What's a Donald Trump music festival really like? 'Exhausting.'
What's a Donald Trump music festival really like? 'Exhausting.'
"Hands down, it’s the worst job I have ever had," says an expat New Zealander who endured four of them.
He’d seen the pick-up trucks in the parking lot and the huge American flags hanging from cranes.
He’d walked past the beer-drinking rednecks munching on chicken wings and turkey legs wearing MAGA hats that read: “Make America rock again.”
And he’d heard the constant chants of “USA! USA!” and “Fuck Joe Biden” coming from the main stage, along with a pre-recorded video message from Donald Trump playing on repeat.
“This is not a subtle environment,” he says. “It’s a unique experience. It’s … just crazy.”
But it wasn’t until he saw the noose that Patrick* fully realised where he was – smack bang in the middle of a different kind of music festival than those he is usually employed to work at.
At the 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, the expat New Zealander was touring the festival site when he came across a pillar adorned with a cardboard cut out of American president Joe Biden. It was dangling upside-down. Thick rope was tied around his ankles.
Next to him was another cardboard figure depicting the smiling former American president Donald Trump. Both of his thumbs were up. “It was like, ‘Wow,’” Patrick told me over WhatsApp recently. “It was an exhausting environment to be in.”
His job had led him there. Patrick usually spends eight months a year employed as an audio technician in the UK, embedding himself with touring artists to make sure all their high-tech stage equipment does what it’s supposed to do. For the other four months, he comes home to enjoy a New Zealand summer.
This year, Patrick was offered something different: the opportunity to work out of his company's Nashville office, to base himself in America. “I thought I'd give that a shot and see how it goes,” he says. On his second day, he was offered his first job. They said: “Look, we’ve got this [festival], it’s … interesting.”
Patrick soon realised he was about to embark on something few people at his company wanted to do. He’d be joining rap-rock musician Kid Rock’s crew on his Rock the Country festival tour, a two-day event with seven stops through America’s southern states on a line-up filled with Republican-supporting acts: Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
It is, for all intents and purposes, a festival for Donald Trump. Trump, a Republican battling the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in a bitter, hotly contested American presidential race that won’t be decided until November 5, may not be there in person, but he’s there in spirit, and everyone who attends is a loud, proud supporter.
As Patrick puts it: “They're rednecks, really. People are drunk. People are out there all day.” Or, as the New York Times ($$) described the festival: “A vision of the MAGA movement in pure party mode.”
Patrick was employed to do four of the seven tour stops. That meant coming into each festival to set up, monitoring Kid Rock’s show to make sure everything worked as it should, then packing down afterwards.
At his first, in Ocala, Florida, 40,000 people attended, about the size of a typical Big Day Out, and a record-breaking heatwave saw temperatures top 35 degrees. His American colleagues thought it was a hilarious induction for him, laughing at “the fact I've come over from New Zealand and that's the gig I've been put on.”
He soon learned every event ran to the same exact schedule. It was, Patrick says, a case of deja vu. “You could have played Bingo,” he says. “Every band would give thanks to God, to military and the first responders, then they'd usually say something about Trump. They’d usually say, ‘Fuck Biden,’ because these things get the big response. Then they'd play a bunch of generally pretty awful country music.”
But he was there to work on Kid Rock’s set, the climax of each event. Patrick describes it as a special kind of festival hell. “The show is bizarre,” he says. “There are two dancing girls that dance on American flag poles. The chant for the encore is, ‘USA! USA!’” Rock incorporates the phrase ‘Fuck Biden’ into some songs. “His set is definitely crafted to appeal to that audience.”
Then it’s the moment everyone’s been waiting for: a pre-recorded video message from Trump playing on the big screen. “The stage goes dark,” says Patrick, who watched this moment play out four separate times. “Trump appears in a presidential suite. He talks about how Kid Rock is one of the best of our generation. He mentions God. Then he says: ‘Let’s make America rock again.’”
(For more, you can watch the entire thing here. Please, don’t.)
Patrick quickly learned not to engage in any kind of rhetoric that might enrage the kind of punters who attended the festivals he’d been employed at. He wouldn’t even bring it up backstage. “I just wouldn't talk politics,” he says. He was worried his immigration status – he was there on a skilled worker visa – might come up. “They could get riled up. You never know with super political guys.”
Next, Patrick’s working on a few tour dates by the metal act Disturbed. He’s expecting it to be far less problematic than the festival run he’s just finished. He is, he says, still decompressing from it. “It's been real weird trying to remind myself that that's not America,” he says. Then he corrects himself: “That’s not the whole of America.”
Would he do it again? “I thought it would be an interesting experience, and it was,” Patrick says. “I’m glad it was only every other weekend for a couple of months. It’s not my idea of a fun day out in the sun. I wouldn’t go back … Hands down, it’s the worst job I have ever had.”
* Patrick is not his real name. I’ve changed it to protect his identity, for obvious reasons.
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