From the Crossroads to the Twilight

I drove down to Corinth, Mississippi, on Monday, October 26 to watch Donald Trump try to energize the faithful one week from the midterms. My paternal grandparents were born there. My great-grandparents are buried there. My Confederate great-grandfather fought the Union in a battle there. I spent many boyhood days in Corinth. With a population of just over 14,000, it is the heart of rural Alcorn County. I love Corinth, but when the sitting president rolls into a place like that a week before Election Day, it is not a victory lap. It is a warning flare.

A confident Republican Party would be barnstorming swing states. Instead, Mr. Trump was in Mississippi trying to fortify his citadel. Cindy Hyde-Smith is in danger of losing her Senate seat. The last time Mississippi sent a Democrat to the United States Senate was 44 years ago in 1982, when John C. Stennis won his seventh term.

The President of the United States was stumping in a cow palace built with pre-engineered sheet-metal panels to keep the GOP from losing a seat it should have banked long ago. The venue, Crossroads Arena, holds 7,700 at maximum capacity. In true Southern style, the Secret Service ringed the building with a laager of John Deere tractors. I am not knocking the place. I saw the Beach Boys there once. It’s just not where you expect a sitting president to be on the eve of an election.

If you ever go to one of these things, press credentials help. You park in a secure area and walk straight into the pen. The general public gets free tickets, but there are more tickets than seats, and it is first-come, first-served. On Monday, many of the folks waiting in line to get in were left outside to watch the Jumbotron. Inside, the warm-up acts were uninspiring boilerplate: fight the Left, common-sense conservatism, etc. It is going to take a lot more than soap and water to clean up this mess. I tuned most of it out and scanned the crowd.

From what I saw, the audience was 100 percent white, except for two black reporters. Every age was represented. It was a fine-looking crowd of working people, families, and older folks who seemed to long for something they aren’t quite ready to admit. Being back in Mississippi put some numbers in perspective. This is the state where whites vote as a racial bloc more than anywhere else. Whites are only 55.8 percent of the population of Mississippi yet delivered 82 percent of their votes to Mr. Trump. No other state’s white electorate matched that. Contrast it with Vermont, for example, where whites are 91 percent of the population but gave him only 33 percent.

This was my first full Trump stump since 2016, when I was credentialed for rallies, the Republican National Convention, and later his first inauguration.

After a short-lived, promising start that inspired me enough to host an optimistic conference featuring Steve King and Filip Dewinter, among other former and current elected officials, most of Trump’s second term has been a train wreck. But I must admit he remains a showman in person, with remarkable stamina. He gave the Corinthians a lively hour and twenty minutes, and he knew exactly how to work that room.

He opened by invoking Willie Horton, the black killer who Democratic Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis let out of jail on furlough in 1986, who invaded a white couple’s home, where he bound and pistol-whipped the husband and raped the wife. George H. W. Bush used Horton in a famous campaign ad, and this has been a bread-and-butter Republican play for decades — because it works. Trump took it further. He noted that rapes in Memphis and New Orleans have dropped since he sent the National Guard in. Then, in pure, over-the-top fashion, he claimed that “2 percent of the population were committing 91 percent of the crimes” and that he “took care of them.” An attendee immediately shouted, “Thank you, sir!” God help me, plying us with the catnip of crime stats almost won me over again. As a Memphian, I am glad the troops are there, and I don’t want them to leave.

He played all the hits: the media are the enemy, Letitia James is what you will get if the other side wins, only Republicans will keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms, protect the Second Amendment, keep English as the official language, protect the border. He said his administration has removed all DEI language from the government. He sent the old folks into raptures when he talked about protecting their Social Security and Medicare. He got a laugh even out of me by saying that Ilhan Omar is married to her brother.

But not everything landed. His claim that Iran was about to get a nuke is straight from the script of Wag the Dog. The war completely undercuts the non-interventionist platform that helped make him president. There was also plenty of gaslighting about the economy. He claimed Americans are richer than ever. Apparently, the President hasn’t bought groceries or filled a gas tank lately. In truth, Americans are suffering financially, largely because of the war he started, and that is a big reason he was in Mississippi trying to secure a seat that should have been safe.

In classic Trump style, he alleged that unemployment rates for blacks and “Native Americans” are the lowest ever. He never mentioned whites, but the all-white audience applauded anyway — even as they struggle to afford insurance, buy homes, or even survive. Blacks and Indians never voted for Trump. The people sitting in that rural Mississippi arena did. Alas, GOP politicians are on a never-ending quest to find a pot of black Republicans at the end of the rainbow.

There was also the usual oddball bluster, including the recent renaming spree, though he did get a standing ovation when he promised not to rename the Mississippi River. At least one dissenter showed up. When Trump talked about the new White House ballroom, a man yelled for the President to “shove that ballroom up your fat ass.” Security removed him, but even that was muted compared with the fistfights I saw at the 2016 rallies when grassroots white Americans were on fire for their man.

Still, I am glad I was there. The rally fell exactly 22 years to the day after my first radio broadcast. It was an interesting way to mark the anniversary, in a town with deep personal roots. I took time to visit family graves. It was a fitting bookend to my experiences a decade ago, when the Trump era was still ahead of us.

For better and worse, I voted for Trump three times. He took Pat Buchanan’s core ideas and made them winning issues. He defanged the media through constant scorn and ridicule. He is also a great disappointment who wasted a trifecta and seems thoroughly compromised. Yet, I remain thankful the witches weren’t elected right after Halloween in 2016 and 2024. The other side will be horrific for white interests, and the Trump era has entered its twilight.

As it always was, it is up to us to build our own institutions and media and elect our own candidates to save our people. But there are reasons for optimism. I have a quarter-century of service to our cause, and I have never seen our ranks so professional and organized. The youth is breaking for us, both here in America and around the world. Look at how each age group voted for candidates such as Thomas Massie and James Fishback, and the AfD in Germany. These kids don’t want a seat at the table. They want to burn the house down. Our job is to stay in the fight long enough for that generation to take power and implement radical change in Western nations before we are demographically swamped.