Two and a half hours before college football’s national-championship game in Atlanta last night, between the University of Georgia Bulldogs and Alabama’s Crimson Tide, a frigid rain fell on a small group that gathered near the stadium. Jack Turner, a thirty-one-year-old organizer in a green raincoat and a beanie, spoke earnestly about the threat posed by President Donald Trump. He was joined by about three dozen protesters, who held signs and called out anti-Trump slogans as some of the seventy-seven thousand people with tickets to the game filed by.

Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium sits in a district represented by John Lewis that Trump, on Twitter last year, described as “in horrible shape and falling apart (not to . . . mention crime infested).” The ticket holders did not look worried. On StubHub, which temporarily crashed last week when fans rushed to buy tickets, the cheapest seats were reportedly going for $2,480 at first offer, while a game suite sold for $94,000. In Alabama and Georgia, they say that football is at least as important as religion and more dignified than politics. In the special election for Jeff Sessions’s former Senate seat, won by the Democrat Doug Jones, last month, Alabama’s football coach, Nick Saban, finished with four hundred and twenty-six write-in votes—just ahead of Sessions.

“Trump is a fascist!” one of the protesters yelled. “He is illegitimate!”

“Fuck off!” a football fan said, walking past.

A female protester in a crocheted hat tried to organize the group. “Ready,” she said. “One, two, three: Black Lives Matter!”

“Let’s go, Trump!” a man walking by her yelled. “These people are absolutely ridiculous,” the man told me, before returning his attention to the protesters. “Go back to where you come from, which is obviously not the South. Go, Dawgs!”

A white former forklift driver named Tim, currently living in Hawkinsville, Georgia, stood to the side of the protest, taking it all in. He was drinking something from a gas-station-bought plastic cup. “NAFTA got my job, more or less,” he said, explaining his recent retirement. In his other hand, he held a lit cigarillo. Having just finished up a long tailgaiting session, Tim began to comment on the “entitled frigging people” protesting Trump. “They’ve failed to prove any high crimes or misdemeanors,” he said. “I’m Trump all the way. The whole nine yards. I mean, he’s got some of the wrong people around him. I don’t like McMaster’s Afghanistan policy. I don’t like what Sessions is doing on the pot—I used to smoke pot.”

Tim said that people should be concerned about immigration and “Muslims coming in the country.” Kneeling during the national anthem really riled him, too. “I’m a veteran,” he said. “Navy, from ’72 to ’75. It’s like this: if you’re political, you need to keep that shit off the football field. Kaepernick, he should do it out here with these guys.” Tim took a swig. He noted the number of whites killed by cops—“very high”—as well as “Trump’s economic benefit to blacks” before wandering off.

A bearded, thirtysomething white man wearing a transparent poncho over a Georgia sweatshirt passed by and yelled, “Work for a living!” He introduced himself to me as Shaun Dalton, an investment banker who “raises capital for community banks.” Dalton said that he hadn’t watched a single professional-football game all year because “some players kneeled.” He was happy to explain his politics. “People hate Trump because he’s not a politician. We’ve gotten so far past what’s normal that I’ve told everyone he’s gonna be a shock to the system. He’s gonna start to bring things back to normal. I don’t need my four-year-old watching the Kardashians and hearing”—he pronounced a half-dozen obscenities. “It’s the new norm. Trump is reining it in!”

Shaun Dalton, pictured right, said that he hadn’t watched a single professional football game all year because “some players kneeled.” Photograph by Maria Lioy for The New Yorker

A black man nearby, overhearing the conversation, said, of Trump, “He ain’t doing shit.”

“I’m gonna tell you this right now,” Dalton responded, coming within a foot of the man. “The key word in immigration is ‘illegal immigrant.’ He doesn’t want to have illegal immigrants.”

“He’s not doing a damn thing,” the other man reiterated.

“Do you work?” Dalton asked.

“Yes, I work.”

“Have you contacted your C.P.A. to find out how much you’re gonna save with the new tax plan?”

“I’m not gonna save anything unless I’m a millionaire,” the man said. “The tax plan doesn’t do anything for me.”

“That’s the big misconception,” Dalton went on. “It ain’t just for the rich, bro. They polled a single black mother in Cary, North Carolina.”

“I’m not a single black mother, bro. I’m a single black man.”

“Contact your C.P.A. I will bet you ten thousand dollars that you will save money.”

“Trump is not here for the average working man.”

Dalton went on to claim that black unemployment rates were decreasing under Trump and repeated, a few more times, “Call your C.P.A.”

Inside the nearby CNN Center, the world headquarters of the Trump-despised news network, Navid Patel, a thirty-two-year-old Muslim Republican born in Pakistan and raised in Georgia, considered buying tickets to the game, though it already felt sullied to him. “Trump is so opportunistic,” Patel said. He’d attended U.G.A. and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “It’s a game between two red states, so now it’s O.K. for him to come? Otherwise, he hides behind a veil.” Patel went on. “I read ‘Fire and Fury.’ There’s not a part in that book where I can say, ‘I don’t believe that.’ I wish he hadn’t come to this game.”

A younger crowd headed for nearby Centennial Olympic Park, where they could watch the game for free on a giant screen and enjoy a halftime performance by the rapper Kendrick Lamar. “I see both sides of the kneeling thing,” Robert Adams, a tall white man with a braided beard, told me. “I have a black wife and black kids,” one of whom stood next to him. “And my grandfather was in World War II. It’s complicated.” Just then, the crowd began to boo loudly and wave a multitude of middle fingers as Trump appeared on the screen during the singing of the national anthem by the Zac Brown Band. It appeared to many viewers that the President either did not know or chose not to sing some of the anthem’s words. “I always thought Presidents were puppets, anyway,” Adams said.

“I didn’t vote for Trump,” Richard Skaf, a Republican insurance salesman living in New Jersey, said. He was standing alone in a Crimson Tide jacket and cap. “There’s an excellent reason why I voted for Hillary: when a Democrat is in office as President, Alabama does better in national championships. So I went with her.”

Like the Presidential election, the game was a nail-biter. In overtime, Alabama’s backup quarterback, a freshman named Tua Tagovailoa, threw the winning forty-one-yard touchdown pass to the receiver DeVonta Smith in the back corner of the end zone, killing Georgia’s chance at its first national championship since 1980 and securing Alabama’s fifth title in the last nine years. As a Georgia fan told me after the game, “the rich just get richer.”