Tom Keen, businessman and former Navy flight officer.
With few exceptions (Hi, Hillsborough!) Democrats in Florida have not been showing us how it’s done lately. Maybe that’s changing (Daily Kos):
Florida Democrats kicked off the new year with a major victory as businessman and Navy veteran Tom Keen flipped a Republican-held seat in the state House―a development that represents Gov. Ron DeSantis’ second electoral humiliation in the span of 24 hours.
Keen defeated his Republican rival, Osceola County School Board member Erika Booth, 51-49 in Tuesday’s special election for the 35th House District, a constituency in the Orlando suburbs that Joe Biden carried 52-47. The Democrat will succeed Republican Fred Hawkins, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed in June to serve as president of South Florida State College despite lacking any background in higher education.
“Republicans will hold an 84-36 supermajority in the state House,” writes Jeff Singer, with “a similarly lopsided edge in the state Senate.” Keen’s seat will be up for reelection in November, so he had best not get too comfortable.
Keen’s showing comes only a little over a year after DeSantis and other Republicans romped to victory in this district. According to Florida data analyst Matt Isbell, DeSantis carried the 35th District 56-43 in 2022, while GOP Sen. Marco Rubio took it by a 53-46 spread.
Both parties understood that Tuesday’s results could resonate far beyond the Florida House of Representatives, and they spent heavily to win here. Florida Politics wrote Tuesday that Booth had outraised Keen $323,000 to $121,000, but the official campaign committee of Florida House Democrats had outspent its GOP counterpart $541,000 to $207,000 through Jan. 11.
And the race may have been even more expensive than these figures suggest. Isbell estimates that Republicans altogether deployed $1.5 million, while Democrats put in $1.2 million, though he cautions that “so much money is hard to trace.”
That’s an insane amount in total spending for a state house seat where I’m from.
“Obviously, this is not the result we wanted- but I respect the will of the voters,” said Booth. “I congratulate Tom Keen on his win and a race well run.”
These days, that concession from a Republican deserves its own headline. Even if Booth ran on fighting “Sleepy Joe’s” “woke agenda” and on protecting our kids from indoctrination (which puzzlingly has something to do with immigration). She is also committed to election integrity, which during the Republican Iowa caucuses on Monday looked like popcorn buckets and grocery bags.
Digging into the numbers shows Keen overperformed with non-party affiliated voters, winning roughly 65% of the NPA vote, enough to overcome a raw vote lead in the race where Republicans cast some 900 more votes in the contest. Keen also overperformed in Orange County, where he beat Booth by 1,859 votes.
That 65% is the sort of result Democrats see in more urban counties. It’s flipped in “Trump country.”
Remember when Ann Coulter used to ecstatically describe Donald Trump as an “alpha male” who was going to set the country straight? She even wrote a book called In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! Well, she’s been off of him for quite some time because he failed to build the wall. And she doesn’t seem to believe him when he and his henchman Stephen Miller promise to deport millions of people who look like they might not be citizens.
“How many people who voted for Biden in 2020 have since switched to Trump?”
If there are ANY, it’s a lot fewer than:
1) those who voted for Trump but who’ve since died (older white people); 2) immigrants who turned 18 in the last 4 yrs and will vote (minorities); 3) Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020, but have since changed their minds over, e.g. his behavior in the GA runoffs, and the 2022 “red wave” — … losing election after election for the GOP by demanding that Republicans run on the “stolen 2020 election,” e.g. Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt, Don Bolduc, Joe Kent, etc.
Then she really let them have it:
Trump voters are morons cont’
NYT: <<“I prefer Trump because Democrats are trying to find any way they can to jail him,” she said.>> Dems lie about Trump, THEREFORE he’d make a great president! There aren’t enough drugs in the world that could make me that stupid.
