There is no understanding Donald Trump without understanding his rallies.

They are the crucible of the Trump revolution, the laboratory where he turns his alternative reality into a potion to be sold to his followers. It is at his rallies that his radical reimagining of the US constitution takes shape: not “We the people”, but “We my people”.

As America reels from a gunman killing 11 Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue; pipe bombs being sent to 14 of the US presidents’ leading opponents, and Trump declaring himself a nationalist and sending thousands of troops to the US border to assail unarmed asylum seekers; the most powerful person on earth continues to rely on his rallies as seething cauldrons of passion.

And that’s not all. Trump is using them as a test run for his 2020 bid for re-election.

Which is why I have crisscrossed the country, from Montana and Wisconsin in the north to Texas in the south, Arizona in the west to North Carolina in the east, to observe the president delivering his message to his people.

Five rallies, eight days. At each, we explore a different emotion that Trump evokes to arouse his people’s devotion, in search of the source of his appeal.

The instant you attend your first Trump rally you are confronted by an uncomfortable truth: to figure out what’s happening you have to acknowledge the love. It may not be pure and selfless. It may be narcissistic and at times even threatening. But love is very much in the air.

Twenty minutes into his speech in Missoula, Montana, Trump breaks from the autocue and exclaims: “I love you too.” He scours the crowd – “Who said that? Who said that?” – until he locates the person who has just declared love for him.

“It’s finally a woman,” he exclaims. “You know, I get it from the men all the time. So far every guy that said ‘I love you’, they’re just not my type.”

Locker-room talk, but it works. It sparks a collective guffaw from Trump supporters. Women cackle, men squirm. It’s a lovefest.

Trump uses the word “love” repeatedly. He loves Montanans, he tells them. Such “loyal, hardworking, incredible patriots”. Later in the speech, he uses “love” in reference to the air hangar where the rally is held, the people of Maine, his first lady, his hair, a couple of local Congress members and hunting and guns.

His supporters repay his love – with interest. They begin forming a line well before dawn that by midday snakes around a giant field under the state’s legendary big sky. The procession is ablaze with red Make America Great Again hats and national flags draped over shoulders amid a festive mood not unlike a carnival.

Francie Bruneau, 58, has driven 200 miles from Spokane, Washington, and will stand for seven hours in line before Trump appears. “He speaks to me,” she says. “He’s like your friend next door, someone you can go to the pub with and drink beer.”

“He doesn’t drink,” someone interjects.

Much has been written about Trump rallies, and the dark forces they invoke. But today the crowd has the character of a family outing of proud Americans, happy to be among their own in a state that Trump won in 2016 by 20 points.

“You can see the love right here,” says Robin Pedersen, 56, a horse trainer from Florence, Montana. “Everybody’s civil, everybody’s getting along.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Under Montana’s famous big sky, Trump addresses thousands of his supporters. Photograph: Fred R Conrad/The Guardian

Further down the line Phil Zacha, 82, is wearing a T-shirt that articulates what many people will say to me in the coming days. It bears the words: “Trump: he says what I think.”

Tonight, his stump speech is closely scripted and he largely cleaves to it. There’s more swagger in his demeanor than there was in 2016 – and there was plenty then. Two years ago he was the insurgent candidate on an unlikely mission to disrupt. Now he is the accomplished victor commandingly in charge.

Here in this sealed terrarium of 8,000 loving supporters, far from the multiple dangers of Robert Mueller, legal threats from porn stars and debates over impeachment, he is in his element.

“I just walked in and a big strong guy grabbed me, it happens every time. And he said, ‘Sir, Mr President, thank you so much for saving our country.’”

The president entices his followers to believe he is lavishing his love on them. But it works both ways: he’s also drawing on their love. The rally is his charging station, the place he goes to refuel his ego and his zealotry.

“We did it together, not me. I’m the spokesman,” he says. “By the way, how have I done?”

The crowd roars.

Tucked into the love, however, there is a menace that has also grown more pronounced since 2016.

I love you people, it seems to say, because you hate my enemy.

