“What’s that all about?” Trump finally said, ending his litany of Bredesen falsehoods. “If you want to stop the liberal agenda of high taxes and high crime, you need to vote for Marsha Blackburn.”
Trump’s prevarications are easier to count than to understand, in terms of their effectiveness as the election approaches. At his rallies, he is painfully easy to fact check. But among his base, as represented by those in attendance Sunday night in Chattanooga, Trump’s performance played brilliantly and, among many, seemed to have been largely taken literally.
Leaving the rally for the 90-minute drive home to Knoxville, a couple who said they’d formerly registered as Democrats explained why they’re voting Republican. Kathy Kelly, a 52-year-old respiratory therapist, summed up her understanding of Democratic immigration policy: “It’s a free-for-all. Take everybody.” Her husband, 62-year-old electrical system designer Steve Kelly, quickly added that “America is built on immigration” and later echoed Trump is warning of many criminal migrants and others who are sick and coming to take free health care that American taxpayers will have to fund.
Kathy Kelly said she bet a lot of the 100 or 200 protesters outside the arena live in their parents’ basements, don’t work and take welfare checks. “I would swear that some of them are being paid,” she said, echoing a common Trump line. They acknowledged they don’t have evidence to back up that assertion, but Steve Kelly brought up George Soros, the liberal billionaire donor who does fund Democratic political campaigns but is also targeted by pro-Trump and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
After the rally, Kim and David Moore were sputtering with rage over what they saw as the press pen’s lack of respect for the president, citing faces that someone among the TV reporters and camera operators made as Trump said the phrase “one nation under God.”
The northern Georgia couple described concerns over what they believe Democrats want to do on immigration. “They don’t want border security,” said Kim Moore, a 50-year-old who works for an insurer coordinating Medicaid programs. “I think they would throw open the border,” said David Moore, a 48-year-old textile manager currently between jobs. They talked about the Trump administration’s family separation policy as a reasonable response when parents break the law; they did not know that a first-time illegal border crossing is a civil rather than criminal violation, and they seemed to think all separated families had been caught crossing illegally, while many presented themselves to U.S. officials and asked for asylum.
How about health care? “They would give it away,” Kim Moore said, saying Democrats want to pay for health care for people here illegally.
As Trump gets closer and closer to the election that could lead to his impeachment, he appears more and more willing to say anything, without regard to truth, to fire up his base. It worked for him in 2016, and, from the parking lots around the McKenzie Arena, it seemed to be working in Chattanooga. But it’s a risky strategy, because for every member of his base who believes the Democrats will destroy Medicare and allow undocumented immigrants to vote, the alarm bell rings even louder for Democrats. And independents who took a chance on Trump in 2016 no longer seem so willing to believe what obviously is not true.
Vernon Loeb is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Politics section.
