Fear and loathing in Latrobe: Freedom, tyranny, and Arnold Palmer’s private parts

LATROBE, Pa. — When fascism finally went mainstream in America, it came hawking a $60 made-in-China Bible and shadowed by a 50-foot American flag braced by construction cranes — and it opened with a story about Arnold Palmer’s private parts.

I’d driven nearly five hours into and under the Allegheny ridges of Western Pennsylvania — up and down slopes that got steeper each mile with the volume of Donald Trump flags and yard signs that proclaimed “I’m Voting for the Convict 2024” — out of a sense that the decline and fall of American civilization has reached a depth that I needed to personally bear witness. It was a fever dream — maybe I could find words that have eluded everyone else.

Just six days earlier, Trump came to the Philly suburbs and turned a supposed town hall into a 39-minute dance party as his deeply confused crowd watched a once and wannabe future U.S. president sway awkwardly to Sinead O’Connor and Luciano Pavarotti, or look utterly frozen in the bubble of his 78-year-old head. And yet, when the alarm goes off the next morning, it’s still Groundhog Day in America, an election with a 50% chance of the music-trance guy winning. Something both incredibly momentous and weird is happening at the same time.

Now, the sun was nearly setting over the runway at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport. With the most consequential U.S. presidential election since 1860 just 17 days away, about 3,000 to 4,000 of the most die-hard MAGA Trump fans who weren’t exhausted by the campaign and the GOP candidate’s frequent visits to Steelers’ country had been waiting for hours on a sunbaked tarmac. They’d let out the obligatory whoop for the obligatory flyover of Trump Force One, and then finally the man tasked with bringing their country back was on the podium, filtered by bulletproof glass.

Trump’s red meat of mass deportation camps and R-rated attacks on his opponents would have to wait. Monday’s DJ was now Saturday night’s comedian, with his cult as captive audience. What started out as an obligatory shout-out to Latrobe’s famous native son — Palmer, the late great golfer who brought the sport to your TV screens in the 1960s — went on for five minutes, then 10, then 12. What started as a nice but meandering tale about Palmer’s working-class roots grew into a stone silence during long detours into stuff like types of golf club shafts as the tale grew increasingly instead about Trump — about how his own power and wealth allowed him to claim friendship with this great man.

You are standing in the twilight wondering if this could get any stranger when of course it did. The man who bragged in his first campaign that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him now wants America to know he can tell a penis joke with the cameras rolling and still get elected as the 47th president.

“Arnold Palmer was all man,” he said. “And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’” Some laughter finally echoed off the tarmac, maybe some from those who revel in Trump’s billionaire crudeness, but much of it seeking a nervous outlet for this American unraveling.

Trump’s Latrobe moment was perhaps more unbelievable than the golfer’s purported anatomy, and yet somehow it perfectly captured both the moment facing this deeply troubled and divided nation, and also the frustrations that brought me to the other side of Pennsylvania, the state that may decide this election and the future of democracy. You see, 248 years of eighth-grade civics and watching peaceful inaugurations and the various whatnots of American liberty have left most of us without the words to describe what is happening to us today.

Our political journalists are trained to cover debates and not how to describe a movement turned cult whose grievances have snowballed into sheer madness, so that a speech aides had leaked to national journalists at CNN and the New York Times would be his “closing argument” was hijacked by a 12-minute setup for a genitalia joke.

That fluster came through in a New York Times live blog that calmly reported Trump “spent the entire opening telling Arnold Palmer golf stories, before finally launching in on the border.” That passage omitting the punch line and other initial headlines marked a new low for the practice of “sanewashing” Trump’s speeches. That means desperately looking for some new tax-cut proposal so they can avoid writing about the manhood joke — when the crudity is the point.

So I came to Latrobe to try and write the 72-point headline that the Times editors can’t — “PHALLUS-JOKE MAN AND DANCING FOOL COULD LEAD THE FREE WORLD AGAIN” — and to scream at the top of my lungs from the bluffs overlooking this tiny airport that this would-be emperor telling the shower story is actually wearing no clothes. Who will shout that Trump’s “closing argument” is the melding of his increasingly public breakdown with how that might lead to an all-too-real domestic war of midnight raids and armored personnel carriers against the fiction of an “Occupied America”?

Ironically, Trump’s endless Arnold Palmer bit seemed part of an effort Saturday night to prove that the rambling candidate is not “exhausted,” something his own aides reportedly said after several recent interviews were canceled. But the Republican nominee — kind of like Madonna’s “Sex” phase and shock photos when her 1980s were ending — also appeared to sense that he needed to get more and more outrageous to get attention, after numbing America to his Hitlerian language that immigrants “will cut your throat.”

“You have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough,” Trump said about midway through his 90-minute ramble, intentionally mispronouncing the first name of the Democratic nominee as he usually does. “So you have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough, that you just can’t take it anymore. We can’t stand you. You’re a s— vice president, the worst!”

