Even for those of us outside the “greatest country in the world”, there really is no escaping the US election on our phones or in the news or in conversation circles after a few drinks. It feels like many Australians are just waiting for this fucking thing to be done with so we can deal with whatever comes next. Our heads are at least partially in the sand, and we’re keeping it that way for the next little while.
For Sydney musician, photographer and (as I’ve recently learned) dog trainer, Xavier Diekman, the election was an opportunity to be on the ground for what may be a defining moment in the history of the United States. Over the past few weeks, armed with his camera, Xavier has been capturing the country’s seemingly trapped state of mania, along with the people, the cars, the strange merch, and the open road in between.
We emailed him some questions to try and get a taste of what is happening over there. Check it out below along with pics in the gallery above. Oh, and follow Xavier’s road trip via his IG here.
So I started in San Francisco, crashing with generous friends and at cheap dodgy motels. Next, I stopped over in Oakland for a night on my way through to Reno, Nevada. From there, I made my way down to Las Vegas and used that as a base to explore Nevada for a few days.
After spending the night at Las Vegas airport (due to my own organisational incompetence), I flew to Washington DC and then made my way up to Chicago via Pittsburgh and Detroit. I’m currently staying with gracious friends in Chicago. For election day, I’m planning to drive from Chicago to Atlanta, GA, and spend the election evening in Atlanta. After that, I’m playing it by ear depending on how things feel, but I’m hoping to make it to North Carolina.
The TLDR version would be that I offloaded my dog training business a few months back and was looking to put a lot of time and effort into photography which, although I’ve been dabbling in it for years, I have never put front and centre. Basically, I wanted to make it a bigger part of my life and figured now is as good as ever!
In terms of timing, I’ve had some vague threads for projects I’ve wanted to pursue over here bubbling for a while, and with the election, it just felt like now was the time to get over. It was also a chance to witness something historic and be on the ground for it. I’m a bit of a politics nerd, but it’s different when it’s theoretical, I guess, and it almost felt like a compulsion to see it unfold in real time.
Driving mostly! I wanted to minimise flying, but also, I love road trips and I really hate airports. Plus, there’s so much stuff you see when you drive as opposed to flying.
It really depends! Some people think I’m a bit mad, but a lot of people really get it—especially at rallies and stuff. Those events seem to attract photographers and others looking to make sense of it all.
So far, I’ve been to a rally held by ‘Team Trump’ and JD Vance in Reno; a Trump rally (held by the Turning Point PAC) in Las Vegas; and Kamala Harris’s closing arguments rally at The Ellipse in Washington. I also went to a Trump rally in Michigan, just outside Detroit, but unfortunately, was denied access with cameras at that one, so I could only attend the line to get in and the car park filled with Trump and MAGA merch stands. I’m hoping to attend Trump’s final rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, tomorrow as well, so we’ll see how that plays out.
For the Trump and Team MAGA rallies, the first step is just registering for tickets, which means supplying details including a US number. I downloaded an app that spoofed an American number to get in, but any American number would do, I think. The next part is getting past the security screening by the Secret Service, which is basically the same as at an airport, but you can’t take bags.
The Secret Service doesn’t care about cameras; they’re just there for safety. As long as the camera turns on and you can prove it’s a working camera and not an IED, they don’t care.
The events staff or media/Trump team in general might give you a hard time, so I’ve just been blending in as best I can, and as always, politeness goes a long way. Honestly, it’s been really inconsistent whether people care or not. They must know it’s pointless given that everyone has a camera in their pocket anyway, but like so many things, it probably depends on who you get and which day you get them on.
I did get kicked out of the Vance rally once they realised I wasn’t just a snap-happy tourist/supporter, but I’d already got a decent amount of work in, so wasn’t too bothered.
It totally depends! I do feel a degree of tension overall, but it’s hard to separate that from my own anxieties about the election and just my general sense of unease. It also depends where you are. At one of these rallies, the energy is overwhelming, but it goes both ways! Certainly at the Harris rally, there was almost a degree of jubilance in the crowd. I mean, so much dancing, and good dancing too! But the prospect of a Trump victory felt like a dark cloud looming, threatening to dump a bunch of rain and ruin everything.
The Trump rallies I’ve attended have been so intense. People are very energised, almost entranced by him when he speaks, and the same goes for JD Vance. Driving around the country, there is so much political advertising, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. You’ll drive past a sign that says “TRUMP”, and underneath, “Do you feel safe now? VOTE TRUMP! YOUR SAFETY IS AT STAKE,” and then on the next block will be Harris/Walz pickets and a big “KAMALA 2024” billboard.
There is definitely a sense of communities being polarised and wearing their political allegiance as a badge or mark of their tribe. Seeing this stark division is a bit unnerving.
Not heaps, but there have been some tense moments. There was a big group of protesters in support of Palestine outside the Harris rally with a police line between them and the main gate, and tensions threatened to boil over a few times. There wasn’t an overwhelming feeling of threat to my safety personally, but with such a huge mass of people (around 75,000) in one area and so close to the White House, it felt combustible. There have been a handful of instances like that so far.
