USA TODAY International Edition
13 years ago, Glenn Beck saw the future
Once upon a time, Glenn Beck was right, and I was very wrong.
It was early March 2003, and Beck, the conservative radio talk show host, was just beginning his meteoric rise. I was the head of the Cleveland bureau of the Associated Press, responsible for the wire service’s coverage across Northeast Ohio.
Beck had called for a series of rallies nationwide — Cleveland being one of the first — to “Rally for the Troops, Rally for America” and stand as a counterpart to anti- war protests going on around the country in response to U. S. preparations for an invasion of Iraq. Beck said these were not ideological events, rather patriotic displays, but there was a distinct conservative consciousness that ran through them, and they became a way for conservatives to stand up across the country and say, “We are here, too.”
“I firmly support the right of all Americans to express their views on the war in Iraq or anything else,” Beck said at the time. “But I was moved a few months ago by Adam Ankarlo, son of a Dallas radio personality, who wondered why there were only TV pictures of protests and no demonstrations to support the troops — troops he was about to join as a new recruit.” So he urged listeners to call their local radio stations and organize promilitary events.
The rallies were grass- roots events, funded by $ 1 donations from listeners, but they quickly got national notice.
By April, a national conservative group had joined in and held a Rally for America in D. C. featuring “readings of letters written by President George W. Bush and movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, and speeches by radio talk- show hosts G. Gordon Liddy and Laura Ingraham, and former senator Fred Thompson, Tennessee Republican, and actor Ron Silver,” The Washington
Times reported. Looking back, Beck’s protests were a seed of the Trump movement.
These were largely white, largely working- class rallies featuring an aggressive, flag- draped patriotism. Although relatively small — the Cleveland event had about 8,000 people — these events were also relatively large. It is hard to get 8,000 to gather for a political event outdoors in Cleveland in early March.
More than 150,000 people attended “Rally for America” events in a bunch of “flyover” cities such as Nashville, Oklahoma City, Houston.
Anyway, I didn’t assign anyone to cover the Cleveland rally.
There were a lot of reasons for this that made sense. For starters, it was a Saturday afternoon, and our bureau was unstaffed during those hours. Second, the way the AP functioned at the time, we could “pick up” ( or “steal”) the coverage of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, our largest member newspaper in the area. And third, the rally organizers made no effort at media outreach, so we were not even sure where and when the event was happening.
These are lame excuses. It would have been easy to find out where and when the rally was being held and assign somebody to cover it, or even head over myself. I decided not to bother because it didn’t seem like much of a Thing. So the AP wire had no national story about the protests that first weekend.
By Monday, conservatives were complaining that the AP had ignored the rallies for political reasons, which was not at all true. We had ignored the rallies because I was too dumb to pay attention to them. I feel that if we had paid more attention then, we would have better understood the Tea Party in 2010 and Trump’s support this year.
It is worth noting that Beck despises Trump, has refused to endorse him and suggested his election would be a “possible extinction- level event for capitalism.” But 13 years ago, Beck tapped the same stream of patriotism and outsider anger that Trump has turned into rocket fuel for his campaign.
As I return to Cleveland this week for the convention to crown Donald Trump as the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, I find myself thinking this stunning development would be easier to understand if I had gone to the Beck rally in 2003.
Obviously, Beck understood something I missed completely.
Beck tapped the same stream of patriotism and outsider anger that Trump has turned into rocket fuel for his campaign. Hundreds of Oklahomans show support for U. S. troops at a rally at a mall on March 3, 2003.