Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for POLITICO.

MINNEAPOLIS—They wanted to see him fight and fight hard and fight here.

On Thursday, the area around the downtown arena of this state’s most notable liberal enclave teemed with tens of thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump. Snaking around the skyways above the city’s streets, sporting hats and shirts and banners and signs saying they were cops and bikers and pilots and women for Trump, they had come to see their chosen champion. Hounded by the impeachment inquiry and increasingly battered by polls, Trump descended on Air Force One to flash for them his vivid and vitriolic refusal to succumb.


“YES, I’M A TRUMP GIRL,” said the hat of Jodi Munson, 50, of Hastings, some 30 miles from the Target Center. “GET OVER IT.” Munson loved that Trump was not only in her state—again—but in this quite specific place.

“Just to shove it in their face,” she told me. “He’s in the belly of the beast.”

M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

“If he can come here and make his statement, right here, in the devil’s cauldron, that’s saying something—that’s putting a big exclamation mark on what he does and who he is,” added a retired union worker from Champlin named Kelvin who wouldn’t give his last name “because we have to hide in the weeds.”

Simply by showing up, Trump reiterated his well-known taste for a fight. But will it get him through the quickly mounting impeachment peril back in Washington? And can this belligerence alone, running the gamut from biting to blithe, deliver a state that he vows is within reach next year?

Over the course of a fiery hour and 45 minutes Thursday inside the almost full 19,356-seat Target Center, in his first campaign rally since the start of the House inquiry, the president unleashed especially acid attacks on Democrats and Washington and the news media while trashing the leaders of the biggest city in this state he so clearly covets.

He pilloried “the insane impeachment witch hunt” and “crooked Adam Schiff” and “do-nothing Democrat con artists.” He castigated potential 2020 opponent “never considered smart” “Sleepy Joe Biden” as well as Biden’s son, Hunter, whom he called “a loser.” And he called the top pol here, Jacob Frey, with whom he feuded this week, a “bad mayor,” and the local member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, “an America-hating socialist.”

“She is a disgrace to our country, and she is one of the biggest reasons I’m going to win, and the Republican Party is going to win, Minnesota,” he said.

“I think we’re going to have turnout the likes of which we’ve never seen,” he said.

“I’m energized!” he said.

M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

Trump’s rallies are central to his political persona, and it’s sometimes hard not to see them as one long string of more or less the same event because of the recurrent themes and chants, the anthemic, chest-rattling loop, the high-voltage hum and the egged-on air, the telltale mixture of play-it-again predictability shot through with head-on-a-swivel uncertainty. But this was something new—a different strain of provocation. At this fraught juncture, this president not only upped the ante of the fight—he took it straight to enemy territory, smack in the Trump-hating heart of one of the most left-leaning districts in the country.

For this president, who always has favored above all else the hunt, the getting more than the having, Minnesota remains uniquely tantalizing. The last time a Republican running for president won the state was Richard Nixon in 1972, and Trump in 2016 lost by just 1.52 percentage points, or 44,765 votes. This week, Team Trump flooded this bustling metro region with a concerted and well-funded initiative: Lara Trump and second lady Karen Pence anchored a Women for Trump event Wednesday in St. Paul, Vice President Mike Pence toured a sign manufacturer earlier Thursday in suburban Lakeville, and Trump’s rally was his third in the state since his election. Those other two events, though, were in Rochester and Duluth—whereas Thursday’s location made for a spotlit, cosmopolitan stage from which he could pry open the state’s marked divide between more rural, more conservative and predominantly white “Greater Minnesota” and more progressive, more diverse Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“It shows a lack of timidity,” former congressman and current United States Senate candidate Jason Lewis told me, “the temerity to go into quote-unquote the devil’s den.”

M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

“It gives me hope,” Danielle Stella, who’s bidding to have the chance to unseat Omar, said when I met her in the line in the skyways. “President Trump isn’t saying, ‘This is such a liberal district I don’t have a chance.’ He’s coming here to fight.”

Inside the arena of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, the incendiary, seemingly indefatigable Trump consistently delighted his red-capped crowd with his rough treatment of Omar and Somalian refugees writ large while bearing down on the Bidens. “He was only a good vice president,” he charged, “because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s ass.” The profane burst elicited electric, gleeful, grinning cheers, some of the loudest and longest of the night.

“Four more years! Four more years!” they chanted.



***

Could Trump actually win Minnesota?

Assuming he holds onto everybody he had in 2016—a big if—Trump still would need to net another not quite 45,000 people. He could try to depress Democratic turnout in the bluer, more urban areas all but mobilized against him (unlikely), or he could try to grow his already stout share around the rest of the state (there are, after all, roughly a quarter of a million unregistered white men, Ken Martin, the chair of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, told me), or he perhaps could peel off some new supporters in slivers of swing-district suburbs and exurbs. This, of course, is a question that won’t have an answer until next November, but it’s on the tips of the tongues of politicos here spanning the spectrum.

