On the last day of the campaign, I took my son to see Donald Trump.
He’s nine, so the only president he’s ever been aware of is Barack Obama. Most of my son's political knowledge comes from repeated listenings of the Hamilton soundtrack and overheard snippets of National Public Radio. His elementary school classmates in the liberal college town where we live come from households so uniformly blue that when one of them wore a “Make America Great Again” hat in the cafeteria a few weeks ago, the boy became such an object of fascination-bordering-on-derision that a teacher had to intervene and prevent him from being bullied. In other words, my son is politically sheltered.
And so, when Trump showed up for a final campaign rally in Raleigh at the North Carolina state fairgrounds—where, just a few weeks ago, my family had happily snacked on deep-fried candy bars and watched livestock competitions—I brought along my son. I figured it might do him some good to see the 2016 presidential campaign—and, more broadly, the state of our politics as they exist in the United States today—for what it really is.
Although it’s been six months now since Trump cemented his place on the November ballot, the experience of seeing him deliver his closing argument on the eve of the election remains so strange it feels like a hallucination. Yes, Trump in these final days is more disciplined and on-message than he’s been the entire campaign. He dutifully reads from a teleprompter—an act he once argued was disqualifying—and is careful to the point of sometimes crippling self-awareness. (“Stay on point, Donald,” the candidate reminded himself mid-speech last week. “No sidetracks, Donald.”)
But the points Trump is staying on—and the script he’s reading from—remain as off-the-wall as a normal candidate’s most career-killing gaffe. Put aside the lines he’s been delivering for the last 18 months, the ones about building a wall and getting Mexico to pay for it or a rigged electoral system. Just consider the last-minute things Trump wants voters to consider before they head to the polls. In Raleigh, just as he has at almost all of his campaign events in recent days, Trump chewed up valuable minutes assailing the lyrics performed by some of the singers who’ve been appearing at Hillary Clinton’s campaign rallies. “If I ever said those words that Jay-Z said or that Beyonce said the other night, you know what would happen to me?” he asked. “The reinstitution of the electric chair.”
He fixated on the size of the crowds at those Clinton rallies. “They heard words they never heard before, they left,” he said. “It was pretty much empty midway through.” And he offered some glory-days-style reflections on his triumph over 16 other candidates in the Republican primary. “Nobody else ever had a field that big,” he boasted, “or that violent. Or that violent.”
And Raleigh, by the standards of a Trump appearance, was relatively tame. Unlike his speech on Sunday night in Minneapolis, he didn’t slander a local immigrant population. (“Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen first-hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state,” Trump said. “Everybody’s reading about the disaster taking place in Minnesota.”) Unlike his speech on Monday morning in Florida, he didn’t invent a new public safety threat. (“The firemen have a—they have a big problem. They have a shooting problem, where they’re being shot as they go to fires.”) Meanwhile, the crowd at Trump’s Raleigh rally chanted “Lock her up,” but no one within my ear shot shouted that Clinton was “a bitch” (or worse). A number of people sported new Trump t-shirts—bought for five dollars outside the rally—declaring, “DONALD TRUMP: WE NEED A PRESIDENT WITH SOME BALLS.” But I didn’t see anyone wearing one of these.
There were no protestors. There were no fights. When the rally was over, I asked my son what he thought of it all. He had a few questions about whether Trump was telling the truth—about whether Hillary’s crowd sizes were really as small as Trump said they were, and whether illegal immigrants murdered as many people as Trump claimed they did. I told him no in both cases and explained that Trump wasn’t so good at telling the truth. “All politicians lie,” my son said. I tried to explain how Trump was different, how he lied more than a typical politician. I tried to explain about how this whole campaign has been unlike anything in modern American political history and about how fragile our democracy suddenly seemed. I tried to impress upon him about how what he had just witnessed was not what American typically is—and certainly not what American politics should be. But he didn’t seem convinced. His reaction to it all was a shrug. Maybe he's not as sheltered as I thought.
Jason Zengerle is GQ's Political Correspondent