Snakebit in the Bronx

What I saw, in spite of terrible hardships, at the Trump rally in May in Crotona Park

I wrote down some observations after roaming around the margins of the Trump rally in the south Bronx in May. But I wanted to wait to develop some photos I took before publishing, and it ended up taking so long that the subject didn’t seem timely anymore, so I never did. Now that Trump has won a second term—improving his performance in the Bronx by 22 points, the biggest swing of any New York county—I thought it would be worth sharing them here. I haven’t made any changes to the below text.

On the morning of the Trump rally in the Bronx I woke up, got in the shower, and injured myself in the most humiliating way possible.

Here’s the story: nothing came out of the medium-sized bottle of almond-scented Dr. Bronner’s liquid castile soap when I turned it upside-down. I had left open the cap on its plastic hinge and the soap—as Dr. Bronner’s soap often does when you leave open the cap—had congealed into a gelatinous plug (this tendency no doubt due to its pristinely back-to-the-land, paraben- and phthalate-free recipe).

Rather than step out of the shower and seek some sort of appropriately narrow instrument to clear the blockage, I opted for the same strategy I’d recently used to disastrous results with a jammed ketchup bottle full of green salsa in Chicago’s Taqueria Los Comales: squeeze it until the blockage clears.

This strategy worked. On the third squeeze, more aggressive than the previous two, the plug of soap was launched free of the bottle by a vigorous, almond-scented jet of soap that traveled directly into my open right eye. Rearing back, yelling, clawing gobs of New Age liquid castile soap from my face as an excruciating burning sensation engulfed my eye socket, with my unscathed left eye I desperately scanned the bottle for instructions on what to do if you shoot pressurized soap into your eyeball. But all I could make out were the oracular woo-woo pronouncements and obscure, peppy cajoleries etched into every little corner of the Bronner’s bottle.

“For 6,000 years the astronomers Abraham & Israel, since the year One!” — Nope.

“Always working, searching for more truth, more light.” — Nope.

“If cap clogs, poke it clear. Do not squeeze bottle.” Ah, yes. Well, fair enough. “Flush eyes well with water for 15 minutes.”

I couldn’t get rid of the burning sensation no matter how much I flushed my stinging eyeball—thank God that on a whim in the bodega that other day I’d opted for almond instead of my usual peppermint—so I staggered through the streets of Brooklyn, squinting and weeping soapy tears into a handkerchief, to the optometrist’s in Crown Heights, where I was dealt with in due course by the brusque but sympathetic doctor on call.

By early afternoon I had my eye drops, I had my lunch (picked up at the Caribbean bakery on the way back: two doubles, tamarind-laced channa masala ladled between spongy discs of bread, and an ample bone-in chicken roti, all washed down with bright red soda). I even had a rather swashbuckling eye patch for the light sensitivity that, I was told, could be expected to persist until my cornea recovered over the next 24 to 48 hours. Walking around with it on the streets of Brooklyn I must have looked like some kind of tragic case—young man maimed by stray firework or subway maniac’s knife—when in fact I had merely been temporarily brought low by a bottle of homeopathic soap.

I canceled all my plans for the evening and set about finishing my work for the day, editing articles with one eye. But as the work day concluded and the smarting diminished slightly, I wondered if I couldn’t make it, after all, to the Trump rally about to begin in Crotona Park in the Bronx. There might be something to write about there. Perhaps my eyepatch would make me a somewhat more palatable presence to the attendees. I’d never been to a Trump rally but my mental image of the attendees was that of a motley crew, a sort of postmodern, Mad Max take on Jacksonian America. I wouldn’t have to tell them why I was wearing the eye patch. It didn’t seem they would take too kindly to the name of Dr. Bronner …

The rally was an intriguing move on Trump’s part—after all, as all the papers said, Trump lost the Bronx, one of the most Democratic parts of the country, by eighty points in 2020. The ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan, expected to conclude in the coming days, has had the effect of bringing him back to his origins. Itching to keep campaigning but trapped in deep-blue New York City, he had so far opted to make a few appearances, including at a bodega uptown. But a rally in the South Bronx?

