Harley Hogs Let Wild Sides Loose At RNCBBQ

Milwaukee – Ex‑U.S. Sen. Scott Brown and his cover band ​“The Diplomats” pulled up to the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee during the third day of the Republican Nominating Convention to strut their stuff, show their support for Trump, and trigger Easy Rider sentimentalism with a rendition of Steppenwolf’s classic rocker ​“Born to Be Wild.”

Because I’m only 25, which is less than half the age of the average conservative who attended the tent barbecue and ​’60s song fest, I wasn’t exactly taken back to the freewheelin’ years of Peter Fonda celebrity. Instead, I recovered a grade school memory: That is, making my debut attempt at attention-seeking around age 7 by faux strumming a cardboard guitar I’d fashioned for my after-school talent show to back my brother as he lip-synced the same song.

As I remember it, only our teenage counselors applauded. I don’t think our whacked-out performance particularly resonated with our elementary school peers, who all tuned into Kidz Bop at lunch time. To be fair, it’s not as though I was tuned into my own motivations. I don’t think I thought Steppenwolf was ​“cool,” but I believed my older brother very much was, and I was happy he was allowing me to associate with him on stage.

Fast forward 18 years later, and I was regretting not having packed my pair of thrifted Harley-Davidson heeled boots to Milwaukee. I combed through a crowd of Republicans decked out in red, white and blue to find someone willing to help me understand what the supposedly bipartisan, or at least independent, Harley brand stands for today — and how that fits into the shifting brand of the Grand Old Party gathered here this week to anoint the Trump-Vance presidential ticket.

On Wednesday afternoon, I attended one of three separate events held for Republican National Convention delegates at the Harley-Davidson Museum. This one was sponsored by the party’s ​“Northeast Region.” The air was filled with music, BBQ, and brand identities.

I’ve always been on board with the outcast-freed-from-the-shackles-of-society style that Harley-Davidson is concerned with conveying. But as the company ages into late-capitalist America and simultaneously seeks to sell its products to a younger customer base, I’m becoming more confused as to what Harley’s really about besides catering to rampant consumer culture. Just like my 7‑year-old self, I’m running exclusively on loose associations.

According to a July 12 article in the Wall Street Journal, the Harley-Davidson’s rebel-without-a-cause pitch has been wearing thin. The company is responding by selling fewer and more expensive bike models while working out new sales strategies to make the brand accessible to a younger cohort.

Similarly, even as the Republican Party grows in power, they’re trying to figure out how to pass their notion of American nostalgia onto a new generation — a phenomenon that’s personified by the naming of newly donned apprentice and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance alongside the defiant outlaw image of Donald Trump.

How’s that working out? And what’s the connection between the two brands? I checked out the crowd and posed the question to Harley and Trump fans. They had wild tales to tell. Check out, for instance, a double-brand-diehard named Edward X. Young.

Lifelong Hard-Road Harley-Seeker Puts Trump First

“I really wanted General Michael Flynn for VP,” Young, decked out in Trump gear, told me. ​“I kept saying, if you put Flynn in the vice presidency, the whole Democratic Party is gonna soil their pants.”

When the 64-year-old first learned that Trump had picked Vance, Young thought that, as a ​“successful businessman,” maybe ​“Trump just wants to recycle the old campaign posters — just cover ​‘PE’ with ​‘VA.’”

But then Young realized his own last name has more in common with Vance’s than Pence’s does. ​“Vance is young. I can see him as a viable successor — and Trump needs a viable successor,” he said.

“He really is a young Trump,” Young continued. ​“He wrote a best-selling novel. They made a movie about his life. Nicole Kidman gets to play his mom. He’s a showman!” he said. (Fact check: The Netflix adaption of Hillbilly Elegy casts Amy Adams, not Kidman, as Vance’s mother.)

Though not a delegate, Young journeyed from New Jersey to Milwaukee for the RNC the same way he has traveled across the country since 2015 to support the Trump campaign — without the help of a hog. While visiting, he decided to attend the ticketed Harley-Davidson-hosted concert because ​“Harley-Davidson is the ultimate, all-American motorcycle.

“All my life I’ve wanted one, and I’ve always been denied one,” he said. ​“I’ve lost three women in my life because of Harley-Davidson.

“When I was a little kid, my older cousin, Gene, wiped out on his Harley, crushed his left leg, and had to wear an elevator shoe. My parents were so paranoid that I had to fight just for a bike,” Young lamented.

His obsession with the forbidden only grew from there.

“Easy Rider was the first R‑rated movie I saw as a kid. I thought, ​‘Once I grow up and get out of the house, I’m gonna get me one of those Harley Davidsons.’ But once I did grow up, it kept turning into ​‘Next year, next year.’ First it was, ​‘I gotta finish paying for college.’ Then it was ​‘I gotta pay the mortgage.’ You keep putting it off and putting it off and you never get it.”

Recently, Young thought he had his chance. His best friend from high school had two Harleys, and was planning on selling one. The friend had been offered $8,000 for the bike, but told Young he’d sell it to him for $1,000.

“I told him, ​‘I honestly can’t afford it until the election’s over. All my money’s going to the Trump campaign. I’m too involved.’”

Over the past decade, Young said he’s put tens of thousands of dollars — both directly and through time taken off from work to knock doors, make calls, and attend rallies — into Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency.

The infatuation started in 2015, when Young got into a car accident that left him bed-ridden with nothing to do but watch whatever television channels were available in his hospital.

“I was planning to move to Hollywood; I had just gotten cast to be in a movie with William Forsythe,” the New Hampshire native said. (Formerly a reporter himself, Young said he fled the profession after seven years to start acting in low-budget horror movies. His best known titles include Mr. Hush, in which he starred alongside Mike Myers, Mold, and Maggots.)

