at recent rallies, donald trump <u+2019>s warm-up playlist, the one the candidate famously insists on choosing himself, has featured <u+201c>funeral for a friend/love lies bleeding,<u+201d> the opening medley from elton john<u+2019>s 1973 album <u+201c>goodbye yellow brick road.<u+201d> like a lot of the playlist, it<u+2019>s an endearingly perverse song for a political event, opening with a somber minor-key dirge performed on a chorus of analog synthesizers. the track played at least a couple of times at the giant center arena in hershey, pa., on friday night, as we waited for trump to arrive, and whenever the dolorous synths cut through the fried-dough-scented air, i felt as if i were at some hybrid of a monster-truck rally and a requiem mass. for all the bluster and provocation of trump<u+2019>s candidacy, its overriding theme has been loss: lost american jobs and industries, lost american prestige, a lost sense of what, in the minds of his supporters, it means to be american at all. this has been clearest at the moments when trump has tried to offer a sustained argument for his presidency. his 75-minute speech at the republican national convention assembled detailed evidence, both real and imagined, of america<u+2019>s decline, but what trump intended to do about it was mostly limited to vague gestures and get-rich-quick aphorisms: <u+201c>all of the people telling you that you can<u+2019>t have the country you want are the same people telling you that i wouldn<u+2019>t be standing here tonight.<u+201d> his campaign may nominally be about a future in which america<u+2019>s supposed decline is reversed, but the magic-wand way he makes promises, and the limited extent to which his supporters seem bothered by it, have always given away the game. ronald reagan<u+2019>s gauzy picture of incipient prosperity was at least convincingly imagined. trump<u+2019>s is a macguffin, a pretense for talking about what he and his supporters miss about an irretrievable past. which past trump<u+2019>s supporters are mourning, of course, matters immensely. is it the past of a booming manufacturing sector, affordable college and attainable homeownership? or is it the past in which white-majority america did not have a looming expiration date? this has been the central argument for a year and a half now among the many people who have been caught off guard by the popularity of trump and his vision for america. the fact that it is so often assumed to be an either-or prospect <u+2014> that you can somehow solve trumpism for a specific variable, without which it dissolves <u+2014> reflects an anxiety over what<u+2019>s on the other side of election day: whether we live in a country that could, at least in theory, be knitted back together, or one that does not want to be knitted back together at all. but loss can be complicated. fourteen minutes into his stump speech in hershey, trump summoned an older couple from the stands behind him: barbara and hugh rone, from south amboy, n.j. on the tuesday after memorial day weekend, the rones<u+2019> 19-year-old son, riley, was returning from the jersey shore when his motorcycle crashed on the garden state parkway, near tinton falls. he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. <u+201c>he was the biggest supporter i had,<u+201d> trump said, before yielding the floor to the rones. <u+201c>young guy, beautiful guy, the most popular person there was.<u+201d> in the slightly uncertain tone of a testimonial, barbara told riley<u+2019>s story. he was a varsity athlete, a community-college student who planned to take over his father<u+2019>s funeral home one day. he was also a fan of donald trump. when trump was informed of this fact, a week and a half after riley<u+2019>s death, he tweeted : <u+201c>riley rone was a great young man. we will miss him dearly.<u+201d> he called the family from the campaign trail. <u+201c>mr. trump said, if it cost millions, he would give everything he owned if it would bring my riley back,<u+201d> barbara told the crowd. as barbara told her story, the arena went from lively to hushed, then from hushed to held-breath silence. it was as silent as i<u+2019>ve ever heard a crowd of 11,000 people make itself. a lone man, off to stage left, shouted, <u+201c>we love you!