CHARLESTON — I remember, vividly, talking to James Antle, now-TAC editor, in the newsroom of the Washington Examiner five Februarys ago. A, deranged, man had walked into a Ted Cruz rally in Iowa and said to the Texas senator what many of his numerous foes in Washington think behind his back: “Ted Cruz looks weird.”

“Ted Cruz looks so weird,” Antle reported the man as saying. “Ted Cruz looks weird!”

Ironic for a notorious Washington knifefighter, the tepidness of Cruz’s response spoke to the fatal flaw of his campaign: it was lame. 

As Antle wrote:

“‘I guess the bars let out early,’ Cruz quipped, noting to scattered applause that the First Amendment protects his critics. The Texas senator then asked, ‘Is that Donald Trump yelling in the back?'”

I tell this story because crowd sizes and style are the elusive North Star of American politics. No one really knows what they mean but political journalists thirst for definitive resolution on the matter. In 2008, Barack Obama was a fringe movement, Hillary Clinton was the (immediate) future, and his packed college gym rallies could be written off. Until they couldn’t. In 2012, Mitt Romney was the impresario of a church choir, but he had parishioners. Thirty thousand at a October 2012 Pennsylvania rally was supposed to presage a surprise victory against an underratedly vulnerable incumbent. It didn’t happen.

Antle noted what was remarkable about the Cruz clash: aside from security, no one in the rally touched the guy. That very well might not have been true at a — continuingly relevant — a Bernie Sanders rally, or even a rowdier Rand Paul rally, an ultimately decaffeinated version of the campaigns his father ran four and eight years prior. What was sure, at least at the time: that guy would have been messed with at a Donald Trump rally.

The energy at a Mitt Romney rally was corporate retreat. Trump’s productions could feel like a gathering of the Hells Angels. 

Until Friday night, I hadn’t been near one in years.

Everyone knows these are still rapturous affairs, but had the weight of incumbency, a relatively thin list of governing achievements as he’s stymied by “the deep state,” and sheer national exhaustion taken any of the varnish off, at least for the congregated?

I’m still not sure. What I am sure of: I witnessed black magic.

We’ve, all, become accustomed this last half-decade to Donald Trump’s downright bizarre style of presentation. He’s abolished the playbook on how to give a political speech. 

Now in power: the rant. Trump’s likely opponent in the fall, Bernie Sanders, is not fully dissimilar in style. 

But Trump trades a Marxist-adjacent framework, and Sanders’ recycled menu of grievances, for an a la carte assault on practically everyone: Hollywood, South Korea, your mother if she’s NeverTrump. 

“Pocahontas, we can forget about her, right?” Trump said, sticking the knife in the candidacy of Elizabeth Warren, now laid waste to by her party’s primary process. “I came out with that name far too early.”

Whatever you think of his last three years in power, no one can deny Trump still plays a formidable role: national hangman.

“How about Klobuchar? Not gonna happen,” as cutting a line in its simplicity  as I’ve heard in politics.

Trump then polled his audience, tipping his hand slightly on the speculation that has quietly dominated Republican circles in Washington the past year: who does the White House want to face?

“Let’s do a poll. Who would be the best candidate for us?” Trump asked. The president of the United States offered a rejoinder: “Who the hell is easier to beat?”

“We won’t include [Tom] Steyer, because he’s a loser, he’s out,” Trump noted. 

Trump: “So who is easier to beat, Crazy Bernie?” The audience roars. 

Trump: “Or, Sleepy Joe?” The audience screams. 

“I don’t know, I think Crazy Bernie has it a little bit?” Trump said. 

Afterwards, in a chalk-white hotel bar near the arena, I’m surrounded by the faithful.

The zeitgeist here, in this famous ex-Confederate stronghold, is the same as it is in every bar outside of maybe Brooklyn and Burlington in America: Donald Trump, impossibly, is going to win once more. 

As I notice a man who looks just like Jamal Khashoggi, but alive, in South Carolina and not the Saudi consulate, pounding Coronas and decked out in MAGA, I’m reminded, in this year of fear and loathing, of the song written by Robert Earl Keen in 1989, the last year of the Sixties. 

The road goes on forever and the party never ends.