“This is the first time in many, many years that a Republican presidential candidate is planning to seriously contest the state,” Jeff Blodgett, a longtime strategist who was the state director for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, told me. “That’s a big deal that Democrats have to take seriously.”

They are. “What we’re seeing right now is probably the most robust and deepest level of investment I’ve ever seen this early on by a Republican presidential candidate,” the DFL’s Martin said. “They already have 20 people on the ground. They have four offices around the state. Their digital spend is about 4 to 1 what the Democrats are doing.”

Could Trump win here? “Of course he could,” Martin said.

“I am not ruling it out,” added Gregg Peppin, a veteran Republican strategist who helped Marco Rubio win the Minnesota caucuses in 2016 before being admittedly surprised at Trump’s subsequent success.

“It’s plausible,” Peppin said, “that he can pick up support in the suburbs.”

“The outer-ring suburbs are kind of back and forth,” Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told me. “It’s varied, and I certainly don’t want to suggest it’s a slam dunk for Donald Trump—I think he’s got trouble with better educated voters, with women and so forth, but there is a pocket in some of those areas where people nod and say, ‘Yeah.’”

Take Dakota County. South of the Cities, it stretches from the edge of the urban core out into green-gold cornfields split by flat rural roads dotted by anti-abortion billboards. And more or less in the middle, some 25 miles down Interstate 35, sits Lakeville. Population 64,334, it’s been growing this decade by about a thousand people a year, according to the mayor. Earlier this week, I drove around under a bright blue sky with wisps of white clouds, taking in a tableau of strip malls and chain stores, square lawns and clean concrete, cookie-cutter stick-built homes staple-gunned to what used to be farms.

The relative banality of the scenery belies its political volatility. At the Capitol in St. Paul, Lakeville has a blend of Democrats and Republicans, from state Senator Matt Little, who’s the former, and state Representative Jon Koznick, who’s the latter. On Capitol Hill, it was represented in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District by Jason Lewis … until last year when Democrat Angie Craig flipped the seat. In the presidential election in 2016, across Lakeville’s 17 precincts, Trump won 51 percent of the votes—neatly emblematic of this past cycle’s leftward shift in areas like this around the state and around the country. “It’s a swing district, and certainly Dakota County is a swing part of that swing district,” Craig said when we talked this week. “And Lakeville is kind of arguably a little bit of ground zero,” Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the state Republican Party, told me. “My district looks like America,” Craig continued. “It’s got working union families, it’s got family farmers, it’s got the suburbs and the exurbs, and so it’s just a non-gerrymandered district—and to represent it well, you’ve got to listen to everybody.”

M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

On Holyoke Avenue, Lakeville’s main drag, I listened the other day to people who didn’t vote for Trump and won’t in 2020, either (“We’re not Trump supporters,” said Jason Baker, owner of World of Games), and people who did vote for him in 2016 and definitely will again (“I feel like most people are for him here,” said Joe Drummer, a supervisor at Ace Hardware), and people who voted for him in 2016 and “probably” will again (“… I haven’t thought much about it,” said Jen Orth, a co-owner of Hypointe Childcare). I also met people who voted for him in 2016 and now aren’t so sure.

“We voted for him,” said local honey merchant Arlene Hill, referring to her beekeeper husband, too. “We would just like the man to stop tweeting and saying stupid things. But I think he’s trying to do a lot of great things.” Her vote next year? “I don’t know,” she granted. “I want to see all the candidates.”

Many Republicans are activated anew. “We’ll come back a lot more to the right than I think anybody will expect,” local Republican state senator Dan Hall told me. Conservative city councilwoman Michelle Volk concurred. “I can tell you that I’m watching people be more fired up than they were the last time in 2016,” she said. “I’m going to liken this to what I saw happen the first time Scott Walker won Wisconsin and then they had their recall vote. And I went over to Wisconsin … to make phone calls on his behalf.”

What, though, about those much-sought-after people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but will vote for him in 2020?

I was sitting at the bar at Lakeville Brewing Company listening to patrons talk about their shotguns while eating surprisingly good Korean brisket tacos when I got a text from Koznick. The local state rep had sent me a picture of the 2016 ballot of a “friend.” The friend had written in Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan.

“Interesting,” I responded. “Is your friend going to vote for the president next November?”

“Yes,” Koznick answered.

Texting with his friend, a Republican who lives in Lakeville, while he was texting with me, Koznick explained that this man three years ago “just wasn’t sold on Trump” but now is, primarily due to Supreme Court judges and “the over reaction by democrats.”

I asked if I could talk to him.

No, Koznick said—because his friend is a State Senate staffer. “It wouldn’t look good for him and for people to figure out that he didn’t vote for Trump.”

Koznick, however, did know somebody else who fit the bill—who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but will in 2020. “Jane is her name,” he told me by text.

