Indianapolis
Monument Circle is a brick-road roundabout in the heart of Indiana’s capital. It is a spacious road with no lane markings, surrounding a nearly 300-foot-tall obelisk built in tribute to the state’s war heroes from the 18th and 19th centuries. It is lined with establishments and businesses, including a concert hall, the city’s major media conglomerate, and, inescapably, a Starbucks. It is haunting at night, the B-roll setting of choice during sporting events when television networks want a shot of downtown Indianapolis coming out of commercial.
On a cloudy, chilly Wednesday morning less than a week before the Indiana primary, vast metal structures resembling rafters loom over the circle. There are TV lights amid them and bystanders observing the setup, the people confined to the sidewalk by temporary fencing. The activity is bookended by police cars on one edge and a large truck displaying the NBC peacock on the other. Just the day before, John Kasich had attended a private event inside the Columbia Club, right off the circle, and taken note of the spectacle outdoors.
It’s not often Indiana plays host to this type of thing. Another presidential campaign event? No. Today they’re setting up to tape an episode of the reality TV hit American Ninja Warrior.
“It’s arguably the best month in Hoosier history,” Pete Seat jokes, but only sort of. The George W. Bush administration alumnus and Schererville, Ind., native had a broader point: A great many circuses have ridden into town. May is always the month for the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, aka the Indianapolis 500. But now comes the Greatest Spectacle in Politics: a decisive May 3 showdown between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and, oh yes, the remnants of John Kasich’s campaign. Why not lump the Greatest Spectacle in Reality TV on top of it all—one of those rare programs on the tube nowadays that actually has the potential to leave viewers feeling good about themselves. (Unlike, say, cable news.)
“This is something we’re not used to. And the sad thing is, when there has been attention on Indiana the last several years, it hasn’t been positive,” Seat says. His consulting firm was helping Kasich in Indiana, but the candidate chose to wind things down here. Now, “Some of our most cherished landmarks and idiosyncrasies and traditions are getting the spotlight.”
Those include pork tenderloin sandwiches—the breaded, deep-fried discs, about three-times the diameter of the buns they’re served on, that are the unofficial state food—and basketball, which is incontestably the official state religion. Cruz rallied his supporters in the Knightstown gymnasium featured in the movie Hoosiers, re-creating a scene in which coach Gene Hackman measures the height of the rim to reassure his small-school players that no matter the size of the crowd and the venue, it’s always 10 feet up from the gym floor. (The Texas senator clanked one off the iron when he referred to the basketball hoop as a “ring.”) Trump appeared at an event with Indiana University coaching legend Bob Knight, who is as famous for his temper as he is for his success. Despite being nicknamed The General, Knight is not on Trump’s vaunted foreign policy team. But he is a fitting surrogate.
Trump “does a great job of finding good people and teaching good people, and just as important, he’s damn good at getting rid of bad people, too,” Knight, himself a stern disciplinarian, said of Trump at a rally.
A (lower-case) general description of Knight reflects what has propelled Trump’s campaign: a blunt-force personality who forges a soldered loyalty from his fans despite his abuse of a microphone, and perhaps even because of it. One doesn’t need to look much further than the two men’s shared contempt for and derision of journalists to see the similarity. Trump routinely mocks members of the press at his public appearances and sequesters them among his throng of supporters in an area only slightly better than a farm pen. Knight just swears at them and once described sports writing as a profession “one or two steps above prostitution.”
Trump earns cheers for shoving back against those who pan his unruly style. Knight won acclaim for reciting to a stadium of Hoosier faithful in 1994, “When my time on earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my a—.” These two were destined to be in a room together.
This brash behavior is hardly reflective of the state’s electorate, though. That the likes of Cruz and Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would give Indiana the Iowa treatment—with visits to small towns from the Greater Chicago region to the suburbs of Louisville, from Evansville to Ft. Wayne—is flattering and rare. The midday bustle in certain places is unaccustomed and welcome, like at Bee Coffee Roasters, an Indy caffeine shop adjacent to the building where Cruz announced Carly Fiorina as his hypothetical running mate. It’s just up the street from Lucas Oil stadium, where the Indianapolis Colts play football on Sundays in the fall and winter. Who knew they would need extra manpower on a Wednesday in the spring?
The people here are just happy to have the attention, and unlike in Washington, it comes without all the street closures.
Except on Monument Circle. Ninja Warrior was to blame for that one.
Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard.
