On the Road Again –
By Glynn Wilson –

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Everyone thought the Republican National Convention had moved from here to Jacksonville, Florida and was then canceled and moved to Washington, D.C., so no one was quite prepared for what happened Monday.

We got word over the weekend that some Republican delegates were still planning to meet in Charlotte, where the Democrats had their convention in 2016 and the Republican Party chose as the location for its nominating convention in 2020. But that was before the coronavirus came ashore in the United States and changed everything.

We also heard that Vice President Mike Pence and maybe even President Donald Trump himself might show up here, so we came to town to get the story.

I’ve been planning to visit North Carolina’s largest city anyway, so this looked like a good opportunity to check it out. I setup a luncheon meeting with a cousin of mine from High Point, and we met at a local brewpub not far from the Charlotte Convention Center.

On the way into town, a line of blue lights marked the way. We arrived about the same time Trump touched down at the airport.

Parking was not a problem. Clearly locals had decided to stay home and away from downtown, knowing the president’s brief appearance would screw up everything. I parked the media camper van right by the Craft Tasting Room and Growler Shop, put on my mask, and went inside to order an appetizer and try an IPA. The place had an outdoor area with picnic tables, so I set up and waited. Even after my cousin arrived, we were literally the only customers in the place. So we had it to ourselves.

About that time I noticed on Facebook that the president had started speaking, so I shared the C-SPAN link on Facebook. Since no one knew this was going to happen in advance, I didn’t even try to get into the convention center. I had not applied for press credentials in advance.

After lunch, I did try to get to the convention center, but the streets were blocked off for blocks. On foot I did get to within about a block of the place, where I ran into a rag tag looking camera crew from Showtime. I asked them about what had been going on, and they said there was literally nothing to shoot. Only a few state delegates were allowed into the convention hall for the roll call vote to nominate Trump for president and Trump’s speech, as usual a rambling diatribe of lies blaming all his problems on the Democrats, so there were not even a few Trump supporters to photograph and interview on video anyway.

One little old lady carrying a Trump sign did walk by on the other side of the street about then. I guess she couldn’t figure out how to get past the blockade either. A large black woman in a security guard uniform shouted at her.

“Your president sucks,” she said, and the white woman increased her pace of getting away.

The Showtime crew told me about a protest coming up later in the afternoon at Marshall Park, so I headed back to the van and drove the few blocks to check out the scene. There were a few Trump supporters with protest signs, mostly against abortion, and a Hoop Bus.

Right as I got out and started to take pictures and shoot video, a long line of bike cops came riding up in protective headgear with GoPro cameras on top and surrounded the Trump protesters.

There were rumors and murmurs that someone had a gun. But nothing came of it. I found out later that the cops had been protecting the small number of Trump supporters from much larger crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters for weeks.

A local news site called The Agenda ran a story on Tuesday about it, lamenting the partisan divide.

36 hours in a divided North Carolina during the Republican National Convention kickoff

Suffice to say there’s not much of a story here, so we’re heading back to the mountains on Tuesday. All I can say is the RNC in Charlotte was a dud, just a buzz kill for locals with much of downtown blocked off just for Trump’s brief touch down.

He came, he ranted, he left. We came, we got the toe touch dateline, we left.

Sorry Charlotte. I hope to get back here one day to see more of your city, in a safer, saner time.