Rico, said he is attracted to Mr. Trump in part because of the former president’s opposition to abortion and in part because of his promises to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
“I don’t like people killing kids,” Mr. Molina said. “People come from different countries and do things we don’t need. They kill people, they are drug dealers. Close the border.”
Craig Deckhard Hyatt, 30, said he grew up in a Democratic household and didn’t give much thought to politics until the past few years. Now, inflation and the Biden administration’s spending on the war in Ukraine are pushing him toward Mr. Trump.
“We just had more money when Trump was in office. And now we’ve given US$96-billion to Ukraine,” said Mr. Hyatt, a hotel operations manager, who is Black. “This is the first election I have a specific reason why I’m voting for who I’m voting for.”
His friend, Keyfon Person, laughed at Mr. Trump’s now-infamous line, the most memorable of his drubbing by Ms. Harris in their lone debate, in which he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” of local residents.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Person, who is Black. “I don’t think Trump is a racist. He just needed a little direction.”
The thoroughly debunked Springfield tale, spread by a Nazi group on social media before it reached Mr. Trump, is only one of the former president’s frequent outbursts.
He has also used his Truth Social platform to promote memes pushing QAnon, the conspiracy theory that claims his enemies are all part of a Satanic pedophile cult. And after the U.S.’s current best-selling musician endorsed Ms. Harris, Mr. Trump posted: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
For his running-mate, Mr. Trump tapped JD Vance, the Ohio senator whose culture-war attack on “childless cat ladies” quickly made him an unpopular figure.
At the Coachella rally, merchandise calling Mr. Trump a ‘defender of pets’ called back to his false claims a month earlier about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
Even as Mr. Trump’s erratic pronouncements have highlighted fears over his fitness for office, a Pew Research poll suggests a reason they might not impede him: a significant number of voters who view his personality negatively apparently plan to support him anyway.
Among Pew’s respondents, more saw Ms. Harris as even-tempered, a good role model and mentally sharp than saw Mr. Trump that way – on the first of these measures, she beat him 64 per cent to 32 per cent. On the question of vote intention, however, the pair were tied at 49 per cent each.
The poll also showed Mr. Trump with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Ms. Harris on the question of who voters believe will make good decisions on the economy, and a seven-point lead on immigration. Ms. Harris had an 11-point lead on abortion, a central Democratic campaign issue after Mr. Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees helped overturn Roe v. Wade two years ago.
Mr. Person, 32, who runs a skincare-product company and works in a convenience store, said he is backing Mr. Trump in hopes of stopping transwomen from using women’s washrooms and migrants from entering the U.S. “Tax dollars are paying for these people to come to this country and mess it up,” he said.
Along downtown streets adjacent to the arena in Reading, an influx of immigrants from the Dominican Republic has helped to drive revitalization. Latin American food stores jostle for space with restaurants serving up mangú, the country’s signature mashed plantain dish. In the last census, more than half the city’s population identified as Hispanic or Latino.
Even as the city has started to turn around its lengthy decline, difficulties remain. The local poverty rate is over 28 per cent, more than double that of the state as a whole. Mr. Trump isn’t proposing policies to improve access to health care or other services for people struggling in places such as this. His focus, and that of his supporters, remains elsewhere.
“He’s going to stop these illegals from coming over. I can’t get what they get,” said Jessica Diehl as she finished a cigarette before lining up for the rally.
The 40-year-old, who used to work as a caregiver for senior citizens, has been out of a job for the past year because of a bad back. She said she doesn’t qualify for disability benefits.
Her husband, Shawn, the truck driver, meanwhile, marvelled at Mr. Trump’s lifelong resourcefulness in the face of his seemingly never-ending troubles. “I don’t know anybody else who’s gone bankrupt six times and is still a millionaire.”
U.S. election: More from The Globe and Mail
From our correspondents
On a bus ride through America’s swing states, a country’s deep divides are exposed
Photographer Barbara Davidson on her trek across pre-election America
Arab Americans in swing state Michigan doubt their loyalties in U.S. election after a bloody year
Examining ‘grossly exaggerated’ claims about Venezuelan gang activity in a Colorado city
Commentary from David Shribman
In the final days, Harris and Trump turn from persuasion to turnout
Trump’s controversies are a reflection of his own impulsiveness
The presidential debate began as a gabfest and ended as a gong show