Granted, her reasoning is typically absurd. But it’s interesting to see Trump hit from the right in this way. And frankly, it’s helpful. The idea that Trump was a great president has been baked into many voters’ minds and it’s useful to have someone like Coulter making the case that he wasn’t — even if it’s for the wrong reasons.
Zeynap Tufekci studies authoritarian movements around the world. She took a look at the MAGA movement for the NY Times and it’s quite interesting. (Gift link, here.) An excerpt:
Cheryl Sharp, a 47-year-old sales associate who was among the many Iowans turned away from a filled-to-capacity Trump rally last month, sounded pretty confident she knew why Donald Trump was so appealing to many voters. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along.
“You want someone strong, globally, so that it creates mutual respect with other countries, and maybe a little bit of fear,” she told me. “Yes, it’s true, not everyone likes him. It’s good not to be liked. Being strong is better.” Sharp readily conceded that not everything Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said. “And he can run the country like a business, and they will leave him alone.”
Three days later, inside a Trump rally in New Hampshire, Scott Bobbitt and his wife, Heather, also brought up Trump’s strength. “He commands respect and fear around the world,” Scott Bobbitt told me. “Many people may be driven by fear of him because he’ll do what he says he’s going to do, and he’s not afraid to talk about it. And I think that that’s very powerful. That does protect our country, and he’ll stand up instead of rolling over.” […]
In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.
Authoritarian leaders project qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style. Our movie-hero presidents, Top Gun pilots and crusading lawyers often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer. No, they are not classic authoritarians jailing opponents, but they have something in common with Trump: They are seen as having special or singular strengths, an “I alone can fix it” power.
What I heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, “don’t mess with me” absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars. His supporters also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician, and Trump sells that message very well to his base.
In New Hampshire, Jackie Fashjian made the case to me that during Trump’s presidency, “there weren’t any active wars going on except for Afghanistan, which he did not start. He started no new wars. Our economy was great. Our gas prices were under 2 bucks a gallon. It’s just common sense to me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
At the same rally, Debbie Finch leaped to her feet when Trump walked into the arena, and like many around us, she started filming. Finch defies stereotypes of Trump supporters: She’s Black and is concerned with racism, which she says greatly affects her life and that of her children. She doesn’t deny there are racists among Trump’s supporters, but as far as she’s concerned, that goes for Democrats, too. She told me she supports Trump because the economy was better under him. She doesn’t care about Trump’s indictments; the justice system has been derailing Black men forever, she says, and she predicts more and more minority voters will cast their ballots for him. (Trump does poll higher among minorities than past Republican presidents in the modern era and his current competitors for the nomination.)
Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters. All the politicians say things like that in private, countless Trump supporters asserted to me and argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.
…Many Trump supporters told me that had Trump been president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened because he would have been strong enough to be feared by Vladimir Putin or smart enough to make a deal with him, if necessary. Neither would Hamas have dared attack Israel, a few added. Their proof was that during Trump’s presidency, these wars indeed did not happen. Of course, the more relevant question is whether these wars would have happened during a second Trump term — a counterfactual that can’t be proved or disproved.
They rationalize everything backwards to their support for Trump. It’s a confusing world and he makes it simple for them.
Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world. Right after his recent landslide re-election, Orban said his party had won despite everyone being against them, and now he would ensure that Hungary would be “strong, rich and green.” In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”
As he spoke such words at various rallies, the crowds often interrupted him with applause and cheering. From another politician, such claims might have sounded so implausibly grandiose as to fall flat. But from Trump, these statements often resulted in the crowds leaping to their feet (actually, some rallygoers never sat down) and interrupting him with applause and cheering.
That’s charisma. Charisma is an underrated aspect of political success — and it’s not necessarily a function of political viewpoint. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oozed it, for example, and so does Trump.
Charisma is so central to politics that Max Weber, a founder of sociology, included charismatic authority (along with legal authority, as in republics and democracies; and traditional authority, as in feudalism or monarchy) as one of three types of power people see as legitimate. Charismatic leaders, Weber wrote, “have a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” and is sought as a leader, especially when people feel the times are troubled.
