The coral of Tampa's Florida State Fairgrounds entrance arcs against an ominously graying Tuesday evening sky. Everyone waits for Donald Trump outside, even though it smells like rain. The Secret Service checkpoint doesn't help, choking admission to the 10,500-seat Expo Hall, but outside is where you want to be in any case. It's where the cameras aren't confined to a pen. It's where the enemy is. It's why we're here.

Even the Trump fans understand that inside is boring. The rear corners of arena seating never fill; a standing room large enough to accommodate the crowd outside five times over remains empty. Fifteen minutes in, people start to exit, because this speech is like all the rest of them. A cheerful bearded man in a USA replica baseball jersey and Trump socks stops on the way out to explain to me why he's leaving and gives the same answer as everyone else:

The press knows the ticket lies outside too. The fact-checkers can do their jobs from a YouTube stream. Inside, people sit on bleachers, not free to move or rave or joke around. Colors wash out in the artificial light, and once the speech starts, the cameras and recorders are supposed to remain within the press pen. Besides, that way the audience always knows where to find the treasonous media on the way out.

Trump knows this. He understands the value of outside. When he arrives, he mentions the thousands of people outside the gate for him (there aren't) watching giant-screen TVs (there are none). And, anyway, not much will happen inside. Everyone knows what the Trump show looks like at this point—grievance after formless grievance, with no policy agenda in sight. GOP gubernatorial aspirant Ron DeSantis is introduced as someone who likes Trump, takes the stage to demonstrate his approval of Trump, then slinks off before his speech becomes dangerously long or memorable. Then the most powerful man on the planet whines about everything unfair to him, an audience whose go-to insult is "snowflake" shares in his victimhood, and, if they're very lucky, go off to find those responsible outside.

Things were different in 2016, the last time I came to a Trump rally in Tampa. Even then, the show was old and repetitive; white boomers danced in their seats to piped-in classic rock beforehand—all elbows and overbites—then called out the greatest hits during the speech. ("Make Mexican Hillary lock up the wall!") If it was authoritarianism, it also sounded like an Eagles concert, only if Don Henley's voice had disappeared up an adenoid, and he had a piece of rebar in his brain, and Don Felder was Muslim. Still, the fans stayed inside the USF Sun Dome to the end, then streamed out to the parking lot. On the way in, heckling the protesters kept the lines from getting bored. On the way out, with nothing between you and your car, they didn't rate at all.

By February 2017, at Trump's first rally since the inauguration, the opportunity to confront the supposedly George Soros–funded protesters seemed like half the point. Fans began melting away after 20 minutes of Trumpian harangue. It was a free show, and they'd already got what they paid for. The new material was outside, the conflict all pre- and postgame.

In Tampa on Tuesday, that conflict comes courtesy of Democratic gubernatorial aspirant Jeff Greene's campaign bus and boosters, Tampa's Indivisibles, NextGen Florida, and a few people from Black Lives Matter and other assorted groups. In total, roughly 250 protesters await the Trump crowd lining up. Two women are dressed as Handmaids; someone plays "Back in the USSR" from a speaker. Jeers about a president bought and paid for mix with chants for gun control, voting rights, reproductive rights, and equal justice. After the rally, the number of protesters dwindles below 100, but they're still chanting.