At first glance, J and Q were stereotypical highly-educated Democrats. They resided in Lexington, Virginia, a small liberal college town of 7,000 where they each worked at historic institutions of higher education. J, a business professor, taught rich Republicans at a private liberal arts school. Q, a historian, taught the less affluent Republicans at a state-supported military college. J’s eight-year-old daughter, already fluent in the subtleties of American class distinctions, once proudly announced her upper-middle-class status, citing her father’s achievement of tenure. Q hadn’t quite arrived at those heights, but she was on her way.
J and Q, both divorced single parents, had been dating for six months when they found themselves attending a Donald Trump rally days before the 2024 election.
They had not undergone a political conversion. Q, especially, is the very portrait of a bleeding heart liberal. Her academic work centered on “gendered violence” during socialist revolutions in China, and her dating profile proclaimed her identities as “queer,” “feminist,” “environmentalist,” “Marxist scholar,” and “anti-racist.” To J, these attributes seemed a little radical, perhaps, but in an endearing, somewhat irresistible way. The fact that Q nevertheless dabbled in the stock market didn’t hurt either, but a Trump supporter, she assumed, might see her CV alone as an argument for Trump’s tough talk on deportation.
Q had come to the United States in 2012 to study for a Ph.D. in history. She hailed from a remote village in northern China, where, even in 2024, a flushing toilet remained a rare luxury. (Xi Jinping’s ambitious “toilet revolution” of 2015–2017 had somehow skipped her hometown.) Proudly calling herself an “authentic Chinese hillbilly,” Q possessed the sort of exotic boldness and curiosity that allowed her to ask delightfully odd questions. She imagined she came across like Borat, despite her female East Asian face and oversized black-rimmed glasses, not to mention the doctorate and progressive politics. As an H1B visa holder desperately awaiting a green card, she was accustomed to being a curious spectator in the very democracy she studied and had lived in for over a decade.
On November 2, J and Q hopped on Interstate 81 and drove an hour south to the Trump rally in Salem. It was three days before the election, and this was their idea of a romantic date. A shared love of public radio and an iconic jam band had sent them into the heart of darkness: A few weeks earlier, they had stumbled upon an NPR article likening Trump rallies to Phish concerts. The unusual comparison piqued their curiosity enough to draw them to an actual rally. They did so purely for research purposes, that being their default justification for doing anything interesting. Naturally, it was J who had introduced Q to this sort of white folks’ behavior (along with wine tours, camping, and hiking).
The rally was scheduled for 4:00 PM, but Trump’s late arrival was a given. J and Q showed up at noon—long after most of the crowd. The parking lot was awash in red: flags, shirts, slogans, and signs. A garbage truck bore makeshift signs reading “Trump,” “Garbage,” “Deplorables.” Supporters patiently snaked through long lines, chatting and humming with an almost festive air.
On the fringes, a small group of counter-protesters, mostly women, stood defiantly and held signs reading “Make a Better Choice than This” and “Virginia is for Lovers of Democracy.” The signs’ muted colors barely registered amid the cardinal show of force.
It was a stark reminder that Lexington is a blue bubble on the electoral map of Western Virginia. Even though Lexington is built around Confederate monuments, it is dominated by liberal academics. The town hadn’t voted Republican since Reagan. It was a cozy enough cocoon that J and Q could convince themselves they were helping to hatch a more progressive world, that their teachings were steering the next generation in the right direction—the rational direction.
In a fit of irrational exuberance, J and Q had even placed bets on Kamala Harris via Robinhood and Polymarket. Beneath their progressive façades, they were pragmatic opportunists with a capitalist streak. Both had ridden the AI wave to boost their investment portfolios. Rising grocery prices barely registered on their radar; they fancied themselves cool professors—worldly, unaffected by such banal concerns.
“I’m starting to doubt my bet on Harris,” Q said to J, as the energy of the crowd surged around them.
Q’s exposure to hardcore Trumpism had been minimal. Although she grew up in China’s version of Appalachia, her American existence was deeply entrenched in the cloistered world of elite academia. J had more direct experience with America’s political divisions. His family was the stuff of an HBO dramedy: a Harvard-educated doctor for a father, a doting mother, and an adopted brother who dropped out of high school, became a lumberjack, and more recently fell into the rabbit hole of QAnon conspiracy theories. The family stayed loving—as long as politics stayed off the table.
