She swiped through more videos and pictures, eventually arriving at a group photo of her and her friends with the Capitol in the distance, shortly before they marched, holding American flags and Trump banners on long poles. A woman on the edge of the group was smiling and holding up a sign that said “STOP THE STEAL — Save Our Republic”: a local parents rights activist, Hunt said, who was coming to the rally today. She had gotten one of the coveted seats in the section right behind Trump.
“She’s going to be V.I.P.,” Hunt said.
Inside, a low rumble of synthesizer, playing a vaguely liturgical suspended chord, filled the arena. A mass of men’s voices came in, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The recording was poor quality, far-away-sounding and distorted around the edges, and the voices had a hauntingly flat and gray affect as they sang of the twilight’s last gleaming. Then the voice of the former president, clearer, rose above them: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
The crowd listened respectfully. It was a recording called “Justice for All,” released early last year, credited to “Donald J. Trump & J6 Prison Choir”: a group of men among those currently serving prison sentences related to the Jan. 6 riot — a majority for assaulting police officers — who were recorded singing over the phone from the D.C. jail. As the prisoners reached the end of the anthem, they broke into a chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The crowd joined in, unified in the new resistance.
The recording’s producers included Kash Patel, a former Trump administration intelligence staff member who is involved in Trump’s 2024 campaign. It opened Trump’s first proper rally of this campaign, in March 2023 in Waco, Texas, and the rallies since. It offered a compressed version of one of the campaign’s central arguments: that Trump’s prosecutions were an extension of the dispossession of the Trump faithful in 2020, and that the weight of the state would fall not only on Trump but on anyone patriotic enough to dare to stand with him.
“Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are really the true threat to democracy,” Trump told us that afternoon. “They use the D.O.J., the F.B.I., our election systems. They rigged our elections and attacked free speech. It is amazing all the people that go get investigated, all of them, all of them — they don’t go after the people that rigged the election. They go after the people that want to find out who it was that rigged it.”