She asked them all about January 6th and democracy and they all had reasons why it wasn’t what we all know it was and why Trump was blameless. I think you have to grapple with the fact that the people who love a strongman are either willing to lie to themselves or are just plain dumb.
It’s easy to see why Trump’s political message can override concerns about the process of democracy for many. What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?
Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.
To be honest, this piece doesn’t really answer that for me. I have heard all this before from Trump voters for years now. They think he’s “strong” and “tough” and he alone can fix it blah, blah, blah. And I realize that some people think he has charisma. But this cult-like devotion goes far beyond this explanation. They just like him, not his “policies” or his agenda or even what he stands for. He’s all over the place. He’s hardly a stereotypical tough guy — he wears make-up and has the wildest hair-do this side of Ru Paul’s drag race. He’s a sucker for flattery and shows weakness every time he goes on the world stage. He’s a punchline.
I think it’s at least partly explained because some people have no bullshit detector and when they hear him bragging and whining about being persecuted they just believe it because they want to believe it and don’t have any innate skepticism.
They are marks and Trump is a con-man. It’s no more mysterious than that.
There is so much talk about the Trump economy being the best the world has ever seen and it’s mainly because Trump just keeps saying it over and over again. It was good but it wasn’t great and on many metrics Biden’s is better. But, of course, we’ve been hearing nothing but gloom and doom about the economy for the past three years so people aren’t hearing that.
Now that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee — I know, it’s not official, but let’s get real — we can expect to hear a lot about how great the economy was on his watch. Which is strange, because he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs than when he came in.
What’s happening here is that Trump has been given a mulligan for 2020. And to be fair, the huge job losses that took place that year were caused by Covid-19, not Trump’s policies.
What’s really odd, however, is that this mulligan appears to be highly selective.
For one thing, if Trump gets to write off the job losses of 2020, President Biden should be allowed to write off the inflation of 2021-22, which we know was largely caused by the aftereffects of the pandemic. How do we know that? Because in 2023, when the economy finally finished adjusting to pandemic disruptions, inflation plunged without any large rise in unemployment.
Also, when Trump supporters go on about his great economy, they play mix and match. They talk about low unemployment while gas cost less than $2 a gallon. But as the chart below shows, the only period when gas was that cheap was when unemployment was actually very high because of the pandemic. For what it’s worth, the current price of gas — slightly over $3 a gallon — is roughly the same percentage of the average worker’s earnings that it was for most of Trump’s prepandemic time in office.
Yes, on the eve of the pandemic, the U.S. economy was indeed looking pretty good, with both unemployment and inflation low. But that’s also true now.
I was fooling around with the latest YouGov/Economist poll and marveling anew at how bad Republicans think the economy is. But the most spectacular finding is surely this:
68% of Republicans think unemployment is a serious problem in the US.
The unemployment rate last month was 3.7%. It’s been under 4% for 24 straight months. The unemployment rate in 2023 was the lowest in the past half century:
Now, this is average unemployment. Maybe you think there are individual places where unemployment is high, and the survey is picking up those folks. After all, the unemployment rate in Merced is 9%! But that’s not it. In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%—almost all of them small farming regions in California.
Nor is it anything else. Unemployment is at historic lows for white people, Black people, and Hispanic people. For men and for women. For the young and the old. By virtually any measure, unemployment is historically low for everyone and has been for the past two years.
And here’s the kicker: 54% of Democrats also think unemployment is a serious problem. That’s not quite as lopsided as it is for Republicans, but it’s still insane. Fox News may be the leader in pushing bad economic news on its audience, but they obviously aren’t the only ones.
Unemployment fell to 3.6% in March of 2022 and has stayed within a tenth of a point of that ever since. The press has had 22 months to let people know this, but to this day the vast majority still think people are struggling to find work. What in the name of God is going on?
