The World Trump Created By Jack Butler
July 2, 2021 6:30 AM
Wellington, Ohio — It’s a common trope in literature, and probably to some extent a feature of our own lives, that journeys end where they began, either literally or metaphorically. So it’s tempting to see former president Donald Trump’s return to northeastern Ohio this past Saturday for his first campaign-style rally since leaving office as a kind of bookend to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. There, just short of five years ago, Trump formally secured his status as the standard-bearer for the Republican Party. It certainly has been a journey since then.
But this literary lens would skew the situation. Not just because the small town of Wellington, home to the Lorain County fairgrounds, which hosted this rally, is 45 minutes southwest of Cleveland, and quite different from the Lake Erie metropolis. More important, whatever these two Trump visits to Ohio bookend, what I understood as an attendee of this rally is that he has no intention of ending his political journey anytime soon. And his myriad supporters will remain by his side, self-affirming conspiracy theories and all.
The people who came to this “Save America” rally were happy to be here, and helped it resemble an event in the middle of campaign season rather than an event against pro-Trump-impeachment Republican Anthony Gonzales, who represents a nearby House district and is up in 2022. There were signs of this enthusiasm before I even got to the fairgrounds. Rural landscapes and small towns throughout the state remain dotted with Trump paraphernalia. As I got closer, traffic patterns were being redirected to accommodate the massive influx of Trump fans to Wellington (2010 Census population: 4,800, surely doubled, at least, by day’s end). Cars in the fairground’s grass parking lot displayed license plates from not just Ohio but also Indiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Alabama — and those were just the ones I saw. Awakened by the return of their champion, they had come from far and wide............
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/the-world-trump-created/
