| No Images? Click here   By Samantha Storey and Nick BaumannChris Mathias, a national reporter for HuffPost, attended a Trump rally in Panama City, Fla last week. There’s plenty of reason to think Trump supporters in this area would be upset with the president. The Florida panhandle has been starved of desperately needed aid under his administration’s watch. But instead most here blamed their problems squarely on Democrats, highlighting the unwavering devotion to the president that many of his supporters still show, over two years into his first term.This is your second Trump rally you've covered. What's the atmosphere like on the ground?It's kinda my third Trump rally if you count CPAC, which felt like a 4-day Trump rally. But yeah, Trump rallies are like a big tailgate. People show up hours and hours beforehand. I met a group of people in front of the line who got there the night before, and had slept outside. There are food trucks and live bands. Tons of people hawking MAGA merchandise. It often feels like people following their favorite band. Think Deadheads or Phish fans.Have you had trouble getting press credentials?So they didn't give me press credentials for the rally in El Paso. I never got an answer as to why. They just went silent. So I was bracing myself not to get press credentials for the Panama City Beach rally. I had heard that the Trump campaign had previously refused to give press credentials to certain publications. But a week before the Panama City rally, they gave me press credentials! It's something I'm gonna keep an eye on going forward. The day of the Panama City Beach rally, Dana Milbank, a longtime White House correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote an op-ed about how the White House had revoked his press credentials, and about how the White House if cracking down on press access.What most surprised you about rally goers?It's something that's been talked about a lot but I think bears repeating: the more I cover MAGA world, the more I realize there's nothing the president can do or say, however awful, that will stop his supporters from supporting him. We were in an area that was devastated by a hurricane, which hasn't received the federal aid it needs for over 200 days, yet the supporters thought he was perfect.We hear the media bull pit is often maligned by Trump on stage. Talk about what that feels like in person.Yeah, I can cross "being called fake news by the president at a rally" off my reporting bucket list. I don't know how to describe it. I didn't feel threatened necessarily. I did feel a sense of solidarity with all the reporters there. On the drive to the Tallahassee airport after the rally, I listened to a podcast with Mehdi Hassan interviewing Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who just wrote a book called "How Fascism Works." There was this amazing thing Stanley said, when he was talking about authoritarian movements, that reminded me of my experience in the press pit in Panama City Beach. "The lies have the function first of establishing your power over reality. You’re showing off to your supporters. ‘Who cares about the truth? I’m the guy.’"Anything you want to add?There was a scary moment at the rally when Trump was talking about refugees and immigrants at the border and someone in the front row yelled, "Shooot 'em!," and everyone laughed and cheered. And Trump responded, "Only in the Florida panhandle can you get away with saying something like that." Anyway, seeing the president joke about murdering immigrants, and it not be a national scandal, is ... really alarming.
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