No Madness Like American Madness
Scenes from a debacle in Phoenix.
In downtown Phoenix, in the space of a few blocks, there were 15,000 Trump supporters and 10,000 anti-Trump protesters. There were Bikers for Trump and a platoon from the John Brown Gun Club, an anti-fascist group carrying loaded handguns and semiautomatic weapons. There were roving packs of weightlifters wearing pro-Trump attire. There were men in sleeveless Confederate flag jackets, and there was a giant inflated chicken made to look like Donald Trump. There was a man with a megaphone who asserted throughout the afternoon that homosexuals were going to hell, drunk drivers should die, and women who wore skirts deserved to be raped. There were anarchists, antifa, and hundreds of heavily armed police officers. This was a week after Charlottesville, the country grieving and boiling in the madness of its most irrational era, and in Arizona, it was more than 105 degrees and felt far hotter.
That no one died that day in Phoenix is miraculous.
On August 16, Donald Trump announced he would hold a rally in Phoenix. This would be a campaign-style rally funded by his reelection campaign.
Speculation swirled that his reasons for doing so were threefold: First, Jeff Flake, one of the two Republican senators from Arizona, had just published a book that was highly…
