It was an hour before the motorcade was set to arrive in downtown Nashville, and the lady in the “Trump Save America” T-shirt was explaining why she hates Kamala Harris. “I’m not meaning to say I’m a prejudiced person,” she began. Of the many ways to end such a sentence, none were promising. I assumed she would call the vice president a “DEI hire,” as right-wing pundits had done all week. But she veered in a different direction.
Harris, the woman went on, believes in pushing homosexuality, transgenderism, and “people acting like cats and dogs.” At her grandniece’s public school in Kentucky, students identify as animals and come to school on leashes. This, she insisted, is the future Democrats want: lawless, godless, and out of control.
It was late Saturday morning, two weeks since the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The woman from Kentucky, a nurse and preacher’s wife, had driven to Nashville earlier that day with her sisters. Outside the Music City Center, the sprawling convention center where Trump was scheduled to speak, the former president’s face appeared on a digital screen against a bright orange backdrop reading “Bitcoin 2024.”
Trump supporters pose for a picture at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Photo: Johnnie Izquierdo/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThe sisters knew little about bitcoin and, to be fair, neither did I. As for the conference, all they knew was that they couldn’t afford it. Tickets ranged from the basic festival pass for $699 to a VIP “Whale Pass” for $21,000. But it didn’t matter. They just wanted a glimpse of Trump. And if they didn’t get one, that was OK too: “We’re here for moral support.”
This was not how I typically spent my Saturdays. On weekends, the strip near the convention center known as Lower Broadway is clogged with tourists and bachelorette parties. Scores of mostly white women in cowboy boots fill honky tonks that have become dominated by bro country celebrity venues, from Kid Rock’s Big-Ass Honky Tonk Rock n’ Roll Steakhouse to a new bar by Morgan Wallen, the country star ostensibly “canceled” after dropping the N-word on video.
Nevertheless, I’d come downtown with a certain sense of civic duty. Trump had arrived as Nashville was increasingly attracting right-wing extremists, who seemed to feel too comfortable in the city I call home. Since I moved to Nashville in 2015, the Republican Party had been taken over by the MAGA movement and Tennessee’s politics have taken a hard-right turn.
Nashville has become a magnet for far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, who moved his media company, the Daily Wire, to the city in 2020, bringing a wave of anti-trans activism that has made Tennessee increasingly cruel toward LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, Nashville, which is often described as a blue dot in a red sea, has seen aggressive assaults on its political power. A new congressional map recently carved the city in three, obliterating a Democratic district and distributing the pieces to a trio of Republicans. The East Nashville neighborhood where I live is now represented by a Trump loyalist from Cookeville, some 80 miles away.
In recent weeks, things in Nashville seemed to be taking an even darker turn. All throughout July, white nationalist groups had descended upon the city. The neo-fascist Patriot Front marched downtown over Independence Day weekend; a week later, neo-Nazis disrupted a Nashville City Council meeting. The weekend before the bitcoin conference, neo-Nazi provocateurs filmed themselves harassing a group of Black boys who’d been downtown playing bucket drums. The men hurled racial slurs, laughing and jeering when one child erupted in anger. As police officers escorted the kids away, one of the white supremacists gleefully faced the camera, calling them........