View this post on the web at [link removed]

In the spring of 2016, my novel, “The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear,” was published by Knopf. I finished the novel a year earlier, before a candidate named Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator.
The novel was set over four days at a deadlocked Republican Convention in New Orleans. The race for the nomination was between a former Vermont governor and sitting Vice President named Hilda Smith and a right-wing populist Colorado governor named Armstrong George. He was running on a “New Bill of Rights” that called for the deportation of millions of immigrants, the end to birthright citizenship, and a military zone the length of the Mexican border. His slogan was “Take America Back.” When asked about how millions could be deported, his stock answer was “The innocent have nothing to fear.”
The main character and narrator is Hilda Smith’s campaign manager, a native New Orleanian named J.D. Callahan. On the opening day of the convention, a bomb goes off in the French Quarter, killing delegates. J.D. knows this is good for Armstrong George’s campaign of fear. When the second bomb goes off the next day, he begins to suspect that Armstrong George is behind the bombings.
This scene takes place before the first bombing, when J.D. and his deputy campaign manager, Eddie Basha, attend an Armstrong George rally at Tulane University's football stadium.
THE LAST TWELVE HOURS I’d been to a bomb site and a political rally, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say the political rally terrified me more. A lot more.
It had been several hours before the bombing, at the big pre-convention Armstrong George rally held in Tulane University’s football stadium. As college stadiums go, it wasn’t so big, with seating for about thirty thousand. Hell, Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium held over a hundred thousand. But for a political event—a Republican political event—thirty thousand was a massive crowd. And it wasn’t just thirty thousand bodies. It was thirty thousand screaming, maniacal Armstrong George fanatics.
Eddie Basha and I took the streetcar up St. Charles to Tulane and walked over, surrounded by the George faithful. It was dusk, and we were both wearing baseball caps and George sweatshirts with cutoff sleeves, and nobody gave us a second look. We passed through the high-tech bomb detectors set up outside the entrance and found a place on the ramp to the stadium. The big halogen lights lit the green field brighter than the hazy day that was fading, and in the middle of the field, there was a small stage. That was it. No elaborate props or staging. Up on the Jumbotrons, videos played of Armstrong George bus tours, his slogan, “Take America Back,” emblazoned on the bus.
Were this a Hilda Smith rally, we would have a band onstage and introductory speakers, probably the most popular local pol we could get and a somebody from the area who repeated a theme we were pushing that day or week: a teacher, an unemployed worker, a female entrepreneur, a veteran. I was a big believer in the Kuleshov Effect, that early-twentieth-century Russian film experiment that took the same shot of an actor and surrounded it with different images. When you see it, you think the expression of the actor is changing, while it’s actually static, the point being that viewers had different reactions based on who and what went before and after. You could take the most unempathetic candidate and surround him with happy schoolkids, and unless the candidate started actually hitting the kids or screaming at them, odds were he would look warmer, and voters would talk about how he really cared about kids. Same with seniors, or minorities, or women, or…you name it. I once tried to explain to a candidate what the Kuleshov Effect was, and they looked at me like I was insane. Later, Eddie Basha told me, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t tell ’em what you are doing, just do it.” It was good advice.
We did it all the time with Hilda Smith, who had a natural Yankee aloofness that read cold. Which, in truth, was pretty accurate; she was cold by the standards of most “hug you until you can’t breathe, let me cry with you for a while” politicians of the new school. But since turning to Armstrong George and calling him out in that debate in New Hampshire, she had come to represent something that was still important to a lot of people in a beat-up country—call it dignity, or decency. At an ugly time, Armstrong George had marshaled the ugliness within us all. It was a deep, burning anger at the large forces that controlled our lives. It was probably close to the religious fervor that swept across the country in the late 1800s. Hilda Smith stood for a different kind of country, one that wasn’t seething with anger. Our bet was that something about Armstrong George made you feel worse about yourself and your country. That his calling for a New Bill of Rights and a new Constitutional Convention was radical, not conservative.
But it was a close thing, and that’s why we were down to fighting over a handful of delegates. As the sky darkened and the field grew brighter under the lights, the music swelled, and then suddenly there was Armstrong George, bursting from the locker room tunnel, trailed by his son, Somerfield. The two looked eerily alike, both tall and sturdy, with big, square, Protestant faces that looked like they came from a WPA mural of the wheat farmers who had tamed the prairie. Which was what the Georges had done. They were not from the mountainside of Colorado but the flat plains that resembled the heartland in geography and belief. There were no fireworks or razzle-dazzle tricks as Armstrong and his son walked toward the simple stage. But the crowd went absolutely crazy, their yells and applause growing louder the closer the Georges got to the stage.
Armstrong George bounded up the steps, took the mike in one hand, and detached it from the stand—no fancy headset for him, he wanted to work the mike the old-fashioned way—and let rip. “Americans!” he cried. “This is our moment!” It was chilling. The crowd went from fever pitch to berserk. “Are you with me? Are we together? Are we…Americans?”
Eddie leaned into me and whispered, “He’s big on this American thing.” It was more a shout than a whisper, the stadium was so loud.
“These have been dark days in America. Our beacon has been dimmed but not extinguished. Within each of you glows the fire to reignite the torch of American genius and greatness. You are our future!”
“God help us,” Eddie groaned, looking around at the crowd. “It’s 1930s Nuremberg.” I waved him off. I was there to see Armstrong George. Every time I saw him, I got some different perspective. I’d snuck into a dozen of his rallies over the past six months.
“You are the Founding Fathers of Tomorrow,” he said in a suddenly low, intense voice, so the crowd leaned forward. “I say to you that, like the Founding Fathers before us, now is the time we must seize the day and control our own destiny. It is time for a New Bill of Rights. It is Time for a New Beginning.”
Then the shout went up from a woman in the crowd. I would have bet anything she was a plant, but it was picked up, and soon the whole stadium was chanting in unison: “America for Americans! America for Americans! America for Americans!” Armstrong George took a step back, put his arm around his son, and waved.
“Jesus Christ.” Eddie sighed. “Jesus H. Christ. We’re doomed.”

Unsubscribe [link removed]?