My two weeks on the road with Donald Trump

According to various accounts of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, the businessman never really expected to win. Making it to the White House against the uber-establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, was a surprise.

In the last days of Trump’s 2024 comeback, as I joined the campaign trail, it was difficult to tell what his people were thinking. Touring around the seven swing states, Trump would go through the motions of his rally routine – ambling on to the tune of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, waving to the faithful, indulging in variations of his lines about “Crooked Joe Biden”, “Crazy Nancy Pelosi”, “Low IQ Kamala” and the “fake news”.

In the final days of his campaign, as he travelled across America, Donald Trump sometimes seemed bored. Credit: AP

Maybe it was fatigue and boredom – he did his 90-minute routine up to three times a day – but it sometimes seemed half-hearted by the end. The arenas were often 30 per cent empty, the energy was lacking. And loose digressions from Trump and his surrogates dominated headlines in the United States, giving the whole thing a whiff of “wheels falling off”.

Yet, Trump and his campaigners always espoused confidence. He told cheering followers “we’re winning by a lot” – and he was right. The published polls didn’t show it at the time. Maybe Team Trump knew something the rest of us didn’t.

Or maybe it was just bluster. With Trump, it can be impossible to tell where reality ends and the “story” starts. That’s one thing we need to collectively remind ourselves of as we prepare for a second Trump administration.

Election night in Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump now lives, was a surreal experience. American elections are such grand undertakings on a scale so completely different to anything in Australia. When Peter Dutton votes next year, he’ll probably be trailed by a handful of cameras and pictured eating a democracy sausage. When Trump arrived to cast his ballot, it was in a police-escorted motorcade that shut down half the island.

From the other side of the world, it’s easy to typecast Trump voters as rural Republicans with straw hats and southern accents. But when you attend rally after rally, from Phoenix to Charlotte to New York, you see that anyone can be MAGA. Women, men, college students, retirees, blacks, Latinos – Trump outperformed expectations across many states and many segments.

Australians might still wonder how so many Americans can overlook the former president’s lies, crimes, threats, narcissism, his record and the frightening testimony of his many former aides. The answer is: easily. They’re used to it by now. This was the third Trump election; it’s difficult to be shocked any more. For many, it’s part of the charm, a central element to the show.

Waiting at the departure gate to leave Palm Beach the morning after Trump’s victory party, I got talking to a guy wearing a black biker’s vest emblazoned with “Donald J. Trump – Born to Ride”.

Santos Lopez at Palm Beach International Airport after attending Donald Trump’s election watch party.Credit: Michael Koziol

Santos Lopez cheerfully showed me photographs from the night before, when he celebrated with thousands of other members of the Trump faithful at the official campaign party. Not far from us, other MAGA folk in caps were drinking at an airport bar, cheering and taking selfies.

I asked Lopez for his take on what happened. “Look at the price of everything,” he said. Petrol, food, rent – they’ve all gone up, a lot. And then, along came a huge increase in undocumented migrants making their way across the border seeking asylum, many of whom are being sheltered in hotels.

“I came here legally from the Philippines, and somebody else is hopping over the border, and I’m paying for their shit?” he asked. “Wrong answer. Not cool.”

In other words, the voters had their baseball bats out for Biden and Kamala Harris. The only question was whether Trump Mark II was palatable, after everything he has said, done and fomented. Lopez had an easy answer to that, too.

“They relate to him,” he said. They see Trump not as a billionaire wannabe autocrat but a guy who was hated by the establishment and fought back. They’re into his pragmatism, and they don’t like the Democrats’ indulgence of identity politics. “It’s not about social policies, it’s about common sense,” Lopez said.

Retiree Tom Niesen of Phoenix, who said he supplied most of the Harris-Walz signs on his street.Credit: Michael Koziol

Out of all the ordinary people I spoke with over those two weeks, it’s the first who stays with me most: Tom Niesen, whose door I knocked on in Phoenix, Arizona, because he was flying a large American flag outside along with several Harris-Walz signs.

Niesen told me if I really wanted to understand America, I should go to some small towns. I would discover the people were nice, he said, but opposed to and fearful of change. “They don’t want to do it. They want to work, and then they want to eat, and they want to drink. And that’s it. They don’t want to extend any other effort towards anything else. They just exist.”

And they vote.

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