NEVER BEFORE HAVE I BEEN a bigger fan of retired NBA star Dirk Nowitzki.

It’s edging up toward 100 degrees, the sun is near its zenith, and several hundred of us lucky enough to attend the Republican midterm convention have been penned outside the entrance in a line snaking through a courtyard lined by shops that includes, surreally, a Tom Brady-branded outlet selling Pokémon cards. Sweat pooling in the small of my back, a lukewarm bottle of water in hand, I saw a 23-foot oasis sculpted in the form of a trademark jumper: Dirk Nowitzki’s statue, erected in 2022 at the American Airlines Center to celebrate the 2011 NBA MVP, was providing the lone strip of shade like a human sundial. God bless that German’s dirty one-legged fadeaway.

Spirits are high outside but fading like that jumper, sapped by the blistering heat. One elderly woman, after asking why we were standing in line, decamped to a patio bar sitting empty since the Secret Service shut down businesses in the area. A delegate from Delaware I’d been chatting with sidled over to a tent for respite; I was happy to let him slide back in when things started moving again. We all had to stick together. But aside from the volunteers desperately handing out bottles of water to the folks baking in the hot sun, no one seemed to know what was going on.

Before entering the canopy for one last scan of our passes, two guys traveling to the convention from the Midwest and I placed our near-empty bottles of rapidly warming water on a growing mound of teetering plastic, there being no trash cans onsite. “Now that’s a piece of modern art,” one of them quipped.

It was certainly a monument worthy of this bizarre presidential pep rally.

To be honest, I was a little surprised I’d been allowed inside the perimeter.

After applying for credentials, I hadn’t heard back from the support staff. When I followed up with the nice young lady in charge of wrangling the press, she added a couple more staffers to the email thread. “I thought ‘The Bulwark’ was denied,” an email from the “Dallas Media Ops” account replied. “Not sure – but I would not recommend giving them credentials,” the wrangler replied. (I was crushed; I thought we had a rapport.) And then the thread went quiet—or maybe someone realized I was on it, and they removed me from it—so I assumed that was that.

But then! My colleague Andrew Egger received an email with the logistics for entry and exit, including a site to pick up the much-coveted media credentials. I emailed again to ask if we had been okayed and heard nothing. So I just drove over to the Hilton Anatole to see if, maybe, we had sneaked through. And, sure enough, a quintet of passes was just waiting there for the taking.

I had earned the right to stand in the shadow of Dirk Nowitzki and wait my turn for entry into Trump’s big midterm party. The forty-eight hours to follow would be hot, sticky fun.

THERE WERE THREE TIERS of attendees at Trumpapalooza, broadly speaking, and you tended to be able to pick them out by...