Trump turns his love to Greg Gianforte, Montana’s Republican member of Congress. In May 2017, Gianforte physically attacked the Guardian’s political correspondent Ben Jacobs who was trying to ask him a question about healthcare reform, grabbing him by the lapels and throwing him violently to the ground.

Trump praises Gianforte for being a “tough cookie”, “my kinda guy”. He then acts out the motions of someone body-slamming another. The hangar explodes with delight.

The slapstick display comes just hours after new evidence has emerged that journalist and Virginia resident Jamal Khashoggi had been beheaded and dismembered by a Saudi hit squad to silence his criticism. Trump has nothing to say about that.

After the rally is over, I call Pedersen, the horse trainer, and ask her what she thinks. She says that Trump “talked to every one of us individually, not as a group. It was peaceful.”

Peaceful. How so?

“I mean the positive energy I get from him. Feeling peaceful in there, feeling like he has your back.”

What about the body-slam?

“He was joking. We read it as a joke.”

Was it appropriate for the US president to joke about a violent assault on a fellow American?

“Probably not. But he did it, and I’m not offended by it.”

Did you laugh?

“I chuckled.”

The peace Trump offers his people is a peace twinned with fear. It’s right there in the phrase stamped on the sea of red hats: Make America Great Again. The slogan implies that the country is going to the dogs, and that only one man can save it.

Here that man comes, Marine One kicking up a giant cloud of dust in the Arizonan desert. As he steps out of the helicopter, for a few precious moments Trump carries himself as president of the United States, with all the regalia of that office. Uniformed marines salute him. Secret Service agents scowl.

Then he disappears into the mass of 5,000 devotees, popping up again in the center of the crowd, transformed into plain Donald Trump, man of the people, the guy who puts your fears into words.

Trump: he says what I think.

“The radical Democrats want to plunge our country into a nightmare of gridlock, poverty and chaos, you know that. They want to impose socialism on our country, turn us into another Venezuela, throw your borders wide open to deadly drugs and ruthless gangs. ‘Come on in everybody! Come on in!’”

This is radioactive for American conservatives who fear illegal immigration more than anything else. It is especially incendiary in the border state of Arizona, nowhere more so than where we are tonight – Mesa, an outpost of Phoenix that was home to Sheriff Arpaio’s 24-year reign of terror against Hispanic undocumented immigrants.

Which came first: Trump’s extremist vision of an immigrant dystopia, or the equally febrile fears of his followers? Who knows. But they make great bedfellows.

In the crowd is Shadow Lane, 42, a boutique owner from Cottonwood, Arizona. She has a Q drawn on her cheek for QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory network.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump supporter Shadow Lane sports the ‘Q’ for QAnon. Photograph: Fred R Conrad/The Guardian

I ask her what America would be like in 2050 had Hillary Clinton beaten Trump. “Guatemala, a socialistic country,” she replies, probably confusing it with Venezuela (Guatemala is currently run by a rightwing president who, like Lane, is an avowed Trump fan).

“Socialistic” is a word that comes up often. For David Stewart, 66, a retired teacher, that means a world in which “taxes and unemployment would go through the roof, the economy would collapse, there would be riots for food and water”. Racial tensions would be inflamed by Democrats seeking to “break the political system”.

Why would they want to do that?

“They want power. Look it up. President Bush said if you put the blacks on welfare they will vote Democratic for the rest of their lives.”

But Bush was a Republican.

Stewart pauses. Then he says: “I don’t remember.”

Rick Novak, 57, a retired building foreman and Harley guy, comes up to me in the press pen saying he wants to come face to face with “fake news”. He sounds intimidating, until he throws me a big just-kidding smile.

What would happen to America were Trump not on the case? “People are going to get killed,” he says. “Gang wars. We are going to get gang wars between white and black, whites and Mexicans. We could have our own little Vietnam, right here.”

People are going to get killed. We are going to get gang wars between white and black, whites and Mexicans Rick Novak

A full-blown war, here in Arizona?

“We are under threat with Mexican people coming over the border. If we don’t close it we are going to let Isis come in with the Mexicans.”

