Under the spell of the crowd

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours on a block of Midtown Manhattan – 33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues – surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so the pack advanced 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers in front closed again. Every time we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” erupted, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup was on the bill, was in view the entire time, a few hundred yards away. Snipers sat on high-rise rooftops and a few drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but the message reached us from the front page that the tickets were not checked – they were a ploy by the campaign to intercept fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled, the clock ticked past us.

I’ve been to Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiar dark and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political crowd wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were many more black and brown people and many more Orthodox Jews than you would see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupation force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened throughout the afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. Getting out through the sideways crush and climbing over metal barriers for a bathroom break or a cup of coffee would require a great effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Standing next to me was a solemn-looking man in his 20s, holding a tiny American flag in one hand. He said he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — a world-renowned, progressive Orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lone dissident. One in about three? No, he said – there were secret comrades in the warehouse. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, regardless of the outcome. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats were only guilty of demonizing their opponents because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no .

An hour later and 100 feet away, I was standing next to Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and a lack of international respect; also, The apprentice. Richard was sure Trump would win in a landslide – would even take deep blue New York City. (There is a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the idea that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 a.m.—after two hours of standing and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been a regular traffic jam in Manhattan, the sound of car horns would have been deafening. But the audience remained shockingly patient and agreeable, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters of a local betting market passed out red T-shirts giving Trump a 57 percent chance of winning, and Richard, Jason and my other neighbors caught a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator barked, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone laughed. Being fellow Americans, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to keep things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, it’s just a political tribe—Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street – that creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock we hadn’t moved for more than an hour. With this immobility in the heart of New York City, the crowd solidified into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Between the men of Flatbush and a metal barricade, I lived in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful bursts of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair come through, wheelchair come”—all these signs of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here longer, I might be enchanted too, like a lost climber who rests in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I pushed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; in Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy theory, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and nepos, the opportunists and fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.