Speakers from Tulsi Gabbard to Russell Brand to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed the crowd in Washington under a pastel “Make America Healthy Again” banner. Entrepreneurs hawked green “MAHA” merch in the iconic style of Donald Trump’s MAGA gear. As far as symbols go, the sartorial marriage of MAGA and MAHA may be the most powerful takeaway from Rescue the Republic.

It’s one thing to see on social media, but quite another to watch as barefoot hippies mingle with gym rats in Infowars gear, or middle-aged Leftists in Birkenstocks find genuine fellowship with evangelical Trump supporters. And not just on fluoride, but on war and art and — dare I say — voting Republican? (Tea Party Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was a crowd favourite.)

Not all of MAHA will vote MAGA. I saw at least one attendee in a keffiyeh who likely finds little to love about the GOP ticket, even if he came to hear Jimmy Dore. The question of scale, then, becomes very important.

In late August, writer Matt Yglesias coined a new term for America’s shifting politics: “The crank realignment”. “The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics,” Yglesias wrote, adding, “The most obvious problem is that as Republicans increasingly become the party of retirees and folks who didn’t go to college, they still need smart, educated professionals to actually do stuff, and they’re fishing in an increasingly thin pool”.

So cranks, or people with a “generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them,” are increasingly aligning with the Right after decades of alignment with the Left, according to Yglesias’s theory. This theory hinges, of course, on those “smart, educated professionals” not also sharing these institutional suspicions and on those institutional suspicions being unfounded crankery.

This formulation lacks nuance and empathy, to say the least. It was “smart, educated professionals” who, for example, believed and spread disinformation on Covid and Russia collusion. Rescue the Republic’s Left-Right coalition would not exist without the blows both narratives dealt to institutional trust. Either way, Yglesias’s theory might have actually been just as well described as the “Elite Realignment.” Why are smart, educated people like J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard pivoting on Trump while smart, educated people like Joe Scarborough turn on Trump? The direction of travel is not always clear.

Writing in the Journal, Molly Ball said the rally was a “testament to the axis of weird that has assembled to support Trump’s candidacy—a cross-partisan fringe united by little more than conspiratorial contrarianism.” But that also feels unfair. One needn’t be weird to support a weird candidate. It may simply be a reflection of unhappiness with the status quo. Looking at the faces in the crowd on Sunday, many seemed to fall into this category.

Rescue the Republic seemed mostly united for Trump, and it is clear that the former president is gathering together an extremely heterodox coalition. Matt Taibbi said it best: “In a pre-Trump universe,” he quipped, “chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell [Brand], Bret Weinstein and I would organically get together for any reason, much less an event like this”.

And the same could be said about most everyone in the crowd. The question is: is this motley group of people big enough to take Trump to the White House?

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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