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I’m old enough to remember when dropping an S-bomb about your opponent was a career-ending move, not 17th-paragraph material as the Trump era marches backward. But we need to be talking about Trump’s vulgarity not only as a symptom of a disordered mind that might be passed the nuclear football but because the indiscreet S-word and the shower room “humor” are really all about the F-word: fascism.

“The purpose of this is not only to model misogyny,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian and leading authority on dictators, posted Saturday about Trump’s attack on Harris. “It is to remove any inhibitions among MAGA thugs about feeling scorn and contempt and hatred and will to harm a sitting [U.S. vice president].”

In a town that once smelled like its famed Rolling Rock brewery, the whole Trump rally reeked of fascism, including the Arnold Palmer riff. Especially the Arnold Palmer riff. The sexism and the almost desperate yearning for undiluted manhood constantly crept into his language — “We’re going to drill so deeply,” he bragged in a pro-fracking rant — and surely reassured those dude-bro fans fearing a loss of traditional patriarchy. But the would-be 47th president also wants you to know he can get away with and say anything, creating an aura of utter disbelief. The unreality of Trump’s crude nihilism is also the secret sauce that creates a dream world where he can one day arrest his political enemies and build his deportation gulags.

Trump’s vision for America is diabolical, and yet evil has never felt so banal as it did under the brilliant blue October sunshine lighting up Western Pennsylvania, where true believers hung out before the rally in a tent city of T-shirt hawkers with a vibe that felt more Renaissance fair than the looming dark ages, bathed in the incongruous aroma of Jamaican jerk chicken.

In just three months, Trump’s survival of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. — some 60 miles north of here — that wounded the ex-president’s ear and killed a spectator has become their American Fátima, enshrined on T-shirts, giant flags, and even reenacted by a character in a Trump mask along with the constant mantra of “fight, fight, fight.” The notion that God saved Trump to reign over America doesn’t seem far-fetched for a crowd that literally wears its Christianity on its sleeve — like the T-shirt proclaiming “Jesus Is My Savior” along with a pro-Trump message and a cross over an American flag. Never mind the other T-shirts for sale depicting the guillotine beheading of a “2nd Amendment Traitor.”

Let alone the penis joke.

“It’s going to be a landslide, just like it was in 2020 — Trump all the way, baby,” said Carol Moore, a former Pittsburgher who retired to Naples, Fla., but came north fleeing Hurricane Milton. She is convinced President Joe Biden didn’t really win four years ago and insists that “Arizona just decertified their election.” (It hasn’t.) She also echoed Trump and elected officials that these unfounded voter fraud allegations must be overcome with huge turnout. “We’re working hard to make it too big to rig — that’s what you need to do because these guys cheat so much that you have to overwhelm it.” She scoffed at the notion of Trump as dictator, but then said some of his rivals should be jailed, like former FBI chief James Comey — “He created the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax, he’s going to have to pay.”

Moore told me she gets all her news from Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter — a habit she shared with many of the attendees. They were all kinds — a 43-year-old Californian calling himself Penny2X, his X handle, who packed up and came to Pennsylvania like his idol Musk, to a gray-bearded Poconos man named Kyle Toffey who was at his eighth Trump rally this cycle, and who told me that it was actually Biden and Harris “who have authorized the use of the military against the American people if things don’t go their way.” (They haven’t.) The common bond is news sources — Toffey gets some of his information from radio’s discredited Alex Jones — that are overrun by disinformation.

But the existential crisis facing American democracy is that the disinformation is amplified by politicians who ought to know better. Both Trump and a surrogate, Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Dan Meuser, repeated from the podium an AI-enhanced lie that Harris had told Wisconsin hecklers that “you’re at the wrong rally” as a response to a cry of “Jesus is Lord.” (It wasn’t.) But then Trump’s monologue was larded with too many lies to keep track, from a false claim that a “2,000% increase” in Haitian migrants to nearby Charleroi has ruined the community — debunked by local Republicans — to his insistence that he really won in 2020, refueling the delusions of his followers. About the only truth that fell on Latrobe was Trump calling Palmer “all man” — the kind Trump himself will never be.

This delusional, disinformed bubble is what gives oxygen to the toxic mixture that is Trumpism, and his real “closing argument” that came late in the rally after serving up spiked Arnold Palmer: that immigrants coming to America mostly for a better life are instead murderers or rapists or patients from mental institutions, who will “look at you and cut your throat.” The numbed crowd sprung to life for this unvarnished xenophobia and a video of the worst cherry-picked criminal immigrants (from a group with lower crime rates than native-born Americans) in an update of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate.

This is the prequel to a kind of American nightmare that most of us can’t imagine, and that seems to be the problem. We are running out of days to write the headlines and clang the pots and pans about the biggest story of our time — a 50-50 dice roll on the end of true democracy — and we may spend decades asking ourselves why we didn’t. Because do you know who did understand this? Arnold Palmer. His daughter confided in 2018 that the golfer grew to despise Trump because “he was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

That wasn’t the final irony of a bizarre day here. As nightfall finally descended, Trump jerked awkwardly on stage to the disco of the Village People’s “YMCA,” which seemed to bring it all full circle. I was sort of glad Palmer wasn’t here to see this.

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