I mean, the closest I’ve been to being an actual victim of crime was probably when I fell asleep at Las Vegas airport overnight. I messed up my booking, so I had six hours to kill between 11 pm and 4 am and decided to make do in the airport. One of the security guards told me not to fall asleep, as every night someone gets their stuff taken. Man, I tried SO HARD not to doze off, but I woke up to someone sitting right next to me (with the whole rest of the airport to sit in), scoping my stuff out and sussing out my bags. Lesson learned—sleep with one eye open, I guess!
Other than that, America is a place of extremes, right? The haves have A LOT, and the have-nots are struggling more than ever. There’s this very American thing of being in some bougie suburb with designer dogs and trendy shops everywhere, and then just ten minutes in the other direction, you’ve got people fighting to survive. It’s stark and unnerving.
For me, the whole drive from Reno to Vegas and then heading straight to the Trump rally felt like sensory overload to the point that it might fry my brain. Admittedly, I had nothing proper to eat all day, so was subsisting entirely on black coffee, trail mix, and Dexamphetamine. Partly because the desert landscapes were so amazing that I was stopping to take photos every 30 minutes, turning a seven-hour drive into nearly 12.5 hours.
There is so much abandoned shit out there in the middle of nowhere. I found some sort of deserted RV park off the main road between Silver Lakes and Vegas and found myself rummaging through old photos from someone’s family photo book in the middle of the desert, in the middle of fucking nowhere, surrounded by abandoned old American cars, shelters, wheelchairs, and white goods for some reason?
Then, another hour down the road was the carcass of a crashed light aircraft next to a derelict sign for the “Angel Ladies Brothel.” The gate was locked, so fuck knows if that’s a trading business anymore. Just so much stuff like that. By the time I rolled into Vegas, with all its blinding lights and insane advertising, I was having internal conversations with myself, just checking in to make sure I wasn’t experiencing psychosis. Not to mention the unreality of the Trump rally itself with its blasting music, Mega Church atmosphere, and people cheering to the prospect of “mass deportations”.
To be clear, I ate a proper meal as soon as I arrived, and to be honest, it didn’t even help.
There’s just so much of it! Literally as I was writing this sentence, I got a message on my US number from the Trump campaign saying: “Xavier, I’m shipping you a Gold MAGA Hat! Congratulations! Should I sign it?” Haha. I’ve seen so much stuff at these merch stands, man—everything from your standard MAGA hats and shirts to gold chains with little bobbleheads of Trump with a cigar in his mouth. To “Trumptorious”-branded merch, to “I’m voting for the felon,” to “Make Weed Great Again”. There’s a lot of stuff with his mugshots on it; I’ll say that.
My understanding is that basically all these vendors pay around 10% of their proceeds to the campaign for licenses to set up their stands and sell merchandise, but that it’s ‘unofficial’, meaning that they can do whatever the hell they want, I guess.
Probably so, I guess it’s unavoidable. America is just so huge. I think in Australia we borrow so much and, in many ways, are sharing so much of the culture from the States. But in reality, the country isn’t a monolith—it is just so big, so diverse, and filled with so many different landscapes, cultures, and communities. I have lots of feelings about this country, and I’m trying to make room for all of them to exist at once… Sounds very therapised, doesn’t it?
In saying all that, I’m sure the election results and the events that come after will have me feeling some type of way.
I hate identifying with a nation-state in general. However, I am undoubtedly lucky and privileged with relative safety and opportunity in Australia, but that’s not the case for everyone. If we think that the kind of destructive forces that have taken the stage in America can’t also come to dominate in Australia, we are kidding ourselves. Especially if Trump wins the election, I imagine the Australian political class will only take that as encouragement to follow his lead.
As of today, the news cycle seems to have positively shifted in the direction of Harris, but that’s just my interpretation. Personally, I think Harris will get the popular vote, but whether she gets enough electoral college votes to win is up in the air; it’s just so tight.
In some ways, a win by Harris with very slim margins is a hard scenario for the country. The way I see it, the more time they have to spend counting the votes, the more of a vacuum there’ll be for misinformation to fill and for Trump to contest the election and mobilise supporters. He and his team have been spruiking the idea of a fraudulent election at every chance they get, and certainly, at the events I’ve been to, this is a huge talking point. I feel like it’s extremely unlikely that he will let a Harris victory go without a fight, and hopefully, it’s just a legal and rhetorical fight. In the case of a Trump victory, I honestly don’t know. I doubt the Democrats will contest it.
Every generation at every time in history has their own fears of apocalypse, right? I don’t want to ignore the fact that there is something fundamentally human about feeling/saying that ‘this event’ or ‘this election’ is the beat of a butterfly’s wing that precipitates the collapse of the global community. Yet every now and again, our fears are confirmed, and currently, we are facing the prospect of grappling with catastrophic climate change in the context of a global community in which the largest superpower is led by someone who has outright denied the existence of man-made climate change.
I suppose America has already dealt with one Trump presidency, but in the case of a MAGA victory, I would feel heartbroken for any of the many marginalised groups in American society that will feel the consequences in a very real way that many won’t have to.
