Butler and Juneau Rallies Make Clear: There Are More Trump Supporters In America Than Ever

The tides have shifted in MAGA world – and those reverberations are being felt not only in politics, but across all of American society.  Many commentators on X noted in the aftermath of Saturday’s historic rally to Butler, Pennsylvania, the sight where Donald Trump was nearly slain some three months ago, how Lazarean the whole event was — with one insightful commentator noting how if one had the ability to time travel back to 2014 and explain to someone back then that “by 2024, Donald Trump, who had been president, was waging his third presidential campaign – and, exactly a month before election day, had made a pilgrimage to the location in which a bullet had nearly struck him down during the campaign – where he was joined by Tesla and X (formerly Twitter) CEO, Elon Musk, on stage, who was jubilantly jumping for joy, onstage, before a crowd size of one hundred thousand people” that person might have looked at you like a lunatic who had escaped the asylum!

But reality, as they say, is stranger than fiction.  The timeline of events this election cycle, not to say the last ten years, has been truly surreal.  Our reality, in 2024 America, is one where the forces of good are seemingly making a comeback against the forces of evil, where the divide between the two sides could not be any clearer (or more stark) – and where the outcome of this race, now less than a month away from November 5^th, will truly be the most consequential of any presidential election – certainly in living memory, perhaps in history. 

Dovetailing with that reality does appear to be a genuine shift in momentum, particularly in recent weeks – since the debate and second attempt on President Trump’s life. At Butler 2.0, Kamala Harris’ media-manufactured “honeymoon” over the summer is but a distant memory.  Everything about the event – from the optics down to the choice of music (which included stirring live performances from Lee Greenwood, who belted out an emotive “God Bless the U.S.A.” – and beautiful renditions of “Ave Maria” and “How Great Thou Art” (among other melodies) by Tenor Chris Macchio, which added a layer of solemnity – and gravitas, even – to end a most remarkable night. 

There are only a handful of presidents in American history who survived assassination attempts. Virtually every one of those attempts (Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, now Donald Trump) has been immortalized in American history, only enhancing the legend of their targets, creating a sense of destiny to their life’s work and mission.  The attempts on Donald Trump’s life stands, astonishingly, apart from the others, historically significant though they are, as the attempts on the former are a manifestation of the Left’s attempt to destroy the Republic itself.  In part, because, they reify and make blood-and-flesh reality of the extraordinary political stakes of this particular election cycle – stakes, which President Trump has been incessantly reminding audiences on the campaign trail in speech for the last two years. 

As Elon Musk explained in his short, but impactful, remarks at Butler, nothing short of free speech – the First Amendment – and by extension, the very fabric of our society – the Constitution, which is the law of land – is on the line. 

The importance of this election, in short, derives not so much from conventional disagreements in policy – be it inflation, the border crisis, or even the looming threat of world war, which are themselves monumental issues that can, depending on who is elected, result in outcomes that make, or break American society.  But going more deeply, the very foundations of our way of life, the principles enshrined in the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights, and epitomized in our governmental institutions, are on the chopping block in a way unlike any other time in American history: more so than the divisions that nearly tore America at the seams at the apex of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s; more so, even, than the deep-seated divisions that separated North and South, and catapulted this nation into civil war, in the lead-up to that most fateful 1860 presidential contest.

This is because at no other point in American history has one political party (the Democrats) been hijacked and fully overtaken by a virus – as much ideological and spiritual as it is political – as the modern Left has done to Kamala Harris’ Democratic Party.  What Kamala represents bears no relationship to anything seen in any political movement heretofore in our country’s history.  And it is not just her policies which are radical and proto-Marxist, from her advocacy of “ending price gouging” to curb inflation, to her support for taxing unrealized capital gains, a death knell to capitalism, to overcome budget deficits. 

Those are bad policies – existentially so – in and of themselves.  But their danger pales in comparison to the dangers of her movement’s ideological fixations, which have made clear their desire to overthrow America’s Constitution, the rule of law, due process, the presumption of innocence, and the morals and ethical substrate woven throughout Western societies across every age since the dawn of Greco-Roman civilization, institutionalized by the Church and Christian and Biblical morality, which Kamala’s Democrats seek to excise root and branch. 

It might seem anodyne, even banal, to the desensitized ear to hear Kamala or her beclowned running mate to inveigh against “hate speech” and call for laws clamping down on “misinformation” on the campaign trail and in political debate.  Indeed, large swathes of the population might not even bat an eye to Kamala, et al. calling for decades-long sentences for the majority of January 6^th demonstrators, vilifying them in the most dehumanizing of terms, denying their presumption of innocence (among other sacred tenets of Anglo-American law), despite the fact that the worst culprits committed misdemeanors – at worst.   And yet, the ease with which Kamala and the institutions supporting and her propping her up speak about political persecutions should ring alarm bells – as loud as the arias of Macchio’s rousing performance in Butler – because that raging drive to weaponized justice as a cudgel to silence political dissent — a still ongoing problem in our society — is anathema to American identity at its core. 

