Rock the Country: What's it like at a Donald Trump music festival?

By Chris Schulz

He'd seen the pick-up trucks in the parking lot and the huge American flags hanging from cranes. He'd walked past the beer-drinking rednecks munching on chicken wings and turkey legs wearing MAGA hats that read: "Make America rock again."

And he'd heard the constant chants of "USA! USA!" and "F*** Joe Biden" coming from the main stage, along with a pre-recorded video message from Donald Trump playing on repeat.

"This is not a subtle environment," he said. "It's a unique experience. It's... just crazy."

But it wasn't until he saw the noose that Patrick* fully realised that he was smack bang in the middle of a different kind of music festival than those he is usually employed to work at.

At the 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, the expat New Zealander was touring the festival site when he came across a pillar adorned with a cardboard cut-out of US president Joe Biden. He was dangling upside-down. Thick rope was tied around his ankles.

Next to him was another cardboard figure depicting the smiling former US president Donald Trump. Both of his thumbs were up. "It was like, 'Wow,'" Patrick told me over WhatsApp recently. "It was an exhausting environment to be in."

His job had led him there. Patrick usually spends eight months a year employed as an audio technician in the UK, embedding himself with touring artists to make sure all their high-tech stage equipment does what it's supposed to do. For the other four months of the year, he comes home to enjoy a New Zealand summer.

This year, Patrick was offered something different: the opportunity to base himself in America and work out of his company's Nashville office. "I thought I'd give that a shot and see how it goes," he said. On his second day, his company offered him his first job. They said: "Look, we've got this [festival], it's... interesting."

Patrick soon realised he was about to do something few people at his company wanted to do. He'd be joining rap-rock musician Kid Rock's crew on his Rock the Country festival tour, a two-day event with seven stops through America's southern states on a line-up filled with Republican-supporting acts like Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a two-day event held to support Donald Trump.

Trump, a Republican battling the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in a bitter, hotly contested US presidential race that won't be decided until 5 November, may not have been there in person, but he was there in spirit, and everyone who attended was a loud, proud supporter.

As Patrick put it: "They're rednecks, really. People are drunk. People are out there all day. It's just crazy." Or, as the New York Times recently described the festival: "A vision of the MAGA movement in pure party mode."

Patrick was employed to do four of the seven tour stops. That meant coming into each festival to set up, monitoring Kid Rock's show to make sure everything worked as it should, then packing down afterwards.

At his first, in Ocala, Florida, 40,000 people attended, which makes it about the size of a typical Big Day Out, and a record-breaking heat wave saw temperatures top 35 degrees. His American colleagues thought it was a hilarious induction for him, laughing at "the fact I've come over from New Zealand and that's the gig I've been put on".

He soon learned every event ran to the same exact schedule. It was, Patrick said, a case of deja vu.

"You could have played Bingo," he says. "Every band would give thanks to God, to military and the first responders, then they'd usually say something about Trump. They'd usually say, 'F*** Biden' because these things get the big response, then they'd play a bunch of generally pretty awful country music."

But he was there to work on Kid Rock's set, the climax of each festival. Patrick described it as a special kind of festival hell.

"The show is bizarre," he said. "There are two dancing girls that dance on American flag poles. The chant for the encore is, 'USA! USA!'"

Rock also incorporates the phrase 'F*** Biden' into some songs. "His set is definitely crafted to appeal to that audience."

Then came the moment everyone was been waiting for: a pre-recorded video message from Trump playing on the big screen.

"The stage goes dark," said Patrick, who watched this moment four separate times. "Trump appears in a presidential suite. He talks about how Kid Rock is one of the best of our generation. He mentions God. Then he says: 'Let's make America rock again.'"

Eventually, Patrick learned not to talk politics, not to engage in any kind of rhetoric that might inflame the kinds of punters who attended the festivals he'd been employed at. He wouldn't even bring it up backstage.

"I just wouldn't talk politics," he said. He was worried his immigration status - he was working on a skilled worker visa - might come up. "They could get riled up. You never know with super political guys."

Next, Patrick's working on a few tour dates by the metal act Disturbed. He's expecting it to be far less political than the festival run he's just finished. He is, he said, still decompressing from it.

"It's been really weird trying to remind myself that that's not America," he said, before correcting himself: "That's not the whole of America."

Would he do it again? "I thought it would be an interesting experience, and it was," he said. "I'm glad it was only every other weekend for a couple of months. It's not my idea of a fun day out in the sun. I wouldn't go back. Hands down, it's the worst job I have ever had."

* Patrick's name has been changed to protect his identity.