By Dan Webb (Taken at the Council Bluffs Donald Trump Rally- 9/28/2016)

NOTE: This article was adapted and published as an OpEd by Lima Charlie News. The OpEd can be found here.

Donald Trump held a campaign rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa this afternoon to kick off his Iowa Christian Conservatives for Trump coalition.

Council Bluffs is located on the Western border of Iowa just minutes from downtown Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha residents typically avoid Council Bluffs unless, in a booze filled bachelor party haze, they plan to gamble away their Union Pacific Railroad salary at the smoke filled casinos or spend it on the hardest hit victims of the closure of University of Phoenix, strippers. Some might mistake the city for being cosmopolitan when they notice that everyone in the town knows the metric system but quickly realize that it’s only because that’s how you measure the weight of meth.

When I arrived at the Mid America Center, the medium sized arena where Slipknot and Dwight Yoakam serenade their Iowa fans, I was greeted by a group of protesters holding signs that said “Fuck Donald Trump” and “Drumpf.” Luckily the guy with the “Drumpf” sign was standing near an entrance used by few rally goers. If people saw that sign it might be the end of the line for The Donald. A simply devastating critique that is quite simply, “huge, if true.”

When I got inside I saw a group of Secret Service agents patting down a man with a re purposed Diet Pepsi bottle containing tobacco spit and woman driving a motor scooter wearing a “Hillary for Prison 2016” shirt. I take back the mean things I said about Council Bluffs now. This city owns.

I made my way in to the conference center where Donald Trump was scheduled to speak about an hour early but it was packed with well over 1000 people. Tana Goertz, an Iowa native who was once a contestant on Trump’s reality show The Apprentice, was speaking to supporters about the Constitution and Trump’s respect for “the rights given to us by our creator.” Tana brought up a preacher who led the crowd in prayer followed by a guy who claimed to be a veteran of Grenada. That guy led the crowd in saying the Pledge of Allegiance but got 50% of the words wrong before his mic “cut out” and the pledge was finished by the crowd like when Eddie Vedder holds the mic out to let the crowd finish the chorus of Nothing Man at a Pearl Jam concert. Immediately following the pledge was the national anthem. My patriotic juices were flowing. When the national anthem concluded a man with a goatee who looked like he had chemtrail induced Morgellons disease looked over at his wife and said, “That Kaepernick fella won’t be allowed to kneel when Trump is in office.” I wish I was making that up. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. You know it exists but its a real treat when you see it with your own eyes.

The guest of honor was about 30 minutes late so I decided to ask a few attendees about the man himself as well as their thoughts on Monday’s debate. I found a tall red-headed woman who was trying to convince a middle aged Gary Johnson supporter in a Superman t-shirt why he should vote for Trump. I interjected into their conversation to ask her the number one reason why someone should choose Trump over Johnson. She told me Hillary was going to destroy the country and that Muslims were pouring into the country by the millions. I asked her if her count of “millions” was being calculated by turnstiles as they crossed the border. She didn’t know where the number came from but she was unhappy about the fact that, “they are eligible for welfare and probably Obama phones.” A few minutes later I asked a very well-dressed man what he thought about Trump’s comments that not paying income taxes for years made him smart. He told me, “Hey buddy, if you want to pay taxes, that’s on you.” I asked him how we would fund our military without taxes and he replied, “repeal Obamacare” as he walked away from me. This is the Midwest. The people that make David Brooks wax-poetic in his New York Times columns each week. Of course he’s never met any of them he just goes off what he saw in the excellent FX original series, Fargo.

Finally, the crowd began to roar as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani came out from behind the large curtain backdrop that separated the crowd from the VIPs. Giuliani, long since leaving the New York City Mayor’s office, has found his niche as Trump’s hype man. If you think that is a totally pathetic fall from grace like I definitely don’t, let me remind you that DJ Khaled was once the hype man for hip hop legend Fat Joe. Now DJ Khaled has millions of Snapchat followers and snaps videos of himself, in the shower, telling people his Keys to Success like “Don’t ride your jet ski at night” and how NoFap November will make you a savvy investor.

Giuliani didn’t speak long but he fed the crowd some red meat by saying Hillary Clinton called him and the crowd a bunch of deplorables. One man in the crowd screamed out, “George Soros is the deplorable.” Guiliani immediately responded, “Yeah!” At this point I was getting overheated ran out of storage on my iPhone and spent the better part of the next five minutes trying to figure out what to delete so I could take more pictures. I didn’t get much out of the rest of Giuliani’s speech but he hyped the crowd pretty well. Outstanding.

Finally, the man of the hour, Donald Trump took the stage. He opened by asking all the Evangelical Christians to raise their hands. He said he was very popular and well-liked by Evangelicals. After that, he asked if the non-Christians would raise their hands. A few people did. Trump laughingly asked if he should have them kicked out. The crowd cheered but Trump said “That’s — oh, there’s a couple people, that’s all right. I think we’ll keep them, right? Should we keep them in the room, yes? I think so.” That was the end of Trump’s comments about Christians at his rally to kick off a coalition for Iowa Christians.

Trump went on to talk about the same things he always talks about. He talked about Hillary Clinton’s emails, her Wall Street speech transcripts, his border wall plan, how he won all the online polls after the debate ect. At one point he remarked that the media wanted him to lose and pointed towards the media gallery at the back of the conference center. The crowd immediately turned an booed. One exceptionally well dressed middle aged woman, right in front of me, turned and screamed at the media with intensity I would’ve never expected from someone like her. She screamed as she held her “Make America Great Again” sign above her head. It was almost terrifying. She was like a Visigoth warrior about to sprint down the Janiculum hill to sack Rome.

The crowd itself was not unlike any other political rally I have attended. The crowd was cult like and the look in people’s eyes as Trump spoke was that of pure captivation. Some people turned red and almost suffered from strokes as Trump spoke about Hillary Clinton and the liberal media. The woman who screamed at the reporters and TV crews behind us closed her eyes and said “amen” when Giuliani told the crowd Clinton would decimate the military. You can tell that Trump and Giuliani, the Manhattan elites that they are, despise these people. The way they speak on stage is transparently patronizing to the crowd of their rabid supporters.

Unfortunately, I was not able to stay behind and take part in any of the post rally festivities at the Mid America Center. A girl I once ghosted after a Tinder date was a journalist for one of the TV stations covering the rally; we made eye contact. I almost asked a Secret Service agent for a special escort to the nearest exit thinking they could be sympathetic. The look in their faces told me they’ve never once in their life felt sympathy. At the end of the day, this rally was not about the Iowa Christian Conservatives, this rally was about making sure Iowa voters filled out absentee ballots. Each speaker ended by emphasizing that.