A couple of days later, Fox News begins peddling the exact same conspiracy theory. Trump’s favorite TV channel reports – without any evidence – that terrorist fighters of the Islamist group Isis have infiltrated the caravan of 3,500 Central American asylum seekers heading towards the US border.

A couple of hours after that, Trump takes up the rallying cry, warning that “Middle Easterners” are hiding in the human convoy and declaring the situation a “national emergency”.

After my week of rallies has ended, Trump takes his blatant effort to turn Americans’ fears into electoral votes to new lengths. He orders more than 5,000 troops to be sent to the US border to intercept the caravan – a ratio of more than one soldier per desperate, unarmed asylum seeker.

Then he says he will end with the flick of his pen the right to US citizenship for babies born in the US – a flagrant violation of the 14th amendment from a president who claims to be a stout defender of the US constitution.

Back in Mesa, where Trump snarls angrily about “kicking the criminals, the drug dealers and the terrorists the hell out of our country”, the gratitude of his people is visceral.

Outside the air hangar, the world is a cruel and ugly place. Here, inside, they are safe.

When Trump began his rallies in 2015, he insisted on choosing his own musical soundtrack: the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Guns N’ Roses played at high volume. (Mick Jagger has insisted Trump can’t be stopped using Stones music, though that didn’t prevent Pharrell Williams this week sending the president a cease-and-desist letter demanding he never again plays the song Happy.)

Three years on in Houston, Texas, the sound system blares out Village People’s Macho Man.

“Macho, macho man / I gotta be a macho man.”

Is it irony? Is it bragging? Did the president hand-pick the tune? As with so much of Trump’s complex aesthetics, you can’t tell. If you had to guess, you’d say both.

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There’s no doubt, though, that he likes to present himself as a strong man. And a strongman.

That’s obvious in Houston, the largest of the five rallies this week. With 16,000 people hailing their great leader inside the auditorium, and several more thousand outside, he is a large cat in heavy cream.

With every wave of affirmation, his chest visibly expands and his pose grows more martial: head back, lips puckered, shoulders square. He looks as though he were standing at inspection as the tanks roll by at his cancelled military parade.

“I’m a nationalist!” he cries. He’s fully aware of the storm he will provoke by using a term closely associated with US white supremacy. “We are not supposed to use that word,” he tells his followers with a verbal wink.

It’s strongman language. But then Trump is all about strongman language. Where Barack Obama used philosophical acrobatics to wow his base, Trump leans on words: pared down, sparse, monosyllabic ones.

Democrats are evil, bad, lousy, sick, cuckoo socialists who produce mobs. Republicans are great, beautiful, tough, patriotic warriors who produce jobs.

Occasionally he’ll allow himself to stick two words together – fake news, “Crooked Hillary”, radical socialism. But he’ll never place himself above his supporters or make them feel inferior to him.

It’s the root of his strength. It makes him one of us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Custom-made cowboy boots. Photograph: Fred R Conrad/The Guardian

There’s another source of Trump’s strength among his people. You have to attend his rallies to know this – it does not transmit through TV.

Humor.

Not humor as it’s normally delivered. He doesn’t do gags, or side-splitting punch lines.

What he does do is riff, a sort of free-form ranting. He goes on about “Pocahontas”, his pejorative name for the liberal US senator Elizabeth Warren, and her Native American DNA test. He calls Maxine Waters, the black Democratic congresswoman from California, a “low-IQ individual”.

The way he tells it, with a cute “don’t blame me” look on his face, his arms outstretched, it comes across as funny. He’s teasing us. Some people laugh. Such is the infectiousness of laughter, others do so too.

But stop and think about what is happening here. The systematic demeaning of women, and the denigration of a person’s IQ in terms Trump reserves exclusively for African Americans – in front of a crowd that is 99.8% white. Through laughter, everyone is complicit.

I don’t agree with his personality, but he gets stuff done Priscila Garcia

It makes you wonder what the many women in the rally think of this. I talk to three groups of Texas women of different ages – one in her late 60s from Trinity; the second in her 40s from Kingwood; and the last a pair of high school seniors from Baytown who are preparing to vote for the first time.