58% think the overall economy is poor (vs. 14% for Democrats)
62% think the economy is getting worse (vs. 22% for Democrats)
53% say they are worse off than last year (vs. 18% for Democrats)
50% say they’ve heard mostly negative news about the economy (vs. 23% for Democrats)
48% think the economy is shrinking (vs. 16% for Democrats)
51% think we are currently in a recession (vs. 28% for Democrats)
On a personal level things are quite different:
7% say they are personally unemployed, almost identical to Democrats
6% are unhappy with their jobs, almost identical to Democrats
8% are “very worried” about losing their job, a little less than Democrats
22% say they might have trouble paying bills this month, a little more than Democrats
As usual, what we see in general is that in terms of their personal life, Republicans report roughly the same economic condition as Democrats. But when they’re asked about the overall economy, they’re far more downbeat. The media might be generally too pessimistic about the economy, but Fox News and its pals are obviously in a class by themselves.
The first irrelevant primary is over. More to come, unfortunately.
14% of Republicans came out to caucus last night. It was one of the lowest turnouts in history. Sure, it was cold, but this was low even taking that into account. Enthusiasm? Yeah, sure.
Also:
REPUBLICANS: We need to take extreme measures to make sure our elections are secured!
56,000 Iowans voted for Trump. That’s 0.000168% of the population of the country. But the internet dudes are already picking out drapes for the new concentration camps. pic.twitter.com/EJOwfyiFu7
Sign spotted in Hialeah, Florida came in over the digital transom last night.
At Saturday’s Martin Luther King prayer breakfast here I spotted a local Republican, a former elected, who sometimes commented back in the day at Scrutiny Hooligans (my Asheville group blog, RIP). When in 2011 I posted a piece titled “Colonist or Royalist” likening corporate Republicans and T-partiers to those who backed King George III, the British East India Company, and other elites who “don’t care about your jobs or your economy, and they don’t care about you,” it really got under his skin. Too close to the bone?
“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Grassley? He’s not eliminating the estate tax to benefit working commoners, but to protect the ownership class from the rabble. His comments prompted an acid-dipped response from Pat Rynard at Iowa Starting Line:
It’s difficult to think of a more condescending, elitist worldview – that if you’re not ultra-wealthy, it’s clearly because you’re wasting all your money on alcohol, frivolous fun and prostitutes (I assume that’s what he meant when he said women). Certainly it couldn’t be because people are struggling to find decent-paying jobs, are straddled with debt from the college education they need to attain better jobs, or are paying outrageous sums for health insurance and medical bills. Nope, it must be because they’re all getting hand jobs from hookers in the back of a dark movie theater while downing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Filthy peasants.
Grassley’s comments recall what historian Robert Calhoon once wrote about colonists who supported the Crown during the American Revolution. “Historians’ best estimates,” he wrote, “put the proportion of adult white male loyalists somewhere between 15 and 20 percent,” a figure not far removed from the Republican base. As many as 500,000 colonists among a population of 2.5 million never bought the founders’ “created equal” nonsense. They remained committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Powdered wigs supported by loyal subjects also carries echoes today. Even after the Treaty of Paris, most loyalists remained on these shores. Their progeny and like-minded continentals who arrived later are with us still. It is a personality type committed to maintaining the “natural” order.
In Iowa and in other Republican primary states to come, cosplaying patriots are lining up to crown a king. Or a dictator. Whatever. Because freedom. (Cue Inigo Montoya.)
Guess I know where I’m buying liquor next time I’m in Miami-Dade.
Protecting Our Freedoms: Defeating MAGA Republicans in the 2022 Midterms – United States In the 2022 Midterms, Americans defied polling, pundits and precedent to stave off the predicted Republican “Red Wave” takeover. Despite significant challenges, Democrats were able to hold the Senate, minimize House losses, and flip or retain key battleground state legