Texas Monthly asks Why Is Donald Trump Kicking Off His 2024 Campaign in Waco?
On Saturday evening, Donald Trump will hold his first official rally of the 2024 campaign cycle. He won’t be doing so in his home state of Florida, however. Nor will he address a crowd of potential swing voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. No, the twice-impeached former president will formally launch his third bid for the office at Waco Regional Airport—less than ten miles northwest of the heart of the city, along a remote stretch of land broken up mostly by a smattering of McLennan County’s finest gas stations, oil-change shops, and self-storage facilities. As presidential campaign kickoff events go, it’s an unlikely spot.
I lived in Waco many years ago and haven’t been in the city for over twenty-five years, apart from driving through a decade or so ago. Still, I know enough about the place, and about Texas in general, to know that it is highly bizarre to be holding a major event from the Waco Regional Airport.
I am, in fact, hard-pressed to find any explanation for this choice that the obvious: that it is intended as a signal to the far right given the linkage to the confrontation between federal law enforcement and the Branch Davidians thirty years ago.* That he is openly courting support from individuals who would find Waco symbolic in this way is highly disturbing.
Heidi Beirich, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, noted in an interview with USA Today this week that “Waco is hugely symbolic on the far right,” and that “there’s not really another place in the U.S. that you could pick that would tap into these deep veins of anti-government hatred.” Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and a famously outspoken critic of her uncle, said in a tweet Thursday night that hosting the rally in Waco is “a ploy to remind his cult of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, where an anti-government cult battled the FBI. Scores of people died. He wants the same violent chaos to rescue him from justice.”
The months-long standoff in Waco was a radicalizing event for many in the anti-government movement; Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in 1995, cited “what the U.S. government did to Waco” as part of his motivation for the attack. Trump, meanwhile, has increasingly made common cause with anti-government types since losing his 2020 bid to remain in the government’s highest office. In addition to inspiring an insurrection against that government in an attempt to remain in power, and then portraying those who were convicted of their crimes as wrongfully imprisoned martyrs, Trump’s own beef with the same Justice Department whose ATF and FBI were on the ground at the Branch Davidian compound thirty years ago has escalated since his South Florida beach club was raided last year in an attempt to recover classified documents. He’s declared federal agents to be “vicious monsters,” echoing rhetoric he has used against rank-and-file members of the FBI since even before his presidency ended, when he called them “scum.”
It is extremely difficult to find an explanation for the choice of location save for a very loud dog whistle.
Still, the Trump people have offered an alternative narrative:
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the former president, issued a statement earlier this week that suggests, however, that the campaign would like to be able to maintain some deniability about that coincidence. (Unless, of course, Trump himself chooses to call attention to it during the speech, which is always a possibility.) “President Trump is holding his first campaign rally in Waco in the Super Tuesday state of Texas because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas’ biggest metropolitan areas—Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio—while providing the necessary infrastructure to hold a rally of this magnitude,” the statement read. “This is the ideal location to have as many supporters from across the state and in neighboring states attend this historic rally.”
This is nonsense, to put it mildly. Waco is, indeed, “close” to those metro areas. But “close” is relative:
It’s roughly ninety minutes from both Austin and Dallas, but a good three-hour drive from Houston or San Antonio. Trump could probably get more bang for his buck if he were to come to Austin proper, which would eliminate all travel time for residents of one of those four cities; it would also cut San Antonians’ travel times in half and shave half an hour or so from the drives of most Houstonians. (DFW residents, meanwhile, would have to drive about as far as folks from Houston and San Antonio will in order to get to Waco.)
And I would note those distance estimates are largely to the outskirts of those regions. I seem to recall taking almost two hours from where I lived in Austin to visit friends in Waco. Depending on where one lives in the DFW area might have an hour (or perhaps quite a bit more) added to the trip. The central locale argument is simply ridiculous, especially in such a smaller metro area.
There is just no good reason to have this rather significant event in Waco, TX, especially at the airport.
It is my nature not to be alarmist, but it is also hard to deny the rather obvious courting of the far right by Trump given the events of January 6, 2021, not to mention rhetorical fusilades like “I am your retribution” as he recently declared at CPAC.
And, I would note, it does not matter what Trump believes (if, in fact, he believes in anything other than self-aggrandizement), what matters is that he is willing to encourage and mobilize whatever elements of society he deems useful in his quest to return to power.
This reality should not be ignored.
——
*I was in grad school in Austin at the time, so between relative proximity to the event in real-time and the fact that I had lived in the Waco area during parts of middle and high school, those events will always be quite vivid in my mind. That they took place three decades ago checks out mathematically, but they feel in some ways more proximate to me.