There is remarkable unanimity. All three age groups say they see Trump as a strong leader who keeps his promises and “gets things done”.

All three give Brett Kavanaugh, the US supreme court justice, the benefit of the doubt in his searing confirmation process – they are convinced he did not sexually assault his accuser, Dr Christine Blasey Ford. There is also agreement across the generations that Trump has strengthened them.

“I do feel stronger as a woman since Trump,” says Stephanie Scott, 42, a stay-at-home mum. “It’s validation. I don’t have to be bullied into supporting Hillary Clinton any more just because I’m a woman; I have my own voice.”

The only chink of light between the ages relates to Trump’s vulgar sexual comments and behavior, such as the way he recently called Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor alleging an affair, “Horseface”. The sixtysomethings think it’s “piddlin’ stuff”.

But one of the high-school students, Priscila Garcia, 17, doesn’t like it. She recoiled at the Access Hollywood tape in 2016 in which he boasted that he would “grab ’em by the pussy”.

“Him saying that makes me and other women uncomfortable,” she says.

There the disagreement ends. Garcia may not like Trump’s loutish remarks, but she remains firmly in his camp. “He’s a better leader than he is a person,” she says. “I don’t agree with his personality, but he gets stuff done.”

On the morning of the fourth rally, the outside world blasts its way into Trumpland. Shortly after 10am, as CNN anchors are telling their viewers about a series of pipe bombs mailed to the Clintons, the Obamas and to George Soros, they have to rush off air because the network has received its own explosive device.

At the same time, Jacob Spaeth and three of his buddies are lining up in a field in Mosinee, Wisconsin. They are all wearing the same distinctive red T-shirt. It bears a cartoon sketch of a smiling Trump urinating profusely over the CNN logo.

Today, after the CNN pipe bomb became headline news, a merchant says he’s sold about 15 of them in quick succession at $20 each.

Spaeth, a 19-year-old college student, doesn’t want to comment on the bombs. But he’s happy to discuss CNN.

“It’s not just CNN, it’s the whole media. They are very unfair to Trump. They’re manipulating kids, telling them that Trump is a horrible guy and that he wants bad things.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The shirt with Trump peeing on the CNN logo. Photograph: Fred R Conrad/The Guardian

Spaeth never watches CNN – he occasionally sees clips of it on Facebook. He gets his information from Infowars, the website of Alex Jones. Jones, a conspiracy theorist, is on the record as saying 9/11 was a government set-up and that the 2012 Newtown school shooting in which 20 children were killed was fabricated. Within hours he will be broadcasting that this week’s pipe bombs are also a hoax.

Spaeth embodies one of the most puzzling aspects of my week in Trumpland. Throughout the five rallies, I talk to scores of people, all of whom, without exception, are welcoming and pleasant. Yet hours later, in the pressure-cooker of the rally, they will turn on me and my mainstream media colleagues and hurl insults at us.

Spaeth admits that when he went to a Trump rally in Minnesota last month he took part in the finger-jabbing and the chanting of “CNN sucks”. It made him feel happy to be able to express his feelings so openly among like-minded folk. “I don’t see it as bullying,” he says.

There’s only one explanation for this pattern of behavior: that Trump enables good, civil Americans to metamorphose into media baiters. “Those people, fake news,” the president says sneeringly at almost every rally, pointing to the caged pen where reporters are cooped up during his speeches.

It’s a trigger mechanism: as soon as he says it, the chants begin. “CNN sucks! CNN sucks!” Many of the people chanting are also laughing – it’s that humor thing again. But CNN is taking no chances: they bring private security guards to every rally.

With the wound of the pipe bombs so fresh, Trump refrains from the usual “fake news” routine. He also holds back from personal attacks on Democrats, though in the other rallies I attend I hear Trump denigrate by name five of the 14 targets of the pipe bombs (Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Soros and Waters).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Trump supporter makes his feelings known. Photograph: Fred R Conrad/The Guardian

Tonight, he talks about the need to “bring our nation together”. It’s an extraordinarily cordial message coming from him. But listen closer. His call to unity is in fact a veiled attack on his political enemies.

