'Paranoid style' is height of fashion in Cleveland

CLEVELAND – If you've been around politics for a while, you've seen them on the farthest edge of any big political shindig.

And here they were again: The "New World Order" conspiracy freaks with their patter about the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds or all the people that Bill and Hillary Clinton have killed, bandana-wearing bikers with flag tattoos and less-politically-correct T-shirts, the silent with their signs for more Christianity in the public sphere.

But on this day when searing July heat alternated with rolling dark clouds over faded smokestacks by the banks of the Cuyahoga River, the extreme nationalist right of America politics grabbed center stage – and did its version of a victory dance on the eve of Donald Trump capturing the GOP presidential nomination.

"You are part of history! You are 1776, not just in America but worldwide – because the American idea is the answer to the globalist program of enslavement!" thundered Alex Jones, the radio host who's built a national following with conspiracy theories such as the 9/11 attacks as an "inside job." "You are the cure to the worldwide tyranny that is the New World Order!"

Yet the normally angry man of far-right radio was happy – happy because Donald Trump is a would-be president who truly gets them, because by not dismissing notions like Hillary Clinton is "a foreign agent of the Communist Chinese and Saudi Arabia" that the presumptive GOP nominee has been "over-the-top amazing."

A crowd of maybe 400 Trump enthusiasts at this "America First" rally organized by the independent Citizens for Trump waved the Gadsden flag of the tea party movement and joined in as the sometimes manic and barrel-chested Jones, in dark Wayfarer sunglasses, led the crowd in a chant of "Hillary for jail!"

On this grassy knoll (yes, literally) in the shadow of Cleveland skyscrapers, a man wearing his "Bikers for Trump" shirt paid rapt attention standing next to a large "Christians for Trump" banner. While Trump has stayed largely on track as the most divisive presidential candidate in a half century, at least The Donald is bringing some Americans together.

A number of rank-and-file Trump enthusiasts at the rally told a similar story, that they'd come great distances, from Pennsylvania to the east and California to the west, to show the world that they have their candidate's back. They swore they are ready to defend him by any means necessary if necessary if the trouble that so many have predicted for the Cleveland confab actually broke out.

"There were so many rumors about protesters being around – I wanted to make sure there were positive people here, letting Trump know that he's not alone," said 47-year-old Lorraine Morrison of Sun Valley, California, a member of Truckers for Trump. And if there had been trouble? "I would have fixed it. Don't doubt me, I would have fixed it" – anything from talking to them to telling them to "get out of here!" an echo of her new political hero.

Morrison was holding an adorable and tiny squirming black-and-white dog as she spoke. Others carried things with less bark and more potential bite. Three young men from York County in central Pennsylvania – Joel Ameigh, Derek Leeds and Sam Kurek – took the day off from their jobs in the building trades to drive to Cleveland and show their Trump love – each with a black sidearm holstered to his hip. The men said they carry concealed weapons back in Pennsylvania but wanted to respect Ohio's "open carry" law.

"There's a lot of concern about it," Kurek conceded, adding that the trio really wasn't trying to make a political statement, just packing heat for protection like they regularly do back home. "People have had mixed emotions."

But one emotion seemed pretty universal at the rally. It's their sense that the America that they knew and loved is disappearing. The reasons they claim differ – some cite the need of middle-class folks to work two jobs just to scrape by, while others fretted about Muslim co-workers following Sharia law. But their shared notions of grievance -- and that Trump is maybe the last thing between the United States and the apocalypse that they fear -- were palpable in the sticky Ohio air.

Michael Rine, a truck driver from Taylor Mill, Kentucky, said he went all in on Trump about six months ago, after he insisted he saw protesters on TV burning American flags and waving Mexican flags outside one of the candidate's super-charged rallies. "I'm an American, you know," he said. "That's when I want out and bought the hat and the yard signs and the pins."

People like Rine or 41-year-old Sean Bosilovick -- who told me he's "a general" in the Michigan Militia and said he supports Trump "since the day he went against the New World Order" – have burst out of the dark shadows and into the prairie sunshine this week in Cleveland.

Their hero probably doesn't actually believe in a "New World Order" in the sense that they do. But there's little doubt that Trump's embrace of so-called "birther" conspiracy theories about President Obama and other weird utterances – like a claim of thousands of Muslims cheering 9-11 from their Jersey vantage point – has taken what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics" and put it out front at a national political convention for the first time since…

Well, since never, actually.

The Armageddon-like encounter with the several thousand liberal anti-Trump activists that so many at the rally were braced for never happened. At one point, a protest march against the presumptive nominee apparently came within a half-dozen blocks of Settlers Landing Park, but was turned away by Cleveland's mobile and effective bike cops who've made the GOP's new mantra ­– "Make America Safe Again" – a reality here so far.

The nation's new cycle of violence, punctuated by the ambush murders of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, has inspired Trump to move away from the build-the-wall xenophobia that launched this political fringe festival and towards a new old model: Richard Nixon, whose 1968 speeches on "law and order" the candidate is said to be avidly studying.

To perhaps help in that transition, the rally got Roger Stone, who was a "dirty trickster" for Nixon in the infamous 1972 re-election campaign and was later a Trump adviser. As a dark cloud rolled in over the river, the dapper Stone -- in seersucker and suspenders, looking like an audition for "Inherit the Wind" – wasted no time of accusing Hillary Clinton having something to do with the 1993 suicide of White House aide Vince Foster.

"There was carpet fiber all over his body," the former Nixon youth insisted. "They rolled him up in a carpet." The crowd roared – as they did again a few minutes later when Stone finished up and threw his hands skyward, in the double "V" made famous by his former idol.