The Trump rally in Waco is not about geography
The connections are clear between the Branch Davidian siege, the Oklahoma City bombing, and conspiracy movements that view Trump as their leader.
I spent a lot of time in Waco, Texas growing up. My family lived about an hour’s drive east of there in a tiny town called Buffalo. I mean really small town. We lived on a dirt road. For real resources, we had to go an hour-ish southwest to Bryan/College Station, an hour-ish northeast to Tyler, or an hour-ish west to Waco. We ended up in Waco weekly at times, thanks to my brother and me taking private music lessons from faculty at McClennan Community College and participating in youth ensembles based there.
Waco is an unremarkable city unless you live in a place like Buffalo and want a reasonably short drive to a city that has shopping, good restaurants, and the resources of a college town. Its main attraction remains that it’s about halfway between Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin–around a two-hour drive from both cities. Waco is not a large city. It has a small regional airport, and Baylor University is located there, as is the Dr. Pepper Museum, the Texas Rangers Museum, and a half decent zoo for a city that size. Chip and Joanna Gaines have taken over part of the city as well.
Probably the only reason most people over age 40 know Waco is that the Branch Davidian cult headed by David Koresh was a little bit outside the city. Thirty years ago, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tried to act on weapons and sexual abuse charges, Koresh and the Branch Davidians fought back, resulting in a weeks-long siege. It ended horrifically in April 1993, when the FBI tried to flush them out with tear gas and a fire broke out. Most of the Branch Davidians died.
That series of events has been fodder for conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists ever since, including shaping the far-right Patriot Movement. Timothy McVeigh said he was retaliating for the Branch Davidians with the Oklahoma City bombing that he carried out in 1995 on the anniversary of the fiery end to the siege. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil until September 11, 2001.
I cannot emphasize enough that there is nothing geographically or politically exceptional about Waco that can’t be said of quite a few other places in the state—except, currently, the 30th anniversary of the Branch Davidian siege.
So why is former President Donald Trump holding a rally there? Its centrality to the state’s population centers is attractive, but during the 30th anniversary of the siege? It seems that’s some optics a political contender might want to avoid, unless they don’t care about sending a not-so-quiet dog whistle to anti-government conspiracy theorists.
Trump and his people, of course, deny this. NBC News reports that “Trump's aides dismiss the possibility that holding a Waco rally during the 30th anniversary of the siege might show sympathy to anti-government voters.
‘That sounds like stuff that people in New York or D.C. who have never even been to Texas would say,’ said one Trump aide.”
The Trump people are actually hoping that most large media reporters haven’t spent a lot of time in Waco so that they can get away with this statement. Well, I am in DC now, but I spent the first 22 years of my life in Texas, some of that heavily featuring Waco, and another five in Oklahoma. The thinness of the reasoning for choosing Waco (heavily featured in the NBC piece), balanced with the optics of it and alternative sites available with similar regional advantages, have my spidey senses activated.
Of course, the reality is that Trump has always been attractive to anti-government and conspiracy minded folks. Patriot Movement organizations have been among his strongest supporters. And he eggs them on–this is most prominently displayed on January 6, 2021, but has more recently been clear from his references to violence that could erupt if he is indicted. The possibility of an indictment just adds another layer of why Waco would be a symbolic pick: Conspiracy theorists have long held that the Branch Davidians were wrongfully targeted by the government, which pretty much what Trump says about any investigation of his business or actions.
So, no, I don’t buy that Waco was chosen without regard for the 30th anniversary of the Branch Davidian siege. The conspiracy movements that remain inspired by those events have rallied for Trump on plenty of occasions, and he is not going to stop leveraging their anger in his attempt to regain power.