Liar's Circus by Carl Hoffman

Author:Carl Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

14.

I Would Fight You for Him

By dawn the temperature had fallen dramatically, and it was now forty-two degrees with strong, gusty winds. We had all taken breaks during the night, retreating to our hotel rooms or cars, except Thompson, who was still completely swaddled, head to toe, in a sleeping bag in his camp chair. I’d left about 11:30 p.m., Snowden not long after, and now he was freshly showered and shaved and smelling good, with gold cuff links peeking out of his camel-hair overcoat. “I’m a mini Trump,” he said, sipping a cup of coffee. “I ran for Congress once, and that’s enough. I like to tell it like it is too much. And that’s what Trump does. Speaks his mind and in a language that’s not customary for people to hear. I like the fact that when Trump announced, he said one of the things that is wrecking America is political correctness, because it’s making everyone afraid.”

Somehow, we started talking about houses and mortgages—“I’ve had thirteen primary residences,” said Snowden—and Thompson stirred and poked his head out of his sleeping bag and told us about his father, a pastor, who lived in a parsonage for twenty years. “He was fucked,” Thompson said. “He had built up no equity.”

“Oh my God!” said Snowden. “You’re a liberal! Don’t get me started. You’re making me mad! No one made him become a pastor and live for free for twenty years. This cradle-to-grave bullshit is too much. It was his choice!”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a few minutes.

Snowden picked up with the politics again. “First rally I ever went to was Goldwater, September 5, 1964. New York, Labor Day weekend, and that was when the presidential campaigns kicked off in those days. There were twenty thousand that day, and that was two months before the election. But this is different. It’s like nothing else.”

“Jesus was born on September 11,” said Thompson. “The Feast of Trumpets. That was the Gregorian calendar.”

“So what does that equate to today?”

“That date, not everyone would come to that conclusion,” Thompson said. “But a lot of things happened on that date.”

“I went to a Biden rally this summer,” Snowden went on. “I left my house and fifty-five minutes later I was there with ninety-five people. It was in the IBEW Hall and was fifty years to the day after the landing on the moon, July 20, 1969. Look!” He showed pictures of Biden talking to people at cafeteria tables. “I respect him, but it was really kind of pathetic. I mean, look, you call that a rally? He had forty-six years of service in the Senate and I can’t believe his wife let him run for office.”

Another gust of wind. The temperature had fallen another three degrees. We still had thirty-three hours to go until Trump’s speech. At 10:00 a.m. a man wearing a black cowboy hat, Skeches trail shoes, baggy blue jeans, and pulling a big roller suitcase strode into our little circle. I recognized him: the frenetic-looking guy with the iPad and the trump tweets matter T-shirts from Dallas.

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