A Trump Rally, Annotated

Flipping the TV dial a couple of weekends ago, I happened on a live feed of Donald Trump’s rally speech in Greensboro, North Carolina, one of several campaign appearances he made in the run-up to Super Tuesday. Trump’s rallies have become so predictable, and so filled with lies and self-serving bluster, that the cable-news networks now mostly ignore them, except for a random clip or two. 

But for once, I forced myself to watch the entire speech. I even reran it, so that I could transcribe some parts. A painful experience, to be sure, but instructive.

What I noticed is that Trump now has two separate gears in these speeches. The first is the rambling, wisecracking, stream-of-consciousness Trump that we all know — closer to a stand-up comedy routine than a normal political speech, but scarier than either. “Did you ever hear of a fine gentleman named Hannibal Lector?” goes the latest twist in his tirade against illegal immigrants. “That’s what they have in insane asylums, and they’re dumping them into a community near you!” 

But there’s another mode, which has become more common in recent months. In Greensboro it was signaled by a musical accompaniment: a vaguely inspirational orchestral drone that plays in the background as Trump launches into a scripted, 20-minute wrap-up.. Now he adopts a wistful, weary, almost mournful tone, a singsong, slow-building lament for all the supposed horrors the nation has been plunged into under Biden. Forgive my subjecting you to a few excerpts, but you need to get the full flavor:   

“Now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years. Where banks are collapsing and interest rates are skyrocketing. Likewise, we are a nation where energy costs have reached the highest levels in our history….

“We are a nation that ended oil exploration in the United States, just as the price of oil reached an all-time high. What other country would do such a foolish and self-destructive thing? Can we be energy independent? Can we be energy dominant again? Oh yes, oh yes, and quickly, says President Trump. Oh yes, oh yes, and quickly. 

“We’re a nation that allows radical left terrorists to violently attack our cities, leaving behind massive destruction and death, and nothing happens to the criminals that do these terrible things. There is no punishment. But when people who love our country protest on January 6 in Washington, they become hostages unfairly imprisoned for long periods of time….

“We are a Third World nation now, that has weaponized its law enforcement against opposing political parties like never, ever before. We’ve got a Federal Bureau of Investigation that won’t allow bad, election-changing facts to be presented to the public… And a Department of Justice that refuses to investigate egregious acts of voting irregularities and fraud….

“We are a nation that is no longer admired, respected, or listened to on the world stage. We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke. And we are a nation that is hostile to liberty, to freedom, faith, and even to God. We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every single list….

“We are a nation whose once revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess. You sit and wait for hours, and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, and they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled, they don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers and they just don’t know what the hell they’re doing….

“2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers from our government, that is so poorly run. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp, and will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”

Set aside the ridiculous hyperbole and the “facts” made up out of wholecloth. (Our educational system ranks last, not on every single list, but on no list.) The speech is an illustration of the power of sheer rhetoric, once it is completely detached from the constraints of truth. 

How should the Biden campaign combat this? A couple of suggestions: 

First of all: let’s get straight exactly which candidate, and which political party, “hates our country.” Trump claims to love America, but he seems to hate nearly everyone in it. Not just Joe Biden and the illegal immigrants invading our cities, but all the tyrants and villains, warmongers and globalists, communists and fascists (and Marxists too!) that fill our government; the FBI and the Justice Department; the “sick political class” and the fake news media; even those poor air-traffic controllers, who “don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”  

The other point about Trump’s dark vision is how outdated it seems. Supply chains are broken and “stores are not stocked”? He must be confusing it with the last, pandemic-plagued year of the Trump administration. Our once-revered airports are now a “dirty, crowded mess”? If Trump ever flew on anything besides private jets, he’d know that the reverse is actually true: grungy old La Guardia is now a gleaming, state-of-the-art showpiece. As for those Marxists in the government — no one has heard a peep from them since the days of Joe McCarthy.  

Joe Biden’s age may be a concern, but the candidate who seems in the most severe mental decline is the one who is living in a fantasyland of his own creation, an alternate universe that only he can recognize. I think it’s time for the Democrats to adopt some of Trump’s own tactics in rebuttal. Cue the music, and the mournful narration: 

“Poor Donald Trump. His mental decline is now too obvious to ignore. He has drifted into a fantasy world. He sees enemies around every corner. He doesn’t remember the last year of his own Presidency. He thinks all the airline pilots have disappeared. He believes he’s the Messiah. Is he sliding into senility? Oh yes, oh yes, and quickly.”