Apparently, he doesn’t know the difference between the American system and a parliamentary system and just wants to be able to call elections whenever he feels like it — which, in his case, will be never.
He’s an imbecile.
The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch went that rally yesterday. He says he goes to them from time to time for a specific reason:
I go largely because I think the media still fails to understand America’s most important story of the last 10 years. U.S. democracy is staring out into the abyss not so much because of the narcissistic bluster of one alleged billionaire ex-president, but because of the people with fleece hoodies over their MAGA hats who spent hours in an April windstorm to see him.
You’re not supposed to say that, of course. His followers are all Real Americans who are good people who are hypnotized by Donald Trump and we can’t hold them responsible. It’s tiresome particularly since they have no compunction about slamming their political opponents with the grossest insults imaginable.
Anyway, here’s part of his report:
Things have changed a lot since I talked to folks outside of Trump’s 2016 rally in Chester County, when they were intrigued by Trump’s not-a-politician bluster and his “get-’em-out-of-here” rage at liberal protesters. Eight years later, a Trump rally has become an Orwellian celebration of an upside-down world where the lowest unemployment rate in more than 50 years is actually the worst U.S. economy ever, the nation’s cities are cesspools of violence despite a plunging crime rate, and the only person wronged on Jan. 6 was not the scores of injured cops but Ashli Babbitt, shot by “a Black police officer.”
In a sense, Trump himself is almost like the MacGuffin, the plot device that gives these characters an excuse to get together. “We already know what the spiel is, we know what he stands for,” one man, a middle-aged Canadian American executive, told me. So why wait on this massive line? It’s partly that a rally gives supporters a chance to get off the couch, shut down the TikTok app, turn off YouTube, and prove to themselves they are actually not alone in thinking that everything has gone to heck. But there’s an even more insidious reason for coming out.
“Look, they’re going to steal the election again,” said one friend of the Canada native who, like many of the Trump voters I spoke with, didn’t want to give his name. “They need to see a larger number of people supporting a different kind of candidacy than the one they’re trying to throw down our throat.” They are smitten by the theory that the Big Lie that Trump actually defeated Biden in 2020 is proven by their mass willingness to stand on a line in a howling wind for four hours, while Biden couldn’t even fill a high school gym.
They told Bunch that they aren’t actually rural rubes but are instead “executives” who traveled from wealthy suburbs or have a bi-racial child thus disproving the narrative that Trump is losing. Or something.
Most have constructed an elaborate worldview about what is happening in America today around the issues that matter most in Trump World, like the southern border or the part of the economy with high grocery prices (but not the part with plentiful jobs or a record stock market). Never mind the inherent contradictions, like the one 69-year-old woman from upstate New York who told me “America looks weak” on foreign policy” but also “not one more dollar for Ukraine.
I asked one gaggle on the line where they get their sweeping narratives, considering what they were also telling me about their contempt for the legacy mainstream media. “TikTok!” one immediately blurted. “There’s a lot of information on TikTok.” His neighbor quickly recommended YouTube, while others promoted obscure websites or the right-wing Patriot channel on satellite radio.
He points out that at the moment Trump was bloviating his greatest hits, Israel was intercepting hundreds of drones and missile strikes aimed at their country. The cult was all oblivious.
That’s why it was so jarring to see that the happiest place on earth was this mile-long line in Schnecksville. It was a kind of “Trumpstock,” one night of manufactured peace, unity, and shared disinformation, while the gale-force winds of truth blew well above their bubble.
I still maintain that it’s more insulting to these people to treat them like delicate snowflakes who can’t be confronted with their willful dereliction of duty as citizens (and human beings.) They are all adults and they all have agency. They know what they’re doing.