Daily COVID-19 infections reach record numbers throughout the country.
A massive concert hasn't been held for months.
The baseball world series is played in front of bleachers that have not been so empty in a century.
Children prepare for the saddest Halloween night of their lives, after the neighborhoods discussed for weeks the safest way to do the trick or treating.
Health authorities ask families to avoid gathering too many guests on Thanksgiving.
In America today, if you want to remember what physical contact with a crowd is like, the best thing to do is follow the president.
On planet Trump, the coronavirus is a thing of the past.
A slight bump in a supposedly superlative success story that progressive elites are bent on destroying.
An alibi that the "radical leftist" Joe Biden will use to shut the country down for months, if these hordes of open-faced citizens, in possession of the truth, do not prevent it with their vote on Tuesday, several hundred of whom waving flags and repeating the supreme leader's gospel Friday afternoon outside Rochester Airport in Minnesota.
"Biden wants to close the country for three months," defends Don Stearns, 61, with a Trump banner, without a mask, repeating a common phrase that distorts the words of the Democratic candidate, who said he would be willing to close the country another time, only if the scientists asked.
“And then next winter he will close it for another three months to end the flu and the cold.
Do you catch the irony?
Socialism.
Fear.
That's what it offers ”.
"Let's make progressives cry again."
"Fuck your feelings."
Banners, flags.
A guy disguised as a boxer, with a Trump mask, jumps in his shorts, stopping to take selfies hugging other fans with laughter.
About half of the 22 rallies Trump held between June and September, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, were followed by an increase in COVID cases in the counties that hosted them.
As the sun goes down, the temperature approaches zero degrees.
Here, if you don't get COVID, you can also suffer from hypothermia.
It happened in Omaha (Nebraska), at another rally at an airport like this one, in which hundreds of attendees were abandoned, the bus service that had to take them to their cars collapsed.
Thirty people needed medical attention and seven had to be transferred to the hospital.
But nothing is able to stop the
Trump
show
.
Neither the coronavirus, nor hypothermia, nor the Democratic governor of Minnesota, who on Friday forced the campaign to comply with state guidelines, and limited attendance at the rally to 250 people, leaving several hundred out.
"The Democratic Party wants to take away your right to assemble peacefully while allowing rioters to burn down your cities," Trump told his small audience from the stage set up next to the airport runway, referring to the violent riots that followed the death. George Floyd in Minneapolis, in this same state.
President Trump, 74, hospitalized for coronavirus just under a month ago, plans to hold no less than 17 rallies between Friday and Monday afternoon.
A true
Blitz -
massive aerial bombardment - that exceeds in intensity anything he has done in these four years.
With the polls against it, Trump trusts everything to that instinct of greed and saturation that has guided his political career over any obstacle that stood in his way.
On Friday, rallies in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
On Saturday, three stops in Pennsylvania.
On Sunday and Monday, five stops each day.
Again Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan again.
The
Air Force One
roadmap draws a clear map.
That of the contested states where Trump needs to prevail to be re-elected, with special emphasis on this industrial belt in the Midwest where 80,000 votes gave him the presidency four years ago.
On that occasion, it barely came close to Minnesota, and Hillary Clinton took the state by 1.5 percentage points.
It is that thorn in the Midwest that the Trump campaign dreamed of ripping out, before the pandemic forced a strategy of securing what was won in 2016.
The sun begins to turn the sky orange, and the Rochester Airport PA announces that
Air Force One
has just landed.
"Welcome to Minnesota."
The 250 lucky ones, standing in front of their separate chairs keeping a safe distance, shout and dance to the beat of old rock hits.
"I saw him in 2015 in Iowa, before he was president, and I took a picture with him," explains Shailyn Anderson, 18, who has come with her grandmother.
“It makes me want to cry, I am so excited to see him again, and I feel so bad for those who have been left out… I just hope he continues to be our president.
If Biden wins we are screwed, we really are, I mean it.
This is the first time that I can vote and I will vote for Trump to the end. "
The
Air Force One
has been arrested just a
few hundred meters.
The asphalt fills with men in black from the secret service.
Sounds
The House of the Rising Sun,
The Animals, in all its gravity.
The president slowly descends the steps of the plane.
Shailyn Anderson cries.
All the solemnity, the liturgy of power, exclusively for a small committee of those voters whom Hillary Clinton referred to in 2016 as a "basket of deplorable ones."
Perhaps from exhaustion, perhaps from anger with local Democratic authorities, perhaps from feeling strange among small audiences, the president is unusually serious, stingy in spontaneous jokes and gestures.
"We have created the most prosperous middle class in human history."
"Biden wants to make the biggest tax hike in history."
"They want to completely destroy the residential neighborhoods that I protect."
"I will fight for you more than anyone has ever fought."
After a succession of hyperbole of little more than half an hour, a minutia for the irrepressible presidential verbiage, Donald Trump says goodbye.
YMCA
sounds
,
the end of the party, the song of the Village People with which the president has made it a habit to leave the stage, shaking his fists and hips, raising his eyebrows and sticking his nose out, in a grimace like an ancient leading man.
But tonight Trump is not dancing.
He's heading fast to
Air Force One
.
Yes, his followers do, waving their arms in the air under the spotlights that illuminate the cold night.
Anything is possible on planet Trump.
See
Air Force One
land right under your nose.
Dancing
YMCA
at zero degrees on the tarmac of an airport.
Traveling the country from one rally to another at the age of 74 and recently discharged from a hospital for a life-threatening illness.
And why not, trust the campaign, turn around an election that polls insist it can hardly win.
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