Make America Great Again Rally Nashville
Trump Takes Nashville
NASHVILLE — "Fight the power," the Facebook message said. "Get two tix for Donald and let the identify stay empty!"
I clicked the link, and that'south how I learned that the president of the United States was coming to Nashville. Equally with and so many of these scattershot acts of resistance, the telephone call to reserve tickets and go out the seats unoccupied seemed pointless for a first-come-first-served effect issuing unlimited tickets. I made my reservations anyway on the off chance I was wrong.
And then I thought, "I should just go." Not as a protester — megaphone-to-megaphone combat is a fine American tradition, but it's not a not bad fit for someone who likes pretty much everybody. Most Tennesseans might consider me a Yellow Dog Democrat, but President Trump's people are my people — the people I come from, the people I live among. I believe my people elected the greatest threat to American commonwealth since the Third Reich, merely I haven't been able to work up a real us-versus-them way of thinking virtually my ain friends and family.
The president was scheduled to speak at 6:30 p.yard., but when I got downwards to the Municipal Auditorium at noon, the line of people waiting to make it stretched all the way effectually the building — twice — earlier crossing the street and continuing farther than I could see. "Wow, what fourth dimension did you get here?" I said to a guy most the front end of the line. He'd been standing there since earlier dawn, on a day when information technology was 23 degrees outside.
A few steps downwards the line, a Trump supporter named Megan Taylor was dressed in jeans and a "Make America Nifty Again" hoodie with sleeves made of American flags — and dozens of Trump buttons: "Hot Chicks for Trump," "Girls Just Wanna Take Guns," "Basket of Deplorables Member." "I feel like I'yard at the off-white!" Ms. Taylor said, turning to show me a push the size of a salad plate: "Trump 2016 — Finally Someone With Assurance."
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But mostly the line looked like any line that might form outside Nashville's scruffy Municipal Auditorium for a concert by a band a decade by its chart-toppers merely still pulling in true believers on tour. Word had gotten out among protesters that the empty-seat strategy wasn't going to work, and a new plan chosen for them to take their seats so ascension to leave en masse in one case the president took the podium. Simply there was no evidence of anti-Trump sentiment on the line. Either the protesters hadn't gotten in line before dawn themselves, or it was impossible to tell protesters from supporters.
For several blocks around the auditorium, vendors pushed carts full of souvenir buttons, hats, T-shirts and Trump masks. A large vehicle labeled "Trump Tram" circled the cake with an figure of Hillary Clinton imprisoned in a muzzle on the roof. If spectacle is what yous require, a Trump rally is worth getting up earlier dawn for.
Merely there's a large divergence between a Trump rally and an actual county off-white in the American South. Except for the vendors, most of whom were black, the people outside the Municipal Auditorium yesterday were white. I mean, they were all white equally far equally I could tell, with the exception of one African-American woman and her teenage girl, who had driven in from Memphis for the upshot.
"I wanted something new," the woman, Sybil Dukes, said about voting for Mr. Trump. "Information technology wasn't that I was discriminating against Hillary as a female. It's simply that I'm a Christian lady, and I believe what he was saying in terms of abortion." For her girl, Johnesha Dukes, the decision was even more straightforward: "I only liked him."
Settling in for a long await, strangers in line were becoming friends. We talked well-nigh Nashville'south traffic, now nightmarish thank you to tourists and endless structure and "pedal taverns" full of drunken bridesmaids. Mostly we passed the fourth dimension telling stories — this is the Southward, y'all — unrelated to politics. I did not identify myself every bit a writer or as a liberal, and the folks effectually me fabricated their own assumptions. When a police force officer stopped to tell me my backpack wouldn't exist allowed in the auditorium, I asked my new Trump friends to save my place while I dropped my stuff back at the auto. "I hope you brand information technology back in time," 1 man said. "I've enjoyed talking to you lot."
I didn't make it back. On the other side of the block, the protesters had arrived. Tennessee is a blood-red state, but Nashville is a blueish city, an organization that works roughly the manner living with an ex in the same house might piece of work. Every time Nashville passes a police to increase inclusion, or subtract idiocy, the Land Legislature passes a police that overrides it. Last month, when Nashville residents took to the streets to protestation the president's executive society on immigration, a land representative named Matthew Hill proposed a bill protecting drivers from civil prosecution if they happen to run down a protester.
People in the wealthy parts of boondocks tend to vote a straight Republican ticket here, just Nashville'south mayor, Megan Barry, is an unapologetic liberal. Our member of Congress, Jim Cooper, is a Democrat. In the time between Thursday of terminal calendar week, when the presidential visit was appear, and the rally on Wednesday, a Metro Council fellow member, Freddie O'Connell, introduced a beak that would require "presidents and major-party nominees to take released federal revenue enhancement returns prior to using public facilities in Metro Nashville."
A full-throated protest was inevitable. By Tuesday more than than two,000 people had committed to attend — including buses full of activists from Memphis and Knoxville.
1 of the earliest to arrive was John Boylan, who described himself as "an Ecumenical Franciscan and an Ecumenical Catholic priest." He was holding a "Beat out Swords Into Plowshares" sign and wearing a sticker that said "Paid Protester" with a Chi-Rho monogram, the symbol for Christ, in place of each P. "My payment comes subsequently," he said, pointing heavenward.
People from groups like Indivisible, the A.C.L.U. and the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition were nowadays in force, but everyone on both sides of James Robertson Parkway seemed calm. I asked Francie Chase, executive director of Tennessee Advocates for Planned Parenthood, how the famously testy Trump supporters were behaving. "Actually, I haven't heard anything from them," she said, "but the twenty-four hour period is immature."
By the time the auditorium doors opened, I was hearing scattered reports of intimidation, specially from protesters who had to pass that mile-long line on their way to the demonstration: "We had to walk all the way past them with our signs," said Mary Reeves, who collection in from Murfreesboro. "At beginning it was just the usual, and so they said, 'We'll kill you, nosotros'll kill yous.' "
"It was very scary," her friend Debi Tannock said."We were going to go within, simply we decided nosotros weren't going to. I'm fearful for my life."
I might've looked a little skeptical. I'd been in that crowd for more than five hours past then, and except for the mode they vote, the Trump people all seemed pretty innocuous to me. "Take this sign and walk by them," the women from Murfreesboro urged. "You'll get to experience …." She trailed off. I'd get to experience the real Trump supporter? I didn't take her up on the offer, simply she had a point. Nil I'd done myself that day had provoked anyone spoiling for a fight.
Meanwhile on the other side of the road, the Ecumenical Franciscan was holding his ground right in the middle of the Trump supporters waiting for the line to move. "Beat swords into plowshares — where does information technology say that in the Bible?" one guy called out, passing by. "Two unlike sources," Father Boylan said, turning to speak to him. Only his heckler was already gone.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/opinion/trump-takes-nashville.html
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