On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours on a block of Midtown Manhattan – 33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues – surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. About every half hour the herd would shuffle forward fifteen to twenty feet before the police barriers closed further up the road. Whenever we moved, there would be a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, but died as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, was in full view the entire time, a few hundred yards away. Snipers were on high rooftops and a few drones hovered above them. A friend had bought two tickets, but we were told from the front that the tickets were not checked; they were a ruse for the campaign to obtain fundraising emails the Hudson River was floating and the sparkling autumn day was cooling, the clock was ahead of us.

I’ve been in the Trump crowd before, but never in New York City. The familiarly dirty and deserted neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political crowd wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were many more black and brown people, and many more Orthodox Jews, than you would see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened throughout the afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. It would take a great effort of will to go sideways through the crush and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or a cup of coffee. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his twenties, holding a small American flag in one hand. He said he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – a world-renowned, progressive Orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lone dissident. One of the three? No, he said, there were secret comrades in the warehouses. I asked if he thought the country could come together again after the elections, regardless of the outcome. His answer – that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that only the Democrats were guilty of demonizing their opponents because the Republicans only said what was true – sounded like a no.

An hour later and thirty yards away, I stood next to Richard and Jason, Trinidadian-born men in MAGA hats who live with me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of the high prices – a dozen eggs for six dollars – and the lack of international respect; Also, The student. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide and even take deep blue New York City. (There is a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked whether he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber – not the virtual one, but a physical one – and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the idea that all those thousands of people were wrong.

Around three o’clock – after two hours of standing and no progress for at least 45 minutes – my lower back was throbbing. It became clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been a normal traffic jam in Manhattan, the honking of cars would have been deafening. But the audience remained surprisingly patient and friendly and immediately made friends in the American way. Promoters at a local betting market threw out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance of winning, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors shouted, “Bet on Trump!” Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator barked, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone laughed. Being together as fellow Americans, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to keep things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only one political tribe – the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street – is creating such solidarity.

By four o’clock we hadn’t moved for over an hour. With this stillness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality – it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Sandwiched between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I lived in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful bursts of song, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming” – all these signs of happiness were dependent on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible that the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people was wrong. And if I were to stay here any longer, I might become enthralled too, like a lost climber who rests in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up again. I made my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show at Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes, vulgar insults, and profanities directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; against Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and half of Americans who support the Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy theories, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the hustlers and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t really have the chops – the dark mirror of goodwill outside. I missed what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell could ever break.