I expected to feel his presence oppressively, but instead, in that small space, I registered him as being barely there—an empty vacuum into which the winds of whiteness, maleness, money, bigotry, and big talk were constantly rushing. Rather than being drawn toward a vortex of charisma, I found myself floating away from Trump entirely, preferring to apply my mind to anything else in the room—toward the people around me, who told me unequivocally that he speaks for them.

I focused on Melania’s face, poised like an apple on the tip of a sword. It did not move; its stillness was preparatory to a performance that never came. She was wearing a black dress with a silver buckle at the center of it, perhaps chosen to recall a pilgrim’s shoe. She was born Melanija Knavs in Slovenia, and now she stood at Trump’s right hand, and hers was the head I wanted to be inside, even more than Ivanka’s. Ivanka, the favored daughter, showered with gold from above, stood at his left hand. She was so, so pregnant—two weeks from giving birth, her proud father told the crowd at the rally the night before. She had been at the polls all day shaking hands. Her face was not quite as polished as her stepmother’s; something occasionally fought in it, and from time to time she nearly mouthed a talking point along with her father, then gave a slight nod of relief when he had delivered it. But still she stood statuesque next to him, matched by Melania on the other side, so the two women resembled the twin female sphinxes in The NeverEnding Story, in the service of a power I could not quite identify.

“I’m so happy,” said a young man behind me, sweating waxily like a farmer’s cheese, the corners of his smile reaching toward his ears. “So happy right now,” just a split-second before Trump literally told the crowd, “I am going to make you so happy,” and there it was again, the kind of sentence you never hear in politics, the sort of thing you say to a woman when you are promising her everything—a promise whose falseness inheres in it, but perhaps you are so grateful to hear it at all.

What Trump was really promising was freedom to move in the world the way he does, under his protection, according to his laws.

I turned to look at Mark, who brought back his 18-year-old bride from Kiev. “My wife had only one pair of shoes, and they didn’t fit,” he had said to me earlier, vehement. “She had only one sweater for three years.” But look, his face told me, what I have given her now. A whole country, an entire new life, a gift that was mine to give.

The center of everyone’s attention, who started his speech the color of a sweet potato soufflé, had progressed to the unnatural, hectoring scarlet of a stick of sidewalk chalk. I found myself in the perplexing position of wanting to write a thousand words about the shape of his lips. Trump held up a theatrical thumb and hurried offstage, with the itching haste of a germophobe who has found himself in a close crowd of the contagious. Fifteen minutes and it was over. That was such a nothing, I think. But when I catch the speech again later, on TV, every smallest movement reads—as if he hadn’t been speaking to us at all, but to those cameras that still followed him, in his mind and ours.

I moved toward the doors, and Rich trailed me with his hands in his pockets, telling me if my Uber driver were busy, he could take me home. “I’m safe,” he assured me simply.

As we walked past the parked vans, we were stopped by another news crew, and Rich repeated to the bright lights that Trump is saying what most of us are thinking, that people are tired of career politicians and want something different, something new. He strode ahead of me toward the car, with that barely perceptible hint of ancient injury somewhere in his bearing, and I thought of the boy inside dressed up as Uncle Sam and felt suddenly ashamed: Votes, even ones incomprehensible to us, rise out of real lives, out of the distance between what we have and what we hope for ourselves.

Rich drove me the winding way back through the snow, occasionally slipping toward the middle of the road. He had turned a little melancholy, as men sometimes do at the end of the night, at the tail end of long conversations where you have asked them to tell you everything about themselves. A row of red hearts flashed; his daughter was texting him. He called her and they talked for a moment in a sweet private language, not baby talk, but in the same family, promising that he was on his way.

The next morning, softened snow slid off the roofs of the houses, each of which came to a neat point like a pencil. When Babiker arrived to bring me to the airport, Omar was sitting next to him in the front, smiling at my surprise. “I missed you yesterday!” he told me. “I cried for two hours!”

They wanted to know about the watch party. Was it crazy people? “Sort of,” I said, wishing to be honest. “I mean, I was there, too. At one point I started insulting the wigs of the Founding Fathers.”