Send in the Clowns
Reflections on Attending the Trump Rally in Montana.1/2
JEREMY CARL. AUG 12, 2024
REGARDLESS OF THE CANDIDATE OR CAUSE, I’M NOT REALLY A FAN OF POLITICAL RALLIES.
Any big crowd, with its waving signs, descends too much into mindlessness for my taste.
Any group shouting slogans reminds me of the multitude in the Bible shouting “Give us Barabbas!”
And yet, I made an exception when Donald Trump decided to rally in my Montana hometown—I had been proud to serve in a senior role in his administration of course, but more importantly, I thought of it not really as a political rally but more of a cultural event— or maybe like an appearance of the circus in town. And thusI found myself in a Bozeman, Montana parking lot at 11:30 A.M. with one of my sons, in line for a rally that wouldn’t even begin until 6:00 P.M.and for which the star attraction would ultimatelynot take the stage until 9:30 P.M. And indeed the wait turned out to be part of the fun.
Several hours into our wait, the speakers connected to the Jumbotron outside the arena beganplaying Judy Collins’ version of Send in the Clowns, a Grammy winning cover of the classic tune from Stephen Sondheim’s musicalA Little Night Music. It’s a beautiful and profound song—But as someone who is aware of Sondheim and Collins’ leftist politics and grew up in the sort of liberal home in which their music got played, the contrast between the song and my boisterous ruby red environment was rather incongruous.
And yet, after a bit of reflection it actually struck me as very appropriate.While Sondheim’s standard has been covered by hundreds of artists, most people don’t understand its meaning— andwhy it was arguably a perfect song for the moment.
“It's a song of regret and anger,”. Sondheim said about his tale of a mistimed love affair. The clowns of the song aren’t circus clowns— the singer in the musical is a theater actress making a reference to the theater. “The show isn’t going well. . . let’s do the jokes,” as Sondheim described it. But at as the song later says—“Don’t bother, they’re here.”— or as Sondheim describes it:
“We are the fools.”
And it was true, and I mean this with great respect to my fellow attendees, but with sadness about what so much of America has become. Like the show of Sondheim’s reference, America is not doing very well— and inthat sense my fellow rally-goers were the “clowns”or fools of modern America, because they are the only ones who still believe in the show at all.
These Trump supporters are in some way the last Americans— the sort of people who check “American” as their ethnic origin on the Census. Like “fools” they still believe in America’s promise— and that, in spite of everything that has happened, and everything that has been done to them and their country, that the American experiment can be reclaimed.
They believe wholeheartedly that we can Make America Great Again.
That was why they were here.
The attendees were mostly working and middle class— Some wore shirts with off-color references.They might, like Trump, be excessively blunt. Their family situation might not always be Ozzie and Harriet—but throughout its history, when America calls, these are the sorts of people who have always shown up.
They believe in America and they love America deeply in their bones— not just with their voices.
Of course, the rally drew a diverse group of people including a number of my “professional” friends in the area—at one point, I was in line behind a retired finance professor at USC.
But far more typical among the people I talked to were middle class and working class Americans who had driven fromEastern Washington (six hours) or Southern Wyoming(seven hours) because this was the closest place they could get to see Trump in our empty quarter of America. We ran into our frequent babysitter with her parents.They had driven five hours from their ranch in remote Eastern Montana.
Despite the utter lack of crowd control— there was embarrassingly little police presence— and a complete lack of updates to explain why the doors opened more than an hour and a half late, these men and women—some of whom looked “rough” behaved perfectly. Despite the fact that many had been waiting for hours and traveling for hours more and it was certain that thousands would not even be able to get inside the arena, ?everyone lined up in an orderly fashion. There was almost no cutting in line andno rowdy behavior.
https://jeremycarl.substack.com/p/send-in-the-clowns
https://jeremycarl.substack.com/p/send-in-the-clowns
https://youtu.be/8L6KGuTr9TI