The prayer of Trump

The Donald comes to town

“Bomb the shit out of ISIS, folks!”

This is not a directive, but a sales pitch. The smiling man with a deep rural drawl holds up homemade buttons with the colloquial declaration of war adorned across them. “Five dollars!” he yells.

It’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, the temperature is well below freezing and my feet are numb. The entrepreneur peddles right-wing talking points out of the back of his truck as I and a few thousand others stand in line, waiting to get inside the Mabee Center to see and hear Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.

He stands between his pick-up and a makeshift kiosk full of conservative swag: Trump t-shirts, red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, and buttons galore: “Trump 2016” (in which a reddish-blonde wig sits atop the signature Republican elephant), “Armed Infidel” (a skull-and-cross-AK-47s featured on camouflage) and “Hot Chicks for Trump” (designed to look like an ad for a gentleman’s club, with the silhouette of a naked woman against hot pink), among others. 

The hawker has staked out a spot in a corner of the Mabee’s parking lot off Lewis Avenue, a few hundred feet north of the Christian event arena’s electronic marquee and right alongside the never-ending line of bodies snaking through the parking lot, winding toward the Praying Hands, that Oral Roberts-funded monument to evangelical health and wealth. His merch is selling fast, especially the ISIS buttons. 

A teenager trots past the line in a red-white-and-blue t-shirt. He moves fast, pausing just long enough for three well-groomed older women standing in front of me to mistake his “Hillary for Prison 2016” shirt for legitimate Clinton campaign threads. 

The women, thinking they just spotted a rogue Democrat disrupter, look at each other in horror. “Unbelievable,” mumbles one of them. Another huffs and puffs and shakes her head, deeply offended. “I’m going to have to watch what I say today.” 

Spurred by the women’s hostility toward an alleged Hillary supporter and determined to blend in, I step out of line and purchase a “Make America Great Again” hat for $20. I peel the inside label, finding the hat’s origin: “Made in China.” 

For the next two hours, the line slowly shuffles across the lot toward the arena’s main entrance. A handful of protestors stand on the side of the road facing oncoming traffic with signs objecting to the rally: “No hate in the 918,” “Hate-free Tulsa,” “KKK Trump Rally Here.”

At Noon, I finally make it inside and through the security checkpoint. I empty my pockets and walk through the metal detector. A police officer confiscates my lighter. A bluegrass rendition of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” echoes through the arena as people find their seats. I find a spot right in time for the opening prayer, Pledge of Allegiance and “Star-Spangled Banner” sing-along. 

The woman leading the prayer introduces Trump as a “Man of faith,” a “Friend of Israel,” and a “Defender of Christians.” 

“Just think,” she says. “We’ll be able to shout ‘Merry Christmas’ everywhere when Trump gets to the Oval Office!” The hyped crowd screams with approval. 

She recites a paraphrased version of 1 Chronicles 4:10, commonly known as The Prayer of Jabez: “Bless him indeed and enlarge his territory.” 

The Prayer of Jabez is a favorite scripture of word-of-faith Christians, many of whom believe the endgame for seeking God is the acquisition of physical health, wealth, and influence. For these believers, Donald Trump is a paragon of Christian virtue. 

But the Donald’s spiritual beliefs are a matter of political convenience, as amorphous and ever-changing as the bacteria and yeast floating at the top of a Kombucha bottle. His demagoguery is obvious to those of us who haven’t drunk the phlegmy Kool-Aid, but, to his supporters, his word is his bond, and any perceived flip-flop on an issue, whether spiritual or political, is simply a misunderstanding, a malicious distortion by a hostile news media. 

After the introduction, an apparently pre-recorded voice booms through the arena instructing supporters on how to handle the inevitable protestors. “Mr. Trump supports the first amendment as much as he supports the second”—pause for cheers—“But some people choose to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s generosity and disrupt these events through protesting.” Boos fill the arena.

“Mr. Trump’s generosity.” It’s a telling phrase that brings to mind a dictator’s cult of personality. A democratically elected leader follows the mandate of the constitution and the people who elected him to office. Only an authoritarian with no accountability is “generous” in this context. It’s ironic, then, in the most obvious way, that many of these people were driven to support Trump in part based on their perception that Obama is a lawless rogue, a wannabe dictator shoving his socialist agenda down America’s gagging throat through gross abuse of executive privilege. (That Obama has issued fewer executive orders than 15 of our last 18 presidents, including George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, is a non-starter.) 

At 1 p.m., “Hey Jude” plays for the third time and the crowd jeers. Trump is an hour late and his fans are getting restless. When he finally takes the stage, the room explodes. He introduces his “great friend who makes things great,” Sarah Palin, and the cheers hit peak fervor. 

The former Alaska governor’s endorsement speech is an adlibbed buzzword salad, a free association game of rhymes and alliteration and dubious accusations, including the head-scratcher that her son Track’s arrest for assaulting his girlfriend the day before is somehow Obama’s fault. The crowd loves it. 

“They’re stomping on our necks and they want us to chill?!” she yells, apropos of nothing, never specifying who “they” are or why they’re stomping on our necks. “Well, we’re not going to chill! In fact, I say, ‘drill, baby, drill!’” 

Later, during Trump’s speech, as isolated dissidents pop up throughout the arena to have their moment of protest, the crowd of goose-steppers, like good Germans playing whack-a-mole, follow earlier instructions to surround each freshly sprouted protestor, wave their Trump signs maniacally and scream “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” until police reach the group and escort the disrupter out. With each new protestor, Trump encourages the mob. “Get ‘em outta here! We have fun at Trump rallies, don’t we?”

It’s grotesque, watching grown adults go apeshit on these far-outnumbered rebels—most of them teenagers or young 20somethings—as Trump goads them on. 

It’s more grotesque that these people (my father, a staunch evangelical conservative still in possession of his critical faculties, calls them the “fetal alcohol vote”) are deluded enough to fall in line with Trump, to swallow his pandering, to actually believe that this man, this godless caricature of a capitalist pig, is sincere about anything other than his self-serving desire to win at all costs. 

As Trump winds down, one more protestor emerges. A swarm of Donald defenders surround him, screaming for the attention of the cops. Trump offers a half-hearted “get him outta here” before continuing his outro, but the cops take longer than usual and the crowd stops paying attention. As the arena cheers Trump’s final words, the forgotten confrontation between protestor and Trumper turns physical. A paunchy, goateed redneck shoves the protestor, a diminutive kid who looks college-age. The kid recovers from the push, stands his ground. More Trumpers descend on him. A hulking cowboy, even larger than the paunchy redneck, storms down the stairs, lunges at the kid, puts him in a headlock and attempts to drag him out by the neck. The kid escapes the grip, spins and knocks the cowboy hat off the guy’s head just as TPD officers finally arrive to escort him away from the angry mob.

A few days after the rally, Trump goes on national television and brags about the unwavering loyalty of his support base. “I could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he said. 

As I exit the Mabee Center and begin the long trek to my car, a wild-eyed man, Trump sign in one hand and Bible in the other, holds court on the sidewalk with a broadcast reporter. I catch isolated words and phrases—“Jesus” and “killing babies” and “government”—as he barks into the camera like a street preacher. 

His voice recedes as I make my way through the parking lot. An impatient woman in a red Jeep almost hits me. She slams on her brakes and glares at me as she passes. I spot a Jesus fish on the back of her vehicle. Behind me, the street preacher yells “Repent!” at the reporter.