Trump’s Weird Rally

Created
Wed, 15/05/2024 - 04:00
Updated
Wed, 15/05/2024 - 04:00
James Fallows has a fascinating analysis of that weird rally last Saturday: Among Donald Trump’s virtues is that he does not drink. That is useful to remember in considering his current speaking style. On Saturday night Deb and I sat through the nearly two-hour entirety of his rally performance at Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, as televised by Fox. The whole thing is archived here, courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting. To me this version of Trump sounded genuinely different from the crowd-pleasing showman who rode televised rallies to success (and big audiences for the cable outlets) in 2015 and 2016. Maybe it’s just that his material is now so familiar and tired. Maybe it’s that Trump has nearly exhausted the “what will he say next??” Evel Knievel-style suspense and excitement of his live shows. Maybe it’s that he goes on at such length. Whatever: the result is less “outrageous” than … boring. It could also be that there is something more visibly wrong with him. In his interview last month with Eric Cortellessa of Time, Trump came across as extreme and under-informed, but more or less coherent sentence-by-sentence. In New Jersey two nights ago, he came across as the kind of person you’d move away from in an airport or at a bar. The kind of person you’d assume to be drunk if you didn’t know he teetotaled, or you’d think was in other ways disturbed. I have not made a single political prediction since dismissing Trump’s chances in 2015. But I find it hard to…