Trump clearly wanted photos of black and Hispanic Bronx residents in MAGA hats splashed across the news, to give a boost to his recent bid—which, according to polls, was having some significant effect—to draw more of the nonwhite vote away from the Democrats. But would the South Bronx turn out? The rally might end up as just a gathering point for a more familiar bunch of tri-state Trump supporters—the petty bourgeois suburban or vestigial outer-borough type, matching Trump’s cultural background and his not so deeply felt cultural conservatism but similarly at odds with their commandingly Democratic states: at once the truest and most eternally frustrated type of Trump supporter.

So, curious, I got on the 2 train and rode it all through Manhattan up to Crotona Park in the South Bronx. I was very late to the rally, which had started at 6—but who would come to a Trump rally in the South Bronx? It was a humid late afternoon with big slabs of cloud passing through the whitish blue hazy sky. Black and Dominican people from the surrounding neighborhood crisscrossed the park as I walked south toward the rally. Ahead of me on the path was a group of keffiyeh-clad kids with signs, headed to the protest outside the rally.

I heard his voice first. So familiar, those cadences—drawling, sneering, bellowing—heard in clips and on television a thousand times in these last years: almost a decade since his arrival at the center of national politics, it boggles the mind to remember. But here that voice was, here! In New York City, the sanctum sanctorum, quadruply protected from the reaches of that other, bad America. Even here, there was that voice: amplified, carrying through the dense afternoon air of a New York City park, the way I’d only ever heard the voices of barbecue organizers or yoga class teachers in Prospect Park. How uncanny.

Young love … at the Trump rally in the Bronx

As it turned out, the voice would be all that I would get of Trump. Across an algae-choked pond, I could see a perimeter of metal barricades, guarded by NYPD and Secret Service. This perimeter protected a bowl-shaped hill, on the other side of which, you could tell without being able to see, the crowd was assembled.

“Should I go off teleprompter and tell you the end result?” I heard that voice say. The invisible crowd cheered. “You think Biden goes off teleprompter? I don’t think so. He’s no good on teleprompter.”

But here too there was a crowd. Circling around the hill, I drew towards two opposed assembled masses. There, on top of a large outcropping of that dark shaly rock common in uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, an enthusiastic group of protestors stood and chanted loudly, carrying a large banner that read

FUCK TRUMP

FUCK BIDEN

This drew some begrudging compliments from the opposite group of Trump supporters, on the path below the outcropping, some shouting at the protestors above them on the outcropping, others queuing in long and apparently unmoving lines to get into the rally, which appeared to be at capacity.

I quickly abandoned the effort to get in. Things were interesting enough out here, and you couldn’t hear anything from the rally from the line because of the protestors and the general din. The group of Trump supporters, slung out along the chaotic band from the line to get in and the calmer area by the pond—where a relaxed atmosphere prevailed and where you could actually hear Trump speaking—was far from a typical assemblage. It was even far from being a kind of temporary addition, as I imagined it might be, to the archipelago of white enclaves scattered across the Bronx, from Riverdale in the west to City Island and the aspirationally named Country Club in the east.

A silver-haired man in a pinstriped grey suit and a MAGA yarmulke—a gay Dominican guy with dangling silver crucifix earrings calling out “Make America great again” to passersby with his arms wrapped around his boyfriend’s waist—an elderly white woman having an urgent phone conversation on her cell phone which was entirely wrapped in some kind of transparent plastic bag or sleeve—black men in red MAGA hats, black women in white MAGA hats, Orthodox guys in payot and MAGA hats—old Italian guys from Arthur Avenue in NEW YORK FOR TRUMP hats—square-jawed Long Island kids with barrel chests and Yankee jerseys, there they were … and none of these likely even countable among the real devotees, who presumably were all inside…

