MOBILE, ALABAMA — President Trump held a rally Friday night at the University of South Alabama in front of roughly 8,000 people, and then asked them to do something that every teacher, coach, and parent in this country recognizes as a perfectly normal civic exercise: close their eyes and pretend he’s on the ballot.

They did it. Eight thousand Alabamans closed their eyes in an arena, together, on the word of their President. You can search the entire record of American civic participation and you will not find a more obedient crowd. Not the Selective Service. Not jury duty. This was a man with a microphone asking a crowd to use their imagination, and the crowd used it.

The reasoning, delivered on stage, was arithmetic, not theater. “When I’m not on the ballot, we don’t do well,” the President said. “We have 44 percent or 48 percent less people. When I’m on the ballot, we get everybody. So, just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot.” Some people heard that as a confession. Those people have never run a bake sale. The person who says “everyone come buy cookies like it’s the cookie festival” is not admitting the festival is fake. That person is growing the festival.

What the President did was solve a turnout problem with zero dollars, zero legislation, and zero fraud allegations. Every other get-out-the-vote operation in America spends money. The President spent a sentence.

"Eight thousand adults closed their eyes on command in an arena. The Marines could learn something from Mobile, Alabama."

PRETENDING: A CREDENTIALS BRIEFING

  • Cost: $0.00. No postage, no mailers, no robocalls.
  • Compliance rate: 100 percent of the visible crowd, per eyewitnesses, eyes shut.
  • Precedent: Every President campaigns. This is the same activity with the paperwork removed.
  • Legal exposure: None. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for closing their eyes.
  • Margin in Alabama: 30.5 points in 2024. The pretending is not load-bearing.

The strategy also has a name in political science, and the name is “enthusiasm.” A voter who imagines the President on the ballot votes like the President is on the ballot. A voter who imagines nothing votes in November like it is a Tuesday, because it is. The President simply removed the imagining gap. That is called closing the loop, and it is the same skill that built the 17-state midterm bus tour he is running right now, rally by rally, state by state.

Not everyone was inside the arena. A few hundred protesters gathered across Mobile with signs reading “their time is coming to an end,” which is a strange thing to say about a man whose crowd just spent ten seconds inside their own heads at his request. Protest is what you do to an opponent. Pretending together is what you do to a leader.

At press time, the Mobile County elections office confirmed it had received eleven phone calls asking whether the President’s name could be added to the November ballot as a reminder. The office declined, saying the pretending had already worked and they did not want to interfere with a good thing.