J had recently endured knee surgery (a consequence of another of his “white” hobbies: skiing), and his crutches gave them an unexpected VIP pass into the Salem Civic Center, as thousands of die-hard Trump supporters waited for hours outside. They slipped into the stadium after just fifteen minutes in line. Curious and amused, they settled into seats toward the front and began soaking in the electric atmosphere. Beside them sat a fellow Virginian who had driven two hours to Salem with her husband. Since retiring, the couple had become regulars at Trump rallies. “I love the vibe!” the woman exclaimed, then turned to Q with a suspicious squint: “Are you a Trump supporter?” Had their lack of MAGA bling given them away? Or were they so obviously liberal nerds?
Q dodged her question and smiled. “We drove a long way to get here, and he even hobbled half a mile on crutches. This is our first Trump rally!”
“Welcome! It’s great, isn’t it?” the woman chirped, her voice an enthusiastic, high-pitched trill. She revealed that she had worked her whole life in a juvenile detention center, a job so grueling that even people in the prison system preferred the quiet tension of maximum-security to the constant emergency of dealing with teenagers.
“That’s a noble job. Thank you for working with those troubled kids,” Q offered earnestly, trying to connect.
The woman beamed, her expression softening. “Wow, thank you, hon! You’re a doll.”
Trying to keep the conversation casual, Q asked, “So, which female politician do you think has the best fashion taste?”
The woman pondered for a moment, “Hillary Clinton.”
Q burst into laughter. “Unusual taste.”
J jumped in. “Alright, if you had to choose between Biden and Harris to spend the rest of your life with on a deserted island, who’d you pick?”
The woman cackled. “That’s a tough one!” She chuckled, finally admitting, “Biden. Couldn’t tolerate Harris. I would drown her first!”
They all laughed. “That’s a peculiar choice of execution.”
Q, sensing an opening, pressed on. “Any Democrats in your family? Do you all talk politics?”
“Just one old Democrat aunt.” The woman sighed. “We don’t talk to her.”
“Not too bad,” Q thought. “At least you’re civil.” In her own family, political disagreements had been rather more extreme. She is one generation removed from China’s Cultural Revolution, when her uncles had turned on their own father, eventually driving her maternal grandfather to suicide.
Indeed, the sea of red hats and slogans churned up memories of the stories Q’s mother had shared about her grandfather. They were fragments, really, as he died when her mother was only four, leaving behind a gap in the family’s narrative that Q, the historian, had spent years trying to fill. Born into 1920s rural China, her grandfather was the only literate person in his village. Having finished middle school, he was regarded as an intellectual. He joined the Communist Party as an underground member in the north during both World War II and the ongoing Chinese Civil War. He then rose to village Party secretary in the new red China of the 1950s. His uncomplicated diligence—almost to the point of naivete—earned him an honorary trip to Beijing. There, it was said, he received a handshake from Mao Zedong, the ultimate honor in those earnest, hopeful years before the revolution devoured its own.
In 1966, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution engulfed Q’s grandfather. His own sons, drawn by ambition and survival, joined his political opponents in denouncing him as a counter-revolutionary. Struggle sessions—intense spectacles of shaming in which comrades became tormentors—followed and broke him, a man once touched by Mao.
Growing up in the 1990s, Q documented the still-audible whispers and stitched together the scraps of a story long buried by the need to move on. Her mother, too young to have truly known her father or perhaps too scarred by his early death, could only offer faint recollections. The loyal cadre’s tragic end left behind a widow with three young daughters, who faced bullying from the villagers, and two elder sons, who had drawn a stark class boundary between themselves and their family, treating their own mother and sisters as class enemies to be shunned. The political chaos shattered Q’s family: Her grandmother and one daughter succumbed to mental illness, while her mother, burdened by the pain of those years, chose silence, burying the past beneath layers of resilience. Yet Q couldn’t let the thread go. She held on to it, tethering her to a past she’d never seen but somehow understood.
Now she was surrounded by red in a foreign land. The setting was alien but the question unsettlingly familiar: Who will survive the cultural revolution this time?
Two elderly women slipped into seats on the couple’s right, snapping Q out of her thoughts. It was their first Trump rally too. Bright-eyed and eager, they recounted their day: waking up at 5 AM for a three-hour drive with a handicapped friend in tow. One could easily notice the effort they’d put into their appearance—the freshly coiffed hair, glossy manicures, and crimson lipstick matching their bright red dresses.
“We’re going out for a fancy dinner after this,” one confided, her eyes sparkling.
Their preparations weren’t so different from those of the Taylor Swift fans who documented their concert trips on social media—the meticulous planning, the giddy excitement, the desire to make the most of a long-awaited experience. For these women, as for so many others in the arena, this wasn’t just a political rally. It was a pilgrimage, a celebration of belonging, a way to affirm their values and vision for the country.
