A Liberal Attends a Trump Rally With Curiosity as His Guide 

Scott Shigeoka is the author of the book Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World, released November 2023. We’ve got an excerpt from his book below about his experience, as a liberal person, attending a pro-Trump rally.

Shigeoka is a Starts With Us Movement Partner. He works as the Bridging Differences Fellow with UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, where he developed the Bridging Differences Playbook, and he teaches courses on healing and connection at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s spoken at Pixar, IDEO, Airbnb, Google, and schools and universities around the world.

In his book Seek, Shigeoka focuses on the transformative power of curiosity. Due to stereotypes and assumptions, there can be a dynamic where we think knowing a few traits about a person, or even one trait, tells us everything about that person. This is a driving force in our us vs. them divides — more of us have simplistic, distorted visions of each other. Curiosity can create a desire to know others, a yearning to understand others at more than a superficial level. 

Shigeoka once attended a pro-Trump rally with the goal of learning more about the people he met there and to dig beneath the surface of his instinctual assumptions about them. Here’s the excerpt from Shigeoka’s book:

It was a sea of red.

As far as I could see, tens of thousands of people wearing Make America Great Again hats snaked around barricades in an overflow parking lot in Minneapolis. There were so many Donald Trump sup- porters that the line stretched through multiple parking lots and garages before making its way into the Target Center arena, home of the Minnesota Timberwolves. I was on my third month of a yearlong cross-country road trip to meet people who seemed different from me, at places like Trump rallies and churches. I wanted to understand how our country could bridge our divides and get along again.

For hours I stood underneath ten-foot-tall television screens, where commentators celebrated Trump. Every few minutes, applause erupted as images of the president or his family were displayed. It looked like a county fair, with food trucks parked around the lot and tables with knockoff Trump gear being sold by hustling entrepreneurs.

In line, I saw a man fully decked out in camouflage, holding a twelve-foot pole with a giant American flag. Someone else, about a hundred folks behind me, wore a hoodie that read socialists are fags. Anytime a Democrat was mentioned on the television—like Joe Biden—a collective “Boo” roared across the crowd. It was a sporting event: Team Red versus Team Blue.

This was my first Trump rally, and I was there alone. I wasn’t voting for Trump; I intensely opposed many of his policies. Even so, I felt electrified by the energy of the rally. It was a collective high.

“We’re going to win this thing!” a man in the audience screamed. Everyone nearby cheered in agreement.

Throughout the afternoon and evening, I walked up to people standing in line around me and asked questions like: Where did you travel from? Why are you here? Why are you voting for Trump? What values are important to you? Would you tell me about some of the Democrats you know in your life?

Most of the people I spoke with had traveled from outside of Minneapolis. Some had driven three or four hours to get to the rally. Some had come from neighboring states, like Wisconsin and Iowa. Others had taken time off work or found a babysitter. Many had brought their kids. There was even a superfan who was traveling to multiple Trump rallies, like a jam-band fanatic following Phish.

When I introduced myself to these strangers, I was surprised by the response I received. In retrospect, I’m not sure what I expected, but most people were actually very gracious. My heart would drop, right before I worked up the courage to bring up my sexuality or where I’d traveled from. But people were up for talking, and some were curious about me and why I was there. One slender white man with wire-framed glasses and short blond hair, who described himself as a “hard-core Trump supporter,” even affirmed the work I was doing with faith leaders to advocate for LGBTQ+ equality and to close “treatment programs” aimed at conversion therapy.

“That sounds important…everyone deserves equal rights,” he said. I was shocked.

“How do you spend your time?” I asked him.

“I’m an optometrist,” he said. He donated glasses to those who couldn’t afford them and went on missions abroad to offer free optometry evaluations to those in need.

He was a humanitarian. He valued family and service—things I valued too. He had an advanced degree. Yet he watched Fox News and bashed CNN. He was well traveled but had a tough stance on immigration. His practice was in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, but he commuted in from a smaller town on the outskirts. He thought liberals were brainwashed. I reminded him I was one.

“At least you come out here and don’t just listen to what you hear about us on the fake news,” he rebutted.

Other folks, admittedly, weren’t so gracious. One man I spoke to went on a rant that included calling Democrats “dumb” and “pathetic”—it was his opening line after I said, “Hi. Where did you travel from?” You could see the fire in his eyes and hear the anger in his voice. Instead of disclosing my views—I didn’t feel safe to—I asked him an open-ended question: “Why do you feel this way?”

He told me about his girlfriend. “She’s a Democrat,” he said. Somehow, they put their political differences aside and stayed in an amicable relationship. Then he started railing against his girlfriend’s friends.

“I’ll be hanging out with them, and I just know they think that I’m stupid,” he said. Although he didn’t say it directly, I could tell he felt hurt by their judgment. I wondered if it made him feel ostracized, and emboldened him to support Trump even more.

