BETHESDA, Maryland — As President Trump prepared to leave Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Monday, his supporters camped outside the hospital said they couldn’t be happier to see him go.
Sam Bethea, a North Carolina man shouting “Jesus saves!” to passing cars, said that he believes Trump’s short stay in the hospital was God’s way of telling him to take it easy just before the final weeks of the campaign.
“I think this was God’s way of saying, ‘Son, you need to lie down, you need to rest for a moment,'” Bethea says.
Like many other Trump supporters, Bethea has followed the president, not just this weekend, but throughout the fall on the campaign trail. He says he’s been praying for Trump every step of the way, including on his surprise drive-by Sunday evening, spreading the message of “God and country.” Alongside him stand several other people holding signs offering up prayers for the continued improvement of the president’s health.
Cars driving down the road honk at the crowd. Some raise their middle fingers and shout, “F— Trump!”
Bethea responds, “We love you!”
Bethea, who is black, chuckles and remarks that his presence out here challenges popular narratives about the president.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” he says. “Everyone wants Trump to seem like a racist, with only white people vote for him. But I’m looking at Chinese people, Vietnamese people, black people, white people. Just is a beautiful picture.”
It is a diverse crowd around him. To his left, a small group of people carry signs reading, “Vietnamese for Trump.” They intermingle with a few people holding Make America Great Again flags and the flag of East Turkestan, which represents the Uighur people. Trump, during the summer, signed legislation challenging China for its alleged human rights abuses against the Uighur people.
On the edge of the crowd, James Jenkins, a man from the Baltimore suburbs, stands alone, decked out in a Confederate T-shirt and Confederate hat and waving the rebel flag. The cars passing by honk at him. One woman screams from a white sedan, “Fascist!”
But Jenkins says he doesn’t care. He brought his wife and 5-year-old daughter to this rally to let them get the experience of a Trump rally. For him, this rally, and the flag with it, are his way of sending a “thank you” to the president.
“This is about coming out here and telling Donald Trump, ‘I support you,'” Jenkins says. “‘I want you to know, whether you’re in a hospital or not, I love you.’ I have never seen people get in front of a president and scream, ‘I love you! I love you!’ But here we are, chanting it.”
He points to his wife and daughter standing on the side of the road. They are waving little MAGA flags and jumping up and down, shouting, “Four more years!” and “Make America great again!”
“Look how much he’s done for us. He’s done the world for us and,” Jenkins adds, pointing to the hospital, “he’s going to do more.”
Elsewhere, there’s murmuring that the Trump campaign will send more pizza, as it allegedly did last night. A man wearing a T-shirt depicting California Rep. Adam Schiff with a literal pencil neck, a reference to one of Trump’s derogatory tweets, bemoans the fact that he did not get in on the pizza frenzy when he had the chance.
“I wish I had grabbed some … People were leaving with three boxes of pies, stacked up,” he says.