It is hence in her rhetoric where Kamala’s extremism is most palpable.  Her words signal either ignorance or callous disregard for fundamental American principles that should never, under any circumstances, be compromised, for reasons that any student of history should immediately recognize: 1) they are venerable parts of our national tradition; and 2) that they are – objectively – true.  We allow free thoughts and free speech (and peaceful demonstrations) because those things are woven into the fabric of American democracy – they are essential prerequisites to not only understanding, but making politically workable our governmental institutions, like Congress, the judiciary, and the Presidency itself. 

What is more, an electorate sufficiently marinated in these principles is also essential – and indeed, a matter of civic responsibility – to ensure the perpetuation of “equal justice under law,” that seminal motto inscribed atop the Supreme Court building, remains in place for future generations.  Whereby those requirements that make our liberty sacrosanct, that most cherished and distinctly American fruit of our political civilization since 1776 (and for those reasons, an object of envy, scorn, and deranged hatred of so many other peoples and parties the world over) possible cannot exist without, in turn, a collective respect for the meanings of such things as due process of law, innocence until proven guilty, separation of powers, constitutional governance, republicanism, and, yes, democracy (in its true and not distorted meaning).  Respect and appreciation for these concepts, which incubate the values of American civic life, can only be obtained, in their fullest capacity, by an immersive study of their histories – and over the course of that study by extrapolating, through deductive logic, their origins. 

Only then can a society begin to understand why the dangers of speaking about these ideas with such brazen disregard, as Kamala Harris does on a daily basis, is not only idiotic, but existentially perilous.  With understanding (what the Founding generation called “Enlightenment”) comes then a deeper appreciation for our values, and a deference that mirrors the awesome solemnity – bordering on fear – with which a true believer worships at God’s altar, and therewith, the hope for civilizational renewal. That renewal does not end with Donald Trump’s political movement – but it is his movement, a dynamic almost miraculous by-product of our political situation, a sort of uniquely American, ingrained survival instinct that kicked-in at the moment of greatest crisis — and only his movement, which makes the revival possible. 

Thus, the pomp and circumstance of Butler – which was followed by another entrancing rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Sunday (one that Steven Cheung, a Trump Campaign advisor declaimed as “legitimately one of the loudest crowds I’ve ever heard”) – is emblematic of a much broader, deeper cultural shift in American society.  In Donald Trump’s third bid for this nation’s highest office, there are numerically more Trump supporters than ever before. If the 2016 campaign was the great awakening, 2024 demarcates the great conversion.  And it’s not simply a matter of public sentiment shifting to become more outspoken about their support for the 45^th President, either (though there is undoubtedly an element of that).   But it is also a reflection of the maturation of the Trump movement, which is not a traditional political movement per se, but a battle for the heart and soul of American civilization (and, by proxy, the West overall), where, in the 2024 campaign, it has reached its fruition. MAGA has become recognizable in a way that it is no longer seen as an enigmatic political subculture of American society; it is now being recognized by an increasing lot of our countrymen as an essential ingredient of America itself; in short, MAGA has gone mainstream — in a way that probably Donald Trump himself could not have anticipated.

Elon Musk, a former Democrat and probably someone who would still consider himself a political liberal (classical, if not modern), is far from the first individual to switch teams from Obama or Biden voter to Trump. Musk instead represents a legion of disenchanted American citizens, both famous and unknown, who have undergone a similar conversion over the last four or eight years.  The conversion is in reality better described as a realization; the realization is not that Donald Trump and MAGA are one of two co-equal political alternatives, each one, however distinct, nevertheless being intrinsically American.  Nay, Donald Trump’s MAGA Movement is the prophylactic to Kamala’s cancer that has eviscerated our society in a way that threatens to wipe government of the people from the face of the earth.

MAGA is about restoring American civilization, at its root.  Policies are important, but when one ideological faction that masquerades as a legitimate political movement works relentlessly to undermine the Country’s Law of the Land, the United States Constitution, that movement forfeits any claim to the mantle of a legitimate political party.  You can wage a political campaign under the pretense of undermining the Constitution of the United States all you want, but you can never claim to be an upholder of American institutions if you contaminate the lifeblood of its very existence. 

That, ultimately, explains the shift in the electorate; that explains the message Elon Musk conveyed on Saturday; it crystallizes the swing in the polling momentum; and, yes, it defines the sense of inevitability setting in among so many Americans that Donald Trump will be elected as President of the United States for yet a third time.

Paul Ingrassia, a graduate of Fordham University and Cornell Law School, is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the NYYR Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow Paul on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.