But what was their vision? The professors watched, puzzled, as one politician after another stormed the stage, their tirades whipping the crowd into a frenzy of rage and resentment. Reason was absent. The Constitution, the erosion of law, even the idea of freedom as J and Q understood it, seemed irrelevant. The speakers railed against grocery prices, sure, but no one appeared all that into it (and audience members certainly weren’t remotely interested in learning about the tariff wars, labor markets, and global supply chains that might actually have explained what was going on). Instead, what truly roused the masses were the insults, the humiliating jokes that echoed throughout the arena: “Shoot her,” “drown her,” “hang her.” Trump may have dodged actual bullets in Butler, Pennsylvania almost four months earlier, but Harris was rhetorically assassinated a dozen times over in Salem on November 2.
“Humanity’s true moral test,” Milan Kundera wrote, “consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy.” Watching the crowd revel in humiliating jokes and violent chants, Q felt a sharp pang of familiarity—a painful echo of her grandfather’s fate. From the villagers’ words, she knew how the Red Guards had erected a makeshift stage and forced her grandfather to kneel before a crowd, his wife and daughters helplessly watching. He was mocked, humiliated, and stripped of his dignity. He returned home in silence, offering no words to explain his anguish. The next morning, they found him hanging from a tree.
For Q, the rally was a chilling reminder that history often resurfaces in new and dangerous forms. The faces in the arena, like those during the Cultural Revolution, had learned to find enemies, to weaponize insecurities, and to turn those insecurities against the vulnerable.
It seemed futile to debate facts and policies with voters who had no appetite for such discourse. They came purely for the love of spectacle, their passion too raw and sticky for academic dissection. American democracy had transformed politics into mere consumer choice. It was the difference between Whole Foods and Walmart, between hand-crafted chocolates and garish Halloween candy. Q smirked sheepishly at the thought. After all, wasn’t organic food just another overpriced scam, marketed to make discerning customers feel better about themselves?
Classic rock anthems filled the room, stirring the crowd. With an assumed nostalgia, couples swayed and danced, hands raised, heads nodding in rhythm. Some leaned in to kiss. This was right-wing romance. The playlist transported the audience to a different time, a past that was white and heterosexual. In that lost world, everything had felt clear-cut. There were no shades of gray, no fluid boundaries. Men were men, women were women. Gender trouble? That sounded as unthinkable—and as dangerous—as communism.
Then Trump emerged. The arena transformed. The tolling of the WWE wrestler The Undertaker’s theme song was funereal, and deliberately so. Each bell carried an eerie finality, marking the looming demise of liberal progressivism. The slow, organ-like notes hung in the air. It was a ritual, a warning, a crawl of sound that cast a spell over the riot of noise. The 78-year-old fighter entered slowly.
This was theater with a clear message: Trump was here as a protector, a self-declared savior. He was the knight who would “Keep [image of a hotdog] out of women’s sports,” as the T-shirts worn by some members of the Roanoke College swim team proclaimed.
Lily Mullens, the team’s captain, took the stage to declare, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have advocated for this anti-woman, sex-based discrimination to continue all over this country.” The crowd roared in agreement. Cross-dressers, trans people—they were cast as villains polluting the sacred binary sex culture of America. One couldn’t help but imagine a younger Lily cheering for Disney’s Mulan, a story about gender disguise and defiance. Now, trans men and women were being framed as the new communists of the cultural Cold War, infiltrating and “contaminating” the moral fabric of a “Great America.”
Trump’s team had struck gold with the issue of gender identity, turning transgender people––barely 0.5% of the population—into a national threat. “The brave members of the swim team stood up to the transgender fanatics, something new in our country,” Trump proclaimed. A man with dozens of sexual misconduct allegations had managed to wield gender politics as the central theme of the rally.
In Chinese culture, as Q knew, gender was too fluid for T-shirt politics. Written Chinese only developed gendered pronouns in the twentieth century, a modern addition to an ancient tongue. Spoken Chinese still used a single third-person pronoun, which is why Q often mixes up “he” and “she” when speaking English—a habit that confuses students and colleagues.
In her village, there had been an intersex person, who lived as a man. This individual was a shaman, revered for their difference, though occasionally mocked by the villagers. During the Cultural Revolution they somehow escaped harm, their role as a spiritual guide apparently exempting them from the ideological purges. Afterward, they resumed their shamanic work. People traveled from distant villages, bearing offerings and asking for help communing with the dead or seeking cures for their sick children. Q remembered the rituals vividly: the shaman smoking three cigarettes at once, their voice suddenly shifting into a woman’s pitch, delivering messages from the spirits. Whether the shaman’s act was performance or something beyond explanation didn’t matter. Their words comforted those who came, much like the simple slogan “Trump will fix it” comforted his followers.
