Inside the MAGA Asylum: Four Days of Worship With the Cult of Trump

MILWAUKEE — On the floor of Donald Trump’s nominating convention Thursday night, a woman from Illinois in a cowboy hat handed out fake bandages for attendees to affix to their ears in solidarity with the former president who was grazed by an assassin’s bullet. These “bandages” weren’t the bright white of the original — they were printed with the American flag. The text on the reverse side read: “July 13, 2024. ‘We ALL Dodged the Bullet.’”

As Trump took the stage to accept the GOP nomination, and recount his brush with death, a delegate from New Jersey, tears welling in his eyes, turned to take a selfie with the MAGA leader on the stage behind him. And as Trump reached the part of the story where he lifted a fist after surviving the attack, the entire crowd joined in unison with the former president’s bloodthirsty call to “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”

The Trump candidacy poses a grave threat to the democratic order. With the immunity ruling from the Supreme Court in his back pocket, and ambitions to act as a “dictator” to begin an unprecedented campaign of deportation of millions of people Trump claims are “poisoning the blood” of the country, the menace is plain. The GOP nominee’s calls for “unity” sounded, in reality, a lot like a demand for submission.

Yet if the American experiment is headed toward a cliff, the Trump convention in Milwaukee underscored that it is doing so in the cheesiest, most buffoonish way imaginable — complete with aging wrestling superhero Hulk Hogan tearing apart an American flag T-shirt to reveal a “Trump Vance” tank-top beneath, a performance that prompted Trump to blow Hogan an air-kiss from across the arena. The coronation’s proceedings were occasionally interrupted by a montage displayed on the jumbotrons of Trump dancing (if you can even call it that) at his rallies, as the 1978 disco hit “Y.M.C.A” blasted on the arena speakers — with delegates, politicians, and Trump superfans all performing the famed letter-dance, as if this were the most mundanely racist Bar Mitzvah ever staged. 

And upon accepting the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination on Thursday night, the ex-president and former reality TV star — before speaking of the recent attempt on his life, before talking about the victim of that shooting, before describing a landscape of so-called American Carnage — began by thanking Kid Rock, who had just performed on the same stage. The former and perhaps future president was sure to inform the crowd full of Republican supporters and luminaries that Kid Rock is not, in fact, Kid Rock’s real name. 

The crowd chuckled and woo’d.

If America does elect Trump again — as polls suggest is likely — and the country suffers the authoritarian bent that Trump and so many of the Republican elite are openly promising, that degradation won’t be executed with the faux-intellectual foundation of antidemocratic takeovers of past decades. It’ll be done with all the charm and dignity of early Bush-era reality TV pageantry, set against a soundtrack of the Village People.

If this is how the American empire finally crumbles into the silt, its four-day party was at times darkly funny, and more often humiliating, horrifying, and cruel. In the arena halls, when Sen. Ted Cruz was enrapturing the audience with accounts of undocumented individuals murdering and terrorizing America’s peaceful communities, Rolling Stone bumped into a seasoned foreign and war correspondent who had recently decamped to the United States to report on the Biden-Trump horror show. They asked, with utter disbelief: “Is this normal in America? Is it always like this?” 

With all the violence-obsessed rhetoric and intense focus on nurturing the Trump personality cult, the foreign correspondent remarked that the onstage displays they’d witnessed at the convention reminded them far more of the excesses and depravities of authoritarian states they had reported from, rather than regions sustaining healthy democracies.

Rolling Stone didn’t have much more to say than: Welcome.

The Trump convention was a bright-red party inside the hollowed-out core of a deep-blue city that cast its ballots nearly 80 percent for Biden in 2020, and had the feel that Milwaukee was being occupied by a conquering enemy. Entering the RNC convention security zone surrounding Fiserv Arena required passing through a Secret Service gauntlet of concrete barriers, dark metal fencing, metal detectors, and countless officers in bulletproof vests. To reach the interior was at once to set foot into a sanctuary of privilege. But the scene that unfolded for visitors also gave the vibes of a caged MAGA asylum. 

The security presence — in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life — was enough to shock and awe. It included the constant circling of a Coast Guard chopper and police gunboats patrolling the Milwaukee River, with assault rifles mounted on the bows. The Secret Service were everywhere, of course, but law enforcement presence also included legions of cops and state police from around the country, including from as far as Columbus, Ohio; Miami-Dade, Florida; and McAllen, Texas.

