Donald Trump has a rule at his rallies: for the fifty minutes before he takes the stage, the only music that can be played is from a set list that he put together. The list shows a sensitive side, mixing in Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and music from “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera.” But it’s heavy on the Rolling Stones—“Sympathy for the Devil,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and the famously impolitic “Brown Sugar.” The young volunteer in charge of music for one rally sent me the full Trump-curated playlist and asked for requests. “Remember,” he said, “the more inappropriate for a political event, the better.”

In mid-December, Trump brought his show to the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, in Arizona, where several thousand people crammed into an airplane hangar. The classic rock stopped as his Boeing 757, which has his name emblazoned on the fuselage in white letters, taxied toward us. “Ladies and gentlemen, the plane has arrived,” an announcer said, and the hangar filled with the patriotic chords of the theme from “Air Force One,” the Harrison Ford thriller in which Ford plays an American President who battles Kazakh hijackers. “Dude, that is so cool,” a young man behind me said to his friend as they watched. “Who needs Air Force One when you have your own airplane?” (According to a list of “Corporate Aircrafts owned by Donald J. Trump” in an appendix to Trump’s new book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” Trump also owns a Cessna Citation X and three Sikorsky S-76 helicopters.)

A small segment of Trump’s audience has little interest in politics, or even in voting for him. They come to see a free live show by a famous political performance artist. At each of the four Trump rallies I attended this winter—in Arizona, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Mississippi—some people left after taking a few pictures with their phones, and the departures steadily increased as Trump rambled on about his lead in the polls and about various losers in media and politics. But most stayed, and often many more were outside waiting to get in or huddled around television screens in overflow rooms. Trump is a celebrity but he’s not just a celebrity. “Somebody said, ‘Oh, Trump’s a great entertainer,’ ” Trump would tell the crowd in Mesa. “That’s a lot of bullshit, I’ll tell you. We have a message, we have a message, and the message is we don’t want to let other people take advantage of us.”

Trump’s 757 passed the hangar and made a U-turn while Secret Service agents moved into position at the bottom of a stairwell. (The Obama Administration granted Secret Service protection at Trump’s request, following a process designed to offer early protection for the candidates deemed most likely to win the nomination. The only other Republican candidate awarded similar protection this election cycle was Ben Carson, whose campaign faded soon after.) The aircraft’s thick door popped open and the candidate appeared. Trump was wearing a shiny blue tie, and from a distance his head looked like a pumpkin-colored balloon on a blue string descending to earth. The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the next President of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” and the “Air Force One” music gave way to the rousing drum bursts of the anthem played at every Trump rally: Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Trump briefly greeted the crowd, and then left the stage to record an interview with Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News, at the rear of the hangar. The day before, at a feisty Republican debate in Las Vegas, Trump had clashed several times with Jeb Bush—Bush called Trump a “chaos candidate,” Trump described Bush’s campaign as “a total disaster”—and O’Reilly wanted to talk about it.

After seven months of Trump, many people who attend his rallies have seen his show before, and his fans mimic his putdowns and cheer their favorite lines. Sometimes Trump asks, “Who’s gonna pay for the wall?” and the crowd yells back, “Mexico!” At another rally, Trump shouted, “Obama—” He then paused for dramatic effect while nodding his head. He finished his sentence with “her.” When he repeated it, the crowd filled in the missing word: “Schlonged!”—a reference to Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. In Mesa, Trump told O’Reilly that Bush has “a very, very low number,” referring to the polls, prompting a man in the hangar to yell, “Zero-energy Bush!”

At many events for Presidential candidates, supporters are hyper-sophisticated about politics and speak in sound bites that echo those of the candidates. One of Trump’s great successes is in attracting people who are otherwise alienated from the political process. The diehard Trump fans I encountered were mostly newcomers. In Mesa, when Trump told O’Reilly that Charles Krauthammer, the well-known (to conservatives) columnist and Fox News commentator, was “a totally biased terrible guy,” a puzzled supporter in the crowd asked a friend, “Who is that? Was he in the debate?”

Trump’s fans tend to express little regard for political norms. They cheer at his most outlandish statements. O’Reilly asked Trump if he meant it when he said that he would “take out” the family members of terrorists. He didn’t believe that Trump would “put out hits on women and children” if he were elected. Trump replied, “I would do pretty severe stuff.” The Mesa crowd erupted in applause. “Yeah, baby!” a man near me yelled. I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.

The racism of some Trump supporters has been well documented. At one rally in Las Vegas in mid-December, attendees punched a black protester while others yelled, “Shoot him,” “Kick his ass,” “Light the motherfucker on fire,” and “Sieg heil.” But most of the Trump supporters I encountered were people struggling to get by in an economy they no longer understand.

“We’re just tired of the actions of the government nowadays,” Karon Stewart, who is fifty-nine years old, told me after a rally in Mississippi. “The simple people pretty much have been forgotten.”

She said that she has followed Trump’s tabloid life on TV, and last year, when she heard him speak about politics, she registered to vote for the first time. She was not persuaded by arguments that Trump has been disrespectful to women and would have trouble running against Hillary Clinton. “I am a woman,” she said. “I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if she was the last person on the face of the earth. She is a disgrace to womankind.”

Stewart said that Trump supporters were misunderstood. “We’re not racist,” she told me. “We’re not prejudiced. We just love everybody. But we’re tired of being run over.”

She added, “My husband is in his fifties. He’s got one leg. But he gets out there and works two almost-full-time jobs, seventeen hours every day, Monday through Friday. And he works on the weekends. But there are people out there that we’re paying welfare who’ve got two perfectly good legs, and they just won’t get up off of their tushies to get a job.”