I retreated back toward the pond and took my place in the gallery of people leaning on the metal dividers, facing the police officers and the rise from beyond which Trump spoke. There was something very nineteenth-century about all this, the Whitmanesque human salmagundi of the crowd, the toothless vendors wheeling around carts of ten-dollar Trump hats, the mere fact of being able only to get close enough to hear snippets of the speech, delivered from behind a veil as if by the Wizard of Oz … wasn’t it the case that hardly anyone at Gettysburg could get close enough to Lincoln to hear him speak? But this wasn’t exactly like that, was it …

From what I could make out, we were now passing through a long section of on-teleprompter material, the tedious rhetorical routine—tedious for Trump too, it was always clear—which (this was an important part of the ritual) he maintained precisely in order to liberate the crowd and himself from it at ecstatic intervals, a kind of miniature version of what he always promised to do politically.

This speech had clearly been designed to appeal to the more urban, less Republican, less white New York City crowd—lots on inflation, cost of living, lots on crime, promises to shore up the subway system; repeated gestures to things Democrats, Republicans and independents could supposedly all agree on; bragging about how good things were for black and Hispanic Americans under the Trump years.

“And these millions and millions of people who are coming into our country”—he always said “millions” in that distinctive way, as if it had a Welsh double-L in it—“The biggest negative impact is against our black population and our Hispanic population.” If I were a Democratic operative listening in on this speech, that line would sound a little chord of fear in my stomach.

To my left along the metal barrier a middle-aged Dominican woman in a Declaration of Independence shirt was saying in Spanish that people had been waiting for four hours to get into the rally and lamenting that she hadn’t gotten in. On this late summer Thursday in the Bronx the hottest club in New York City was the Trump rally … to my right was a Puerto Rican-American guy who talked in a stereotypically Italian-American accent—so much so, he sounded like a bad SNL parody of a Sopranos character.

“The minute Crooked Joe Biden shuffles out the door, I will rapidly rebuild the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump was saying.

“Shuffles out the door—this guy’s great. I love him,” said Puerto Rican Sopranos parody guy, picking up on the least remarkable remark that Trump had made all afternoon. “I wish he was my uncle. Uh-huh-huh! Right? That’s fucking great. Ninety-one felonies, no charges. Ha-HA! You understand? Ha-hahaaaa. They’ll never get him.”

The last sentence delivered in a slurred growl. The guy was onto something about the avuncular quality of contemporary populism … people often said in Brazil about Bolsonaro that he reminded them of their controversial but beloved uncle … so much the worse for the study of political psychology that Freud gave us so much on mothers and fathers and so little on uncles …

“We will make energy affordable again by saying, ‘Drill, baby, drill!’” cried Trump from behind the hill.

Puerto Rican Sopranos parody guy, however, turned out to be something of a bleeding-heart liberal on the energy issue.

“The ‘drill, baby, drill’ thing is cool, but it’s not really that cool,” he said, “Because it’s affecting the earth. You need something that’s renewable … they have to figure out how to perfect solar, wind, make it so that you’re not putting that shit in the grid, you’re putting it in the house.”

That’s what you get at a Trump rally in the Bronx.

As Trump was taking a break from being a candidate, having felt a desire to return to his days as a motivational speaker—“I’m so tired of politics! Can we devote six minutes to success? ‘Kay?”—I walked back over to check on the line. There was a bit of chaos as the Trump group exchanged taunts with the protestors up on the outcropping. Ever more extreme cries, from a few assembled Trump supporters who, by the look of them, arrived themselves on American shores three, two, one, zero generations ago, of “send them back,” “fuck ‘em, fuck all of them!”

A couple Hispanic guys pushed past me chanting Trump’s name in Spanish (Donal Tron). A white guy unfurled a rainbow banner that read GAYS FOR TRUMP. A line of riot-squad officers now began to form, blocking my way to the line to get in, which still didn’t seem to be moving in any case. Neighborhood kids ran around underfoot dribbling soccer balls, shrieking, “Biden’s finished!” in Spanish.