“I did not vote for him in 2016,” confirmed Jane, a woman from Lakeville in her 50s who spoke to me on the phone on condition I would not use her last name. Unaffiliated with either party, she voted for Hillary Clinton, she said, after not liking either candidate but going the way she did because she decided to just vote for the woman.

“So,” I asked her about Trump, “what was the hang-up for you three years ago?”

“Well, I think one of the hang-ups,” she said, “was that there was just an off comment he made on one of his shows … I can’t remember if it was ‘The Apprentice’ … I can’t remember … but he made the comment about—and I can’t remember who it was—but it was a vet who actually was a prisoner of war, and he made the comment, something about I don’t like him or something … I can’t—it was so long ago—but something about where he got himself caught.”

“Captured?” I prompted.

“It was somebody, a higher-up, and I don’t know …”

“I think you’re talking about John McCain,” I said.

“Maybe,” she responded. “Maybe that was it.”

“But that turned you off …”

“It did.”

“To where you didn’t want to vote for him …”

“Yep.”

“And so tell me a little bit more about what he’s done since his election in 2016,” I said, shifting the conversation back toward Trump, “that has changed your mind.”

“Our economy is doing better. Unemployment is down. I really like what he’s doing with autism. I really like the border control. I am one—I feel for these people who are trying to get here, but it’s still illegal, and you still got to follow the process. What I like about him is he is actually enforcing the laws that we have.”

I asked if anything could change her mind again.

“Nothing’s going to change my mind,” she said.

This, she said, is also because of the impeachment inquiry and what she perceives as Democrats’ consistently shabby treatment of Trump.

“I didn’t vote for him, but he’s the president, so I’m going to respect him,” Jane told me. “They say, ‘Oh, he didn’t win the popular vote.’ I don’t care what vote he won. He won. He’s in there. Show him respect.”

“They just hate him so badly,” she said. And it’s made her like him that much more.

Throughout Minnesota, are there 44,766 Janes?



***

On Thursday, up in the skyways, some seven hours before the scheduled start of the rally, a man wearing a homemade Trump shirt that said “FUCK YOUR FEELINGS” on the back had to go to the bathroom. “Excuse me,” he said to a security guard, “is there a restroom around here?”

M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

When he returned, I introduced myself.

He had made the shirt the night before, said Trevin Miller, 29, from nearby Bloomington. “Deliveries were a little backed up on Amazon,” he explained.

Miller was for Trump from the start. Some of his friends, though, were not. That, he told me, is changing. An accountant, an insurance salesman, landscapers—“they’re seeing the facts, the numbers on unemployment.” And he has other friends, he said, who just didn’t vote at all. They didn’t think it mattered. Now, he said, given how close Trump came last time, they see that it does, and this time they’ll head to the polls. “That’s what I’ve heard from a few people,” Miller said. “‘OK, I’m voting.’”

At the very front of the long line, seated in a camping chair, having arrived at this spot 2½ days before, was Dan Nelson, 36, from suburban Spring Lake Park. He was wearing on a hat he had made. “GOD WINS,” it said on the front. “Q,” it said on the side, a reference to the vast, online, pro-Trump, anti-“deep state” conspiracy theory. Nelson, too, loved Trump from the get-go, but he had a friend, he said, who was “hardcore” against Trump. Now? “He says, ‘You know what? Everybody’s got jobs.’” Something else he thinks is leading some who were reluctant to vote for Trump in 2016 change their tune: “He didn’t destroy the place,” Nelson said, meaning the country, “like people were saying he was going to do.”

Down toward the other end of the queue, standing next to a window charging her phone, I met Munson, the woman from Hastings, the woman with the “GET OVER IT” hat and a “Q” on her shirt who was excited that Trump was on his way to “the belly of the beast.” Munson told me she has “probably 20” friends who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but will now. “They can just literally look around and see that things are better and people are happy,” she said. “They just see all the negativity in the news, and they can see through that. They’re saying, ‘That doesn’t look like my life.’”

“Those votes are out there,” Michele Even, 54, of Prior Lake near Lakeville, who started just this past June a 2,000-member grassroots group called MAGASOTA.

M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine

I walked through the skyways feeding toward the Target Center. I saw all those hats and shirts, and visors and vests, and koozies and scarves, and banners and flags, saying “NO MORE BULLSHIT” and “PROUD TO BE A DEPLORABLE” and “DEPORT ILHAN OMAR.” I saw Trump running shoes. I saw a sweatshirt that was nothing but prints of Trump’s face. I saw InfoWars shirts. I saw lots of the letter Q. “Breitbart is an excellent news source,” I heard somebody say. A man called me “fake news.” A woman called me “nefarious.”

And then the people here all but filled the arena, practically packing it to the ceiling to see Trump.

“Phony polls,” he told them.

“Crooked writers,” he told them.

“These people are sick,” he told them.

“USA! USA! USA!” they chanted.

“We are,” Trump said, “in a struggle for the survival of democracy in America.”