Q often reflected on the continuity and contingency of history. How had her grandfather, a loyal Party cadre, been destroyed by the same system that allowed an intersex shaman to survive? History, she mused, might follow certain patterns, but life itself—individuals, their survival, their choices—defied predictability. Perhaps the only universal law was the struggle to endure, shared by every living thing.
This rally was just one of many reality shows in Trump’s life, and Trump himself was merely one of 45 presidents in the timeline of a relatively young country. Yet, for some—women, immigrants, the tech titans, or transgender individuals—this election wasn’t just another chapter. It was a crossroads, a moment that could reroute the trajectories of their lives. As Wuhan diarist Fang Fang wrote about the pandemic, “one speck of dust from an entire era may not seem like much, but when it falls on your head it’s like a mountain crashing on you.” Her poignant statement became a refrain known to almost every Chinese person. Those who still remember or grasp the lessons of the Cultural Revolution understand that the weight of collective upheaval falls heaviest on individuals, forcing them to shoulder the burden of history’s cruel and absurd jokes.
When the rally ended, J and Q walked out of the stadium in silence, their hearts heavy and their minds active. They had witnessed the fervor, the unyielding passion of The People. Yet, as capitalist opportunists, they couldn’t ignore the chaos, since chaos always creates opportunities. By the time they reached their car, they had already revised their investment strategy: Bitcoin-related ETFs, nuclear energy, Tesla, aerospace stocks. Q hesitated over GEO Group, the private prison company tied to U.S. immigration detention centers. “It’s too evil,” she muttered, her voice conflicted. “But money comes first,” she sighed.
Their investments paid off quickly and spectacularly when the election results were announced on the night of November 5. That same night, J’s mother texted him, “It is your brother’s world. It is not our world now.” Born into an upper-class family and married to a doctor, J’s mother hadn’t worked in 13 years. There was a hint of bitterness, cloaked in acceptance, in her words. Her elite world was fading, like the vacuum-sealed turkeys at Whole Foods Market—perfectly packaged, isolated from the shifting chaos of the outside world, and oblivious to the fact that their time of preservation might soon run out.
While J’s mother mourned the crumbling of her carefully curated reality, Q’s mind raced with a different set of anxieties: her precarious immigration status, the uncertainty of her career, and, most of all, her child’s future. Even the sudden windfall shown in her investment portfolio couldn’t ease her growing fear. A citizen of a nation now viewed as a primary adversary by both political parties, she remained trapped in the painfully slow process of obtaining her green card. The fear wasn’t abstract; it was visceral—a reminder of the anti-Asian sentiment she had experienced during Covid.
She recalled the day in May 2020 when she was walking with her three-month-old in Boston. A man had followed her, shouting, “Fucking Chinese! You brought the virus here! Go back to your fucking country with your bastard!” The words hit her like stones, leaving her too scared to look back, too paralyzed to even take in his face. The insult wasn’t new. She knew her countrymen had faced similar scapegoating during San Francisco’s bubonic plague outbreak in the early 1900s. In the American imagination, Chinese people have long been seen as both carriers of disease and national threats. Xenophobia didn’t discriminate between documented or undocumented; a “foreign” face was enough to stoke hatred.
On the social media platform RedNote, popular among overseas Chinese, hundreds of posts echoed similar fears following the election: “Should I marry my American boyfriend for a green card?” “Tips for green card application through marriage.” “Why hasn’t my American boyfriend proposed, even though he knows about my immigration anxiety?” What had once been China’s foremost fashion and luxury shopping platform had become an odd repository of shared insecurities and survival strategies. The future for many now seemed less about hope and more about hedging against risk, as though love itself had become another currency in the precarious exchange of safety.
When Q polled her students after the election the next day, she found that around 80 percent of them had voted for Trump and cheered his victory. She stayed silent. The silence about politics on campus was deafening, an unspoken agreement to avoid the fault lines that had grown too wide to bridge. For Q, the moment felt like history folding back on itself—ideological battles disguised as personal choices, collective chaos carved into individual lives. In this theater of politics, silence became a paradox: an act of both defiance and complicity, a strategy for surviving a world that always seemed to conspire against the fragile and the foreign.
That night, neither Q nor J could sleep. The weight of the rally, the election, and the world’s uncertainties pressed down on them. J turned to her and said, “We should get married as soon as possible.” The reasoning behind his proposal was self-evident, and she said yes. Their shared anxieties bound them more tightly than any legal ceremony ever could. Perhaps, in its own way, the rally had been a romantic date after all—an acknowledgment that love, too, could be a form of resistance.
Postscript: Trump is in the White House. DOGE promised efficiency. J and Q’s marriage paperwork is stuck in bureaucracy, but at least DOGEcoin is up.