Campaign events that once incubated anger and disenfranchisement have taken on an air of joyous celebration. President Donald Trump’s supporters see his presidency as an undisputed, historic success. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Elections Inside Trump’s 2018 rallies: Cocky young men and few protesters A visit to several Trump campaign events reveals that the resentments of 2016 have been replaced by a triumphal sense of confidence: 'The sun has risen again,' said one Trump supporter.

HOUSTON — Outside the Toyota Center where President Donald Trump was soon to fire up his supporters Monday night, a parked SUV was draped in a banner declaring a “Red Wave Tour,” complete with an image of Trump surfing a red tide about to swamp an unsuspecting donkey.

That may not be a widely shared forecast of next month’s midterm elections, but it does capture the triumphant mood of Trump’s political rallies as Election Day closes in.


Two years ago, Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies had an air of insurgency. He was on a seemingly impossible mission, but even in likely defeat he would be giving his supporters a voice and sticking it to the Washington establishment.

Today, the campaign events that once incubated anger and disenfranchisement have taken on an air of joyous celebration. Trump’s supporters see his presidency as an undisputed, historic success. And writing off polls that favor Democrats as the handiwork of the fake news media, they betray little concern for the risk of a potential electoral disaster and are taking an early victory lap.

“Who believes the polls?” asked Bruce Troutwine, 62, an automation specialist who attended a Trump rally in Missoula, Mont., last week. “I have not been part of a poll in 40 years.”

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In Houston, as well as Missoula and Mesa, Ariz., there were other new themes since 2016, and, of course new internet memes. Young men have become a more visible presence at the rallies, while liberal protesters have faded into the background — a sign, some Trump fans insisted, that the anti-Trump “resistance” is growing weaker, not stronger.

But a prevailing feeling was not so much that Trump is surrounded by enemies and needs help. Instead, it was that president has already won.

“He has literally saved this country from going off the cliff," said Powell Swanser, a sculptor and bladesmith, who wore an elaborate necklace inset with arrowheads. Trump, Swanser said, has already joined the pantheon of the country's five best presidents

“The sun has risen again,” Swanser said. “It’s like we can see the sun again.”

To Trump’s supporters, the sun comes in many forms. Some are real — like gross domestic product growth, job creation and tax cuts. Others are imagined, like the supposed 50,000 sealed indictments of left-wing pedophiles drawn up by Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller, a key facet of the fantastical pro-Trump internet conspiracy theory known as “Q.”

Another new addition to the rally mix: more and better-organized groups of young men, who have become a more visible presence at recent events than they were in 2016. That shift mirrors polling, including by Reuters/Ipsos and Pew, which shows white male millennials breaking toward the Republican Party as issues of race and gender have come to dominate political discourse, especially on social media (partly thanks, of course, to Trump himself).

Two dozen members of the Proud Boys—a pro-Trump “Western chauvinist” fraternal group whose membership and visibility has surged over the past two years, in part because of its role in violent street altercations—turned up for Trump’s rally in Mesa last Friday night. They declined to answer questions. “We usually defer that to officers,” one said, explaining that none were present.

A large group of teenage boys from Scottsdale’s Chaparral High School also gathered at the rally’s entrance. (Not all were white: One wore a “Gay Latinos 4 Trump” shirt.) Rather than attend the event, the bikers, the Proud Boys and the high school students clustered around a group of protesters, taunting and yelling at them.

More frat boy swagger was on display inside a hangar at a Missoula airport where Trump was scheduled to speak on Thursday. About a dozen young college Republicans from Washington State University, all men, gathered near the press pen and took photos together while flashing the “OK” hand sign, which is either a symbol of white supremacy or an ironic way to upset progressives, depending on whom you ask.

Though the sun was well on its way to setting, many wore aviator sunglasses, and several heckled CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta. One young man remarked that he would not be satisfied until he made Acosta cry. (He failed.) When Trump, speaking in the open air, returned an “I love you” from a woman in the crowd, another young man shouted at the president, “I love you!” then added, “No homo!”

The atmosphere at the rallies can be bewildering without a certain fluency in pro-Trump internet memes, which have proliferated since 2016.

References to the “Q” conspiracy theory, which first took off this summer, were thick on the ground on T-shirts and bumper stickers. The elaborate theory — which maintains that Trump and Mueller are cooperating to prevent a deep state coup backed by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros — continues to enjoy support among rally attendees, whose devotion to the theory borders on the religious.

There were also references to “NPC,” an abbreviation for “non-playable character” and the latest pro-Trump internet meme to break through at the rallies. The phrase comes from video games and refers to characters that are controlled by a computer rather than human players. It’s meant to convey the idea that Trump’s critics are unthinking automatons who follow popular opinion.

Among the protesters in Mesa, a stocky man shouted continuously, “Orange man bad! Orange man racist!” In fact, the initiated would recognize the chant as a pro-Trump allusion to the NPC meme. The man also wore a mask associated with the meme, but the obscure reference was lost on the vast majority of attendees.

Though Trump has made a point of campaigning against protesters—calling them “left-wing mobs”—the protests at recent rallies were smaller and more muted than they were two years ago, when some rallies drew thousands of demonstrators and violent clashes involving Trump supporters, protesters and police were commonplace.

During his presidential campaign, Trump gleefully spotlighted protesters and hecklers at his events, sometimes even encouraging his supporters to attack them.

Trump’s first-ever megarally, in Phoenix in July 2015, was interrupted repeatedly by protesters. And when Trump visited Phoenix last August, demonstrators threw rocks and bottles at police, who responded with tear gas.

Bikers for Trump and other supporters of the president surround protesters and exchange insults at the rally entrance in Mesa, Arizona. | Ben Schreckinger/POLITICO

But when Trump spoke at an airstrip in Mesa, outside of Phoenix on Friday night, only a couple dozen turned up.

“This is pathetic,” confessed one, who would only give her name as Eve.

The night before in Missoula—a liberal college town often called a “blue dot in a red state”—an estimated 1,500 demonstrators did join a “Love Trumps Hate” rally in a city park. But the event took place far from Trump’s rally. Off in the distance, Trump’s supporters, if they squinted, might see that protesters had added, to a giant letter ‘L’ that sits on the side of a local mountain (signifying Loyola High School at its base), the letters “I-A-R.”

But at the event itself, on the ground, protest was barely visible. One woman holding a “Love abides” sign walked up and down the line outside the event, chatting amiably with attendees. A group of a dozen students from the University of Montana also showed up to express their opposition, but only three were able to make it inside the event, which they watched peacefully.

Two hours before Trump’s Houston rally, the resistance amounted to a group of about 10 people barricaded off in a “free speech zone” around the block from the arena’s entrance, surrounded by dozens of police officers and out of sight of attendees.

The InfoWars host and notorious pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Alex Jones arrived on the scene and began mocking the protesters. “This is all they got!” he shouted into an air horn, while a kindly old woman in the protest zone shouted back profanities and flipped him off with both hands.

Cailley Formichella, 26, who demonstrated outside the rally in Mesa, said Trump’s supporters were wrong to infer that smallers protests at rallies were a sign that opposition to the president was dwindling. She predicted a “blue tsunami” in the midterms and offered a different explanation for her side’s small turnout.

“People are out organizing,” she said. “People are knocking on doors.”

Christopher Cadelago contributed to this report.