Newsletter 16: Covering an Early Trump Rally in Mobile

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one is from August 2016, when I was still covering the Presidential campaign for Bloomberg Politics and was reflecting on reporting on a Trump rally in Mobile the year before. I thought it was all bad then. It got a lot worse.

One year ago this Monday, I traveled to Mobile, Alabama, to cover a Donald Trump rally. This is the piece I wrote about it. I’m pretty pleased with how that piece turned out; I was given a lot of freedom to do it right, and not to have to turn it into the sort of You’ll Never Believe What Donald Trump Said Today piece that has dominated all media coverage of Trump in the year since. Frankly, it’s not the sort of piece that even Bloomberg Politics would run today. It can be tough to tell how to cover an election like this one. This election cycle has turned a lot of people into something they wouldn’t have recognized 12 months ago. It gets in your head.

It was sort of happenstance that I got to cover the rally anyway. My editor called me at, like, 7 p.m. and said that, for reasons no one in the office could figure out, Trump was randomly flying to a college football stadium — South Alabama’s, actually — the next day, and I was the only reporter they had “in the area.”…