“But then three drunk, stoned, illegal aliens hit me with a stolen car and I ended up going to the hospital.

“I was divorced, in a hospital bed,” — with an enormous list of maladies, including ​“eight herniated discs” and several broken limbs — ​“contemplating suicide… and then I saw Donald Trump come down the escalator on screen. And he says he’s running for president. And he says that one of the big problems is illegal immigration.

“I’m like, I like this guy. I’m gonna work for his campaign. I’m going to Trump Tower and getting one of those hats. They didn’t even call them MAGA hats then!”

Since then, Young said Trump’s saved him 20 times over.

Abandoned, Then Revved Up

Last year, Young was essentially abandoned at the altar. The story goes that he was slated to marry a girl nearly 40 years his junior who had come onto him at a Trump rally. ​“I’m old enough to be your father!” he told her. ​“But you’re the coolest guy I’ve ever met!” she told him.

Days before the wedding date, she broke up with Young for another man ​“with a few Harleys who had promised to give her one.”

It was a nightmare on repeat: Just a few years earlier, he said he had encountered his ex-girlfriend at a college reunion.

“I really loved you. We had marriage plans. Why did you leave me?” he asked her. ​“What can I say?” she replied. She had found another guy — ​“he had a Harley and he told me to hop on.”

But she also told Young that after having two kids with that husband, they wound up divorced. ​“The relationship was always rotten… I think I was just in love with his Harley,” she supposedly said to Young.

In between those relationships, Young tried dating a ​“liberal woman.” She, too, left him for a dude with a Harley. ​“It’s just like some big sex machine for women,” he said. ​“Like a giant vibrator.”

When the third Harley-break happened, right as Young was coming up on yet another birthday, he decided to flee that same day to a Trump rally happening 760 miles away in South Carolina — albeit not on a bike — ​“to distract myself from the heartbreak.”

“It was hillbilly territory, 103 degrees, people were passing out,” he said. Trump’s security, with whom Young said he was already well-acquainted, told him he needed to get out of the heat.

“You’re sick! I see your eyes rolling back in your head,” Young said the security guard told him. But Young didn’t want to miss Trump’s big speech. He stuck it out — and ​“fainted as soon as the speech was over.”

Today, Young said he’s convinced that Trump is ​“the greatest president this country’s ever had. He’s the embodiment of the citizen president our forefathers’ imagined.”

Meanwhile, Young is on disability and working as a debt collector. Somehow, throughout his storied life, he’s still managed to make ​“over 50,000” calls and attend 79 rallies for Trump. And as he actively works towards a second Trump term, he spends his downtime dreaming — of getting his hands on a Harley one day.

Convert: Trump, Harley = Freedom

I next sought out a woman to test Young’s ​“giant vibrator” theory.

I caught Massachusetts Delegate Julie Hall walking out of the museum with a bag full of Harley-Davidson T‑shirts. What did Harley-Davidson mean to her, I asked?

“There’s not a particular profile of a Harley driver,” she said. ​“And that’s what I like about it.”

“I think there’s two sides to a lot of people’s personalities. Mike Pence drives a Harley. He can wear a three-piece suit, but he obviously has a wild side,” she said.

Similarly, she noted that when ​“Donald Trump gets on stage, he’s out there and he’s wild,” but when ​“he comes into a room he’s just the nicest, grandfatherly guy.”

As for Vance? ​“He’s young.”

But that’s OK, she said, because, like her, he’s a veteran of the armed forces — which she said symbolizes his independence, free thinking, and knowledge of national security.

More young conservatives are needed in the political arena, she reasoned, because of trickle-down economics: ​“When this country makes money, that’s how you spread the wealth. When you have a limited amount of funds, everyone just gets a small slice. But when you make more — well, everyone gets to buy a Harley!”

That said, Hall was embarrassed to admit that she rode a Japanese Honda until her current boyfriend got her into Harleys. Up until then, she worried the bikes were too big for ​“little women” like her.

But now, as a veteran air force officer, she said that the Harley better captures her self-image as ​“the officer that does everything by code and the person who is free and risk taking.”

And she likes having a wide array of complicated friends who ride Harleys, too. ​“One guy I ride with is a priest. But he also drives Harleys and smokes cigarettes and drinks whiskey. He’s cool.”

Hall summed it up: ​“The Harley represents America. It represents freedom. It represents all of the things I served for.”

Freed From Europe

“Harley-Davidson is all about the American dream,” echoed another man on scene. His name was Nicolas, and he had traveled from France with two middle-aged buddies from Spain to meet up with their American ​“brothers” for a club convention of worldwide law enforcers.

“When you ride,” he said, ​“you leave all your troubles behind.”

He declined to comment on Trump. As yet another European on scene told me: ​“Everyone told us, ​‘Don’t talk about politics or religion in the United States.’” Without divulging secrets, the group did make clear that their allegiances this week were not out of place in Milwaukee.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find any young motorcyclists or conservatives willing or able to weigh in. There was scant evidence that Harley — unlike the GOP — is making inroads with a younger generation.

But as the youngest person in attendance, I can say this: After getting bullied off the Harley-Davidson campus by a spokesperson who told me I was not allowed to report outside the confines of a tent blasting music on the museum’s campus, I no longer thought of Harley as symbolically free, or in any way for me. When I go home, I plan to put my Harley-Davidson shoes back in the box.

I left thinking about a question posed to me by Edward X. Young: ​“If I’d bought a Harley, where would I be in life?”

“Maybe I’d be happily married,” he reflected. ​“Or maybe I’d just be limping around with an elevator shoe.”

Nora Grace-Flood and Fred Noland are in Milwaukee covering the Republican National Convention for the Independent.