The merch hawked at the convention was as garish as it was cultish. In addition to rhinestone “Trump 2024” hats, conventioneers could pick up a leather-wrapped, $75 holy bible with the imprint of an American flag, jointly marketed by Trump and Lee Greenwood, the “Proud to be an American” songman who played throughout the week’s programming. There were also shirts with pictures of a bloodied Trump in the aftermath of getting shot that read: “BULLETPROOF.”

Seemingly everything inside the security zone was branded with the name of the leader of this cult of personality. The old-timey bus moving elderly attendees across the security zone? The “Trump Trolley.” A whole section of the arena was rebranded the “Trump Terrace.” Massive LED screens throughout the arena flashed images of bald eagles and Trump’s familiar catchphrases, including “Make America Great Once Again.”

The convention speakers’ focus onstage was often to tout the “forgotten” working men and women of this country’s blue-collar workforce. But the class picture inside Fiserv Forum, by contrast, was one of easy privilege: men in bow ties and smoking jackets, women in summery cocktail finery, and more seersucker than you’d see anywhere outside of the Hamptons.

Only MAGA grandees had access to the suite level at the arena, reached by a devoted escalator. In the span of minutes Wednesday night, Rolling Stone saw Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy take a ride to the skyboxes. McCarthy’s nemesis, Matt Gaetz, who had just spoken on the floor, took selfies with adoring fans, and then attempted to board the escalator of the elites. But by mistake he took the neighboring escalator to the nosebleeds. The Florida congressman awkwardly attempted to descend the staircase, but soon realized that his downward dash was making him a spectacle of futility, and so resigned himself to a trip among hoi polloi. 

The upper crust of the convention partied at exclusive events. On Tuesday, Rolling Stone attended a ritzy party sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Cornerstone Institute in a grand stone building with a gilded two-story hall in the interior. As attendees including former NBA center Enes Kanter Freedom and Fox News host Laura Ingraham noshed on deviled quail eggs and sipped champagne, they were treated to speeches by former Trump cabinet members Ben Carson, Matt Whitaker, as well as Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law who has led the Trump takeover of the Republican National Committee as its co-chair. 

Lara Trump hit overtly Christian nationalist themes that were not subtext at the convention — they were in boldface, tied to Trump surviving a would-be assassin’s bullet. “If you had any question as to whether or not God exists and performs miracles, we got our answer on Saturday evening,” Lara Trump said. “God is real. He performed a miracle, and it is only by the grace of God that Donald Trump is still here, because God is not finished with Donald J. Trump just yet.” After her speech, Lara Trump stepped upstairs to film an interview with Christian broadcaster Elaine Beck of the Proverbs Media Group.

Hardline Christian preachers and demonstrators greeted convention attendees at many of the exits of the security zone, including several who held graphic posters of aborted fetuses, and one whose banner read: “Attention lukewarm Christians: JESUS WILL VOMIT YOU OUT OF HIS MOUTH.” The fundamentalist currents sloshing through the convention were hard to square with the actual gospels. Instead of Love Thy Neighbor and Welcome the Stranger, the MAGA faithful on the convention floor waved posters reading “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW!”

The convention grounds outside the arena showed the heavy branding of three GOP think tanks and their affiliated action groups: the Heritage Foundation, of Project 2025 infamy; Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s Christian nationalist powerhouse; and the America First Policy Institute, a group co-founded by Texan fundamentalist billionaire oilman Tim Dunn. The way in which these three groups were interwoven into the off-center-stage programming of the Trump convention underscored their centrality to his campaign and his potential second administration.

The convention week also offered a bizarre form of C- and D-list celebrity watching. Is that David Brooks riding down the escalator? Look: It’s Russell Brand in the arena stairwell. Oh, that’s Bret Bair in full makeup on a golf cart. Who is at the center of that entourage rushing to the elevator? Ron DeSantis. Hey there Judy Woodruff. Dear God, it’s Fabio!

And Fabio’s really excited to be partying and snapping selfies in the same restaurant that Donald Trump Jr. and Newt Gingrich are in!!!

There were just a few recognizable national corporate vendors at the convention’s many tents and booths — AT&T and GM among them — but they mostly appeared to be marketing their wares to the myriad cops in attendance. Amid all the lowbrow wares and entertainment, one booth was hawking a high-end book: a tome of Donald Trump’s tweets reformatted as if they were e.e. cummings verses. 

The book was bound in a tasteful green hardback and embossed in gold, Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump. Produced by an indie publisher from Portland, it sold for the low, low price of $45, in honor of the 45th president. Rolling Stone even observed the authors pitching their product to Charlie Kirk, who laughed and seemed delighted as he handled the handsome volume, remarking, “I feel like I’m about to open up A Tale of Two Cities.”

He had a point. It was, indeed, the worst of times.