I spoke in-depth to nearly a dozen people over the course of the hours I spent waiting in line. One woman told me she grew up in a Republican household, and said she taught her children those same values. She loved being a mom and was incredibly proud of her kids. I asked her what she thought about Trump’s remarks about women. She replied that she didn’t always agree with him.

“But no matter what you believe or who you voted for,” she said, “he’s the president.”

As we got closer to the entrance of the Target Center, my legs were starting to cramp from all the standing. I saw folding chairs, umbrellas, ice coolers, and other gear abandoned against the walls. Security was rigorous; we passed through a row of metal detectors as the staff checked our bags, only to be patted down again by hand. I learned that some people had camped in line since the early morning, like shoppers on Black Friday waiting for a store to open.

Inside the arena, you could hear the crowd’s cheers ricocheting off the walls. Hundreds of Secret Service and police officers stood wearing earpieces. It felt like the NBA Finals. There were flashing lights and a massive stage down on the court, with a horde of people standing in front of it, waiting for the show to start. Thousands more were in the stadium seating, filling up every row. An occasional roar of applause would wash through the arena, and Trump Pence and Keep Americans working signs were seen in every direction.

Eventually, after a series of warm-up speakers, Trump took the stage. His speech sounded like an extended version of the clips I had already seen countless times before: railing against his perceived enemies, blasting the media (and egging the crowd on as they yelled things like “Fuck you!” to the media tent), and making personal at- tacks on Joe Biden and others.

About an hour into Trump’s speech, I felt my insides shutting down. My body was viscerally reacting to what I perceived were hateful attacks. It was becoming too much for me. I got out of my seat and awkwardly squeezed around people’s knees to the aisle, then made my way up the stairs to exit.

In the hallway, I collided with a group of people in Trump gear who were leaving early too, which piqued my curiosity again.

“Why are you leaving early?” I asked one of them.

“We’re trying to get ahead of the traffic!”

“Mind if I walk out with you?”

We small-talked. They were a couple and had driven two hours to see Trump. I was too tired to ask any more open-ended questions about their beliefs, values, fears, or joy—my mind and body were zapped, and I just wanted to get to my car and find food. I felt a knot in my neck, and my feet dragged with exhaustion.

As we made our way out of the arena and onto the street, a sea of counterprotesters standing across the road shouted anti-Trump slogans. Based on what they were saying, it seemed safe to assume that their politics were pretty similar to mine. Then one man from the crowd pointed at us.

“Fuck you, racists!” he screamed. “Get out of our city!”

The man I was walking with yelled back, “I’m not racist!”

I wanted to yell back too. I wanted to defend myself: “My politics are more like yours than theirs!” But I was deflated, bereft of energy, shocked by the screams directed at me.

This counterprotester thought he knew everything he needed to know about these Trump voters and me, without asking any questions. It transported me back to encounters from my past, where a stranger would yell “Ching chong,” or ask me “So what country did you come from?”

I made my way back to my car, keys in hand, anger coursing through my body. That rage turned into pain and a sense of hopelessness about whether we could ever get past the hatred pouring from all sides of the political aisle. Sitting in the driver’s seat with the ringing sound of the key in the ignition—ding, ding, ding—I was on the verge of tears. I thought: Is this really the state of our country? Here I was, trying to practice curiosity, but would it actually change anything?

Through my windshield, I watched a cheerful group of Trump voters with their red caps and shirts, heading back to their cars. A boy, probably in sixth or seventh grade, jumped up and tried to reach the lights on the ceiling of the parking garage with his small hands as if it were a basketball rim—something I used to do at his age. I thought about his life, and then I saw his mother smiling at him with amusement. For one moment, I didn’t see the red clothes or remember which political team they cheered for. I just saw a mother and a son—two people heading to their car after an event.

Exiting the parking garage, I saw a counterprotester across the street laughing so hard that she needed to hold on to her friend for stability. Who knows what was so funny, but isn’t this what we all want at the end of the day? We all want to see our kids play and to laugh.

I reflected further on my memories from the day, like the Trump voter I’d met in line who didn’t know anything about conversion therapy, or the man who’d opened up about the exclusion he felt from his girlfriend’s liberal friends. I thought about how my perspective had changed of who a Trump voter was—that they weren’t a stereotype of an illiterate, uneducated, hate-filled person. They were humanitarians. They were parents. They valued similar things as I did: family, service, and a sense of belonging.

My mind was so focused on the state of the world I forgot about my own state of mind. I realized that I had come to the rally with the goal of learning more about Trump voters, but what I gained was much more unexpected: The experience changed me. It expanded my mind, countered my assumptions, and revealed a common humanity among those who seemed different from me. My politics didn’t change—and they didn’t have to—but my attitude toward the people I deemed as “the other” did.

Learn more about Scott Shigeoka’s book Seek.