Back by the pond, Trump had veered into speculation about the recent wave of migrants. Were they forming an army? They spoke languages no one had ever heard of. Like something out of the fall of the Roman Empire…

Now he prepared to read the poem that is an age-old staple of these rallies:

On her way to work one morning,

Down the path alongside the lake,

A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.

His pretty-colored skin had been all frosted with the dew.

“Oh well,” she cried, “I’ll take you in and I'll take care of you.”

“Take me in oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven's sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

She wrapped him up all cozy in a curvature of silk

And then laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk.

Now she hurried home from work that night as soon as she arrived.

She found that pretty snake she’d taken in had been revived.

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

Now she clutched him to her bosom, “You’re so beautiful,” she cried.

“But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died.”

Now she stroked his pretty skin and then she kissed and held him tight .

But instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite.

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

“I saved you,” cried that woman.

“And you've bit me even, why?

“You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.”

“Oh, shut up, silly woman,” said the reptile with a grin,

“You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in,

“Take me in, oh tender woman,

“Take me in, for heaven’s sake,

“Take me in, oh tender woman,” sighed the snake.

The habitués in the crowd had cheered when Trump had dangled the poem before reading it, like the hardcore fans of some rock band rejoicing when they announce the next song will be an old concert favorite. They understand, those habitués, the irony that lurks in Trump’s delivery of the poem. On the face of it, it’s a straightforward allegory about the risks of Christian charity when offered to malevolent recipients. It no doubt does its job admirably for the Christians in Trump’s audience at a normal, non-Bronx rally—supplying a kind of anti-Parable of the Good Samaritan. It appeals to that rather Old Testament strain in the American religio-cultural tradition, in which a very real charitable imperative coexists with the capacity for boundless wrath and ultimate exclusion for those understood to stand in opposition to one’s own brotherhood.

But at a subtler and more piquantly ambivalent level this parable of the snake—there’s no denying it—describes Trump’s own relationship to his supporters. The terrible, and yet somehow irresistible temptation to take in the frozen serpent, the inevitable and mortal bite upon its reanimation, and the final jeer, reminding the victim that all of this was foretold in advance: it’s all there. Take me in from the cold, Trump says. You know what will happen but you know you’ll do it anyway. You want to be bitten. And what could be more American than that?

A younger-middle-aged white guy on a unicycle draped in American flag gear and wearing the sort of Viking helmet associated with that one guy who stormed the Capitol pedaled himself over carrying a megaphone. I took a picture, then immediately regretted it as he started delivering, through the megaphone, his woeful attempt at parody of the assembled Trump supporters, in that ironic tone I associate with Gen X, a flat kind of irony that barely disguises a deep terror and resentment of one’s own powerlessness.

“Trump for dictator!” he cried. “Trump for dic-ta-tor!”

He kept this up until, eventually, the mostly black and Hispanic Trump supporters around, having ignored him, started telling him to go away and that he was annoying.

The Gen X anti-QAnon anti-shaman

The rally wound down, a few local Democratic politicians taking the stage in turns with Trump, before he delivered a final peroration. Who knew if any of the people at the rally would take the subway back to wherever they came from, but just in case, to beat the rush I hightailed it out of there, past the neighborhood kids dribbling soccer balls, past the American flag canopies under which guys were selling Bronx rally pins and Trump memorabilia, past the apartment blocks and vinyl-sided low-slung Bronx houses, down toward the subway.

A guy was playing old bossa nova songs on his saxophone by the trestle. Then, “Old Man River.” Out to the west between the buildings a pink-orange strip was swelling outward from the horizon.   

“I was just there for the moment,” a black woman said on the phone to her friend in the bodega as I ordered a sandwich to eat on the train back to Brooklyn. “We need some excitement in the Bronx.” We’re snakebit, and we like it.