Trumpus Maximus Goes to Mobile

About two hours before gates opened for Donald Trump’s out-of-nowhere, only vaguely explicable rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Alabama, a gaggle of us journalists began to work the line. The line—already 1,500 deep two hours out—was a dream, a Venn diagram of everything a political journalist desires at this particular point of this already ludicrous and undeniably irresistible campaign. There were:

It was chum in the water: It was crack. You could talk to young people, old people, white people, black people, tall people, short people, purple people (a couple did seem purple), all of whom were there to see the biggest, most confounding political story to hit since Barack Obama. Donald J. Trump, the Queens-bred real estate magnate with the mansions and the germ phobias and the love of Jacqueline Bissett, had packed an Alabama football stadium on a sweltering Friday night; it was as if he hastily assembled this rally on a dare, a dare he appeared to be winning.