In the name of “peace and harmony”, he tells politicians to stop treating their opponents – for which read Trump – as “morally defective”, and he references the “mob” – for which read Democrats. Remarkably, he is actually mocking the very concept of national unity while calling for it.

It is not until the day after my week of Trump rallies ends in North Carolina that the consequences become fully apparent of a nation whose civilian population owns vastly more guns than any other being led by a man who whips up racial fears and mocks national unity. On Saturday 27 October, two hours after he had posted a rant against “invaders that kill our people”, Robert Bowers enters a synagogue in Pittsburgh, pulls out an AR-15 style assault rifle and at least three handguns, and kills 11 Jewish worshippers.

They want to turn America into a socialistic country. It’s disgusting Steve Spaeth

Within a few hours of the Pittsburgh attack Trump is back at his next rally in Illinois promising “strong borders, no crime, and no caravans”. Within 48 hours of the attack he has renewed his unfounded claims that “very bad people” are mixed in with the caravan and that the “fake news media” is the “enemy of the people”.

But those events still lie in the future. Tonight in Wisconsin, the crowd are focused on only one thing – hearing their leader. It includes Steve Spaeth (no relation), 40, who runs a home exteriors company in West Bend. I ask him who he regards as his political enemies, and whether “hate” is too strong a word.

“Not at all,” he says. “I have a deep and absolute disgust for these human beings.”

Which ones?

He rattles off CNN, Soros, Clinton, Waters, Booker, “Pocahontas” AKA Elizabeth Warren, and others.

Why do you hate them?

“They want to turn America into a socialistic country. It’s disgusting.”

I ask Spaeth how far he is prepared to take his hatred. In reply, he tells a story. The other day he talked to his sister, who is liberal and votes Democratic. He said to her: “If there is a civil war in this country and you were on the wrong side, I would have no problem shooting you in the face.”

You must be joking, I say.

“No I am not. I love my sister, we get on great. But she has to know how passionate I am about our president.”

To end an account of a week in Trumpland on a low note would be inaccurate – fake news.

Look around the sports arena in which he holds his last rally of the week and all you can see is a mass of smiling faces. That raises another uncomfortable truth: to grasp what is going on in the world of Trump rallies, you have to accept how good he makes his people feel.

They are buoyed by hope.

That hope begins with jobs. Trump’s base is convinced that he has turned the economy round and that the wind is now in their sails. America is great again.

From the gravel pit worker in Montana who said orders are up; the teenager in Texas overladen with offers for weekend shifts; to Matthew Holt, 20, here in Charlotte, North Carolina who says his family-run gas station is doing just great – the prevailing mood is optimism.

While the president berates the media for their lies – “all we want is honest coverage,” he says tonight – his own taste for mendacity has been on ample display all week. He has boasted falsely that the tax cut he enacted last December was the “biggest in history” (it is the eighth largest since 1918); that Asian American unemployment is at a historic low (it was one percentage point lower under Obama); that at least eight new steel plants are opening (only two existing plants are being expanded).

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That’s before you get to his lies about the Democrats paying for the immigration caravan (they didn’t) or wanting to abolish the federal immigration enforcement agency Ice (they don’t).

Commentators have long debated why Trump is so fond of lies, whether it’s conscious or not. Given how carefully he crafts his rallies, the answer seems indisputable.

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Katy Tur, the NBC News reporter who was targeted by Trump during the 2016 election, begins her book on the experience with a revealing quote from him: “I play to people’s fantasies. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

That’s a perfect summary of how the rally ends. Trump pumps out his final words – “We will make America great again” – the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want is cranked up at such volume that CNN will find it hard to live broadcast, and the thousands of supporters begin to head out.

They carry with them a renewed love of their leader, reawakened fears about the mortal threats all around, strength in themselves and the rightness of their crusade, hate in their bellies towards those they call “un-Americans”, and hope that their worldview will prevail.

The doors are flung open, air rushes in to the Trump terrarium, and they step outside into the dark night.