Julia Ioffe is contributing writer at Politico Magazine.

Under the rain on Saturday in Manhattan, a few dozen Trump supporters gathered from far and wide—Jersey Shore, DC, Queens—to stand in front of Trump Tower and show their support for the man who built it. They had been planning this on Facebook for over a week, and it just so happened that they arrived to see their candidate’s campaign going down in flames: about 24 hours prior, audio surfaced of Trump bragging about his ability to assault women because he was a star, sending scores of Republicans to withdraw their support and calling for him to relinquish his spot on the ticket. But these people didn’t care. He was still their man. They huddled under umbrellas, squishing around the TV tents gathering rain on the sidewalk, and sang the national anthem. As Trump emerged from the Tower after a meeting with Reince Preibus, they shouted “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Someone blew a shofar, sending up a prayer to God on behalf of the beleaguered Donald Trump. A man dressed as a human-sized penis stood around with a placard that said, “TAKE A PICTURE WITH TRUMP!!!”

“He is the only one who can get us out of the mess we’re in,” said Jeannie Rodriguez. She was an immigrant, “but I’m a legal immigrant,” she added. “I don’t care what he said. That was in the past, we all have our pasts.” Her eight-year-old daughter Gabriela stood listening. “My responsibility as a parent is to filter information for her,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t have to explain it to her because right now because she can’t handle it. I’m the one who’s going to filter information to her.” (Gabriela, for her part, was still supporting Trump “because he’s good” and “he’s going to make America great again!”)


Everyone had their reasons for still supporting Trump, and many weren’t bothered by the “locker-room talk.” “Come on, that’s how real men talk!” said a very frustrated man who wouldn’t give his name. “That’s how men talk!” A 17-year-old who has been volunteering for the Trump campaign, and who also didn’t want his name used, was explaining to a bystander that Trump’s comments weren’t predatory because they let him do it because he’s a star, and that is a form of consent.

“I could care less about those tapes, because when men get together and they’re all alone and they’re talking about themselves, they say a lot of things just to impress one another. That doesn’t bother me in the very least,” said Kathy Serra, who came in from the Jersey shore in a fluorescent yellow anorak and a camo Make America Great Again cap. “He was bragging, just like the other men. I’ve heard it all before. Listen, I’d rather have a man like Trump be president than a criminal like Hillary Clinton!” Why is Clinton a criminal? “She sold uranium to Russia! I mean, that’s what you use to make nuclear bombs!” Serra said. When I asked her about Trump’s friendliness toward the Russian president, she said that “being friendly is fine! And Putin respects Trump because he has a set of calyuns, as my father used to say,” referring to old Italian slang for the seed-making part of the male anatomy. (And it wasn’t even Hillary that was the problem, really. It was George Soros, a “currency manipulator,” “evil, evil man, he’s the shadow government of this country.” “He’s responsible for Black Lives Matter, he’s responsible for Ferguson, he’s responsible for the mess in Charlotte that just occurred,” she went on, explaining to me that Soros invented BLM to carve up the country.

Some had even more alarming accusations. A college student who worked at nearby Rockefeller Center who leans toward Clinton wandered over to see what this was all about. “That man over there, with the horn, he was telling me that Hillary is a witch, that she practices witchcraft." The man with the horn—a ram’s horn called a shofar and used in Jewish ritual—was Johnny Rice, a messianic Christian from Washington, D.C., decked out in Trump regalia. After some discussions of Bill Clinton’s sexual transgressions, I asked him if he had been telling the young man over there that Hillary is a witch. A relieved and knowing look came over his face. “Oh, for real, for real,” he said nodding with the gratitude of someone finally being understood. (The shofar, he told me, was part of his studying Judaism to understand Jesus better and to “turbocharge” his prayers.) “Have you heard of Alex Jones? Alex has the behind-the-scenes people, like Larry Nichols. And I was even able to call Larry personally, and he said he asked Bill one time, how come Hillary flies to L.A. once a month? And he said, Hillary is going to witchcraft meetings.”

Do you know of any spells she’s cast? I asked him.

“I mean, didn’t travel with her to these witchcraft meetings but, as a Christian I have spiritual discernment,” he said. “I can discern Hillary. I can tell she’s into that stuff.”

Some, however, were a little bit more careful in their support. Carlos Giron, a Guatemalan immigrant, stood with a rain-soaked Trump sign, and made a good show of defending his candidate. “I think this is a typical thing that playboy millionaires do,” Giron said. “We all knew what we were getting with him, we all knew he was an eccentric billionaire. The thing that would disappoint me is if he refused to change,” by which Giron meant talking more about the issues and less about himself, fewer “petty fights with people.”

It had been over a year now, and Giron was “a little disappointed that he hasn’t changed fast enough.” And though he still held out hope, and though Trump had been his third choice after Rubio and Cruz, he has a bad feeling. “If he makes another mistake like this, I guarantee you a lot of us will walk away,” he said. The 17-year-old volunteer had heard about Nicholas Kristof’s article about Trump forcing himself on a young woman in Ivanka’s childhood bedroom at Mar-a-Lago, and he was afraid to go back inside Trump Tower to read it.

At 6:30, the rally’s permit expired and, after a rousing rendition of the Star Spangled Banner—and a toot from the shofar—the crowd began to disperse. The stragglers posed for pictures and talked about where to stock up on Trump paraphernalia. An old man, hunched over his cane, rain streaked across his glasses stood listening to me talk to Rice. His father had been a friend of Fred Trump—“a very humble man, you could never tell he was a millionaire”—and he didn’t want to give me his name. Trump wasn’t his first choice, but he felt for him. “If you’re a Republican, they’ll dig everything up on you, everything!” he said, complaining to that it was hard to be a Republican in this town.

He hadn’t heard about Friday’s tape, and, after hearing a brief summary, his face stretched into disbelief. He looked away, seeming pained. After a moment, he said, “The Bible says, ‘All men are sinners.’” He looked at the shiny Trump Tower lobby just on the other side of the doors. “You know, they say Trump is a racist, but if he was a racist, why would he have these, these, these people working here?” He gestured with one crooked hand at two black security guards. He shook his head. “They’ll dig up everything!”

Just past him, the man dressed as the penis saw that he was no longer attracting any attention. He threw up his hands in boredom, and wandered off into the rainy night.