A Photographer’s Diary of 12 Turbulent Months In Trump’s America
It would be too much to say that if you’ve seen one Trump rally you’ve seen them all. But “they all follow a predictable pattern,” says Peter van Agtmael, who has been attending them since 2016. As a news photographer, “You have a lot of nice conversations, and maybe one or two people aren’t very nice. Then they turn into a mob when Trump stokes them and provokes them.”
Usually the moment comes when, like clockwork, Trump points back toward where cameras and reporters are cordoned, and instructs the crowd to vent their spleen. “And they all turn on you as a mob and shout at you and give you the finger. He can turn a loose or friendly crowd — or at least a neutral crowd — into an angry crowd in a few seconds,” he say. “And I never got used to that. It’s hard to be in this vulnerable position when thousands of people are looking at you with hate in their eyes.” Over five years, the dynamic was the same; van Agtmael could predict when it was coming.
Jan. 6 felt different from the start. “I had a strong feeling something bad was going to happen,” he says. By the time a mob moved from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House to overrun the U.S. Capitol, the day had brought together the forces van Agtmael had been documenting over the previous year — Trumpism, race, politics, COVID-19 — in what may have been a crescendo, or merely a prelude. Van Agtmael isn’t sure.
“This year,” he says, “kind of embodies all these things I’ve been looking at for the last 15 years: How forms of nationalism and militarism found a bedfellow in Trump, and well beyond that, to identity politics and a kind of sordid version of patriotism. But then also this racial reckoning. And then beyond that, the pandemic and our response to it, which framed questions like: What is our notion of liberty and duty to our neighbors and duty to our country?”
From years covering conflict overseas, van Agtmael is more than comfortable with armed men. He recognized, among the National Guard summoned to protect the Inauguration, the faces of friends he’d made while embedded with U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. His work always toggles between front line and home front, and makes visible the dilemmas that haunt peoples’ lives and, in some circles, drive politics.
The photos here were made across America — in Wildwood, NJ., Minneapolis, Tulsa, Louisville, Portland, Erie, and, finally, our nation’s capital — during a year when just being out and about came with a certain element of risk.
“I’ve been on the receiving end of mob violence before in Egypt during the revolution,” the photographer says. In Washington, “I was wandering through that crowd for hours. Then it got pretty rough. I had to leave the scene for a while because I thought militia was going to beat the sh-t out of me. Instead, they likely gave me COVID-19. Mild symptoms kicked in five days later. It’s kind of right on the dot.”