<u+201d> i realized, with a start, that i had momentarily done the unthinkable: i<u+2019>d forgotten that trump, who was nodding respectfully off to the side, was onstage at all. trump<u+2019>s campaign has been unusually crowded with martyrs: his nominating convention alone included speeches by the mother of a state department officer killed in the u.s. consulate attack in benghazi, the father of a teenager killed by gang members who were in the united states illegally and the mother of a police officer killed in a car crash with an intoxicated undocumented immigrant. so i braced for what seemed like the inevitable conclusion of barbara<u+2019>s story <u+2014> but it never came. somewhere around milepost 103.6, riley tried to switch lanes and lost control of his bike. no one else was involved in the accident. it was the most true-to-life personal tragedy i<u+2019>d heard described at a campaign rally, profoundly sad and entirely random, devoid of any political implications. the point of the story was simply how much trump meant to riley. <u+201c>he was obsessed with mr. trump,<u+201d> barbara said, recalling her son<u+2019>s words as if they were prophecy. <u+201c>when there were 17, riley said, <u+2018>mr. trump is the nominee.<u+2019> when there<u+2019>s one nominee, mr. trump, riley said, <u+2018>mr. trump will be president.<u+2019> <u+201d> the family put trump<u+2019>s name on riley<u+2019>s grave marker. <u+201c>i want you to please, please, please vote for mr. donald trump in my son<u+2019>s honor,<u+201d> barbara said. <u+201c>please.<u+201d> she collapsed, heaving, against trump<u+2019>s chest. the crowd erupted. <u+201c>oh, boy, i didn<u+2019>t expect that!<u+201d> trump exclaimed, less than convincingly. there was a closed-circuit quality to all of this: riley rone saw something in trump, and trump acknowledged his having seen something, so voting for trump would affirm that both of them had been right. what trump stood for or intended to do as president didn<u+2019>t factor into the equation. there was no obvious way that riley fit into his narrative of american decline and redemption. what trump was offering the rones was an uncomplicated form of meaning, one that asked for nothing but votes and gave nothing but his attention. maybe this was just trump<u+2019>s version of cutting down on the red meat in the last days of the campaign, though his stump speech still featured all the standbys. the rallygoers cheered for the wall, the refugee ban, the imprisonment of his opponent. they wanted these things. but it doesn<u+2019>t diminish that fact, or its consequences, to point out that they didn<u+2019>t want only these things. at the giant center, it felt as if the most essential product of trump<u+2019>s candidacy, for the faithful, wasn<u+2019>t the prospect of him enacting these policies but what was happening right here in this room <u+2014> as if whether he actually built that wall was less important than the fact that his call for it had made the world sit up and take notice of him, and therefore of them, and all that they were grieving. in hershey, the few moments of truly visceral rage i witnessed were directed not at hillary or syrian asylum seekers or mexico but at the media, the dozens of us locked into our pen near the back of the arena floor, proxies for the many shadowy forces arrayed against trump. at one point a wiry man in a <u+201c>hil no<u+201d> t-shirt and a lopsided trump wig lunged at the guard rail around our tables, muscles tense, and berated a local reporter sitting meekly in the front row. all i could make out was, <u+201c>are you going to tell that story tonight?<u+201d> nearly every person i met, after trump left the stage and we all began heading for the exits, demanded to know why the tv cameras on the platform in the middle of the arena hadn<u+2019>t once turned away from trump to show them <u+2014> why the story was the candidate and not the people who had drawn themselves close around him, why we were not seeing what they saw. a woman from gettysburg named betty fowler, speaking softly and leaning on a cane, wanted to know if i<u+2019>d seen the two young boys, the children of a family she knew, who had been running around the floor during the speech waving trump signs, working up the crowd. <u+201c>they just lost their dad, not too long ago, to cancer,<u+201d> she said. <u+201c>their mother and dad taught them, right before he died, what to do. they were saying: <u+2018>crooked hillary! crooked hillary! lock her up!<u+2019> these little children <u+2014> they listen.<u+201d> a tall, barrel-chested man named kraig moss nodded. in the rolling carnival that has grown up along the trump campaign trail, moss had attained a minor celebrity : <u+201c>they call me the trump troubadour,<u+201d> he told me. moss was from owego, n.y., where he still had a house, though he mostly lived on the road now, shuttling between natural-gas fields in pennsylvania, ohio and west virginia. he had been following the campaign since january, guitar in hand, writing and performing his own campaign songs. he looked like an outlaw country singer from the <u+2019>70s, dressed in a black leather vest, a plaid snap shirt and an immaculate stetson, garnished with a small cross and a pendant of mammoth ivory. hershey was his 44th trump rally. <u+201c>this place was alive ,<u+201d> he said. <u+201c>everybody was so tuned in to what he was saying <u+2014> it just exploded.<u+201d> in january 2014, moss<u+2019>s 24-year-old son, rob, died of a heroin overdose. the rones<u+2019> story was familiar to him. <u+201c>they didn<u+2019>t know what to do,<u+201d> he told me. <u+201c>i didn<u+2019>t, either, when i lost my son. i was down for two years. then all of a sudden i hear him<u+201d> <u+2014> trump <u+2014> <u+201c>talking about protecting the borders, keeping the drugs from coming in. that<u+2019>s when i started supporting him.<u+201d> he drove out to a rally in urbandale, iowa, with a man he met named julian raven, who had painted an enormous trump portrait in his garage. <u+201c>and when i talked to those kids out there about heroin, and i see them nudging their friends and stuff, it just got me,<u+201d> he said. <u+201c>that<u+2019>s where i decided i was going to go to rallies.<u+201d> as the stragglers left the arena, moss and i walked out into the crisp, clear night, to the corner of the parking lot where he had left his pickup truck. <u+201c>you know, i<u+2019>ll admit,<u+201d> he said, wincing a little, <u+201c>i don<u+2019>t like the way he talks about you guys.<u+201d> he had heard a rumor that the foreign press had been banned from trump rallies <u+2014> though in the press pen this didn<u+2019>t seem to be the case <u+2014> which bothered him; he had recently enjoyed being filmed by a chinese documentary crew. he propped up the truck bed<u+2019>s cover and fished around through clothes and guitar gear for a knife, so he could open a box of the cds of trump songs he had recorded and self-released. he handed me a fistful of them. <u+201c>give them to your friends,<u+201d> he said, then thought for a second. <u+201c>i don<u+2019>t suppose you know a lot of trump supporters.<u+201d> i asked moss where he was going. <u+201c>manchester on monday,<u+201d> he said; new hampshire would be trump<u+2019>s last east coast appearance before election day. moss looked out at the long line of traffic inching out of the parking lot in the direction of the highway. <u+201c>tonight, i<u+2019>ll probably just recline the seat.<u+201d> moss<u+2019>s cd is called <u+201c>donald trump for president.<u+201d> the songs <u+2014> <u+201c>trump train,<u+201d> <u+201c>let our voices be heard<u+201d> <u+2014> are about trump, and the jacket artwork is a collage of trumps, along with the occasional trump supporter. but tucked inside is a loose piece of paper, with a picture of moss<u+2019>s son and a copy of the letter moss wrote him on the first anniversary of his death. <u+201c>i thought i<u+2019>d write to you one last time,<u+201d> it says. <u+201c>oh, how i wish i were going somewhere with you <u+2026> working with you <u+2026> laughing <u+2026> something other than this.<u+201d> moss sifts through the memories: the time he and rob went to cowboy church in florida, the time a screech owl divebombed them in a park in fresno, the time they rolled over a big piece of quartz on a hike and found themselves surrounded by cows. <u+201c>anyway, what<u+2019>s done is done,<u+201d> he writes. <u+201c>i always told you dying was a part of living. now i got to understand what i was saying.<u+201d> driving home that night, i realized i<u+2019>d forgotten to ask moss what he planned to do after nov. 8. the outcome of the election was enormously important to him, obviously. but i wondered if, practically speaking, it might not make much of a difference to him at all <u+2014> it seemed as if most of what he needed from trump he had already gotten. <u+201c>we all cope with death in different ways,<u+201d> he wrote in the cd notes. <u+201c>supporting mr. donald j. trump for president and singing to the folks at his rallies has allowed me to talk about my son.<u+201d> and he had met <u+201c>so many great people along the way.<u+201d> is this what politics is for? it shouldn<u+2019>t be. but sometimes it is. charles homans is the politics editor for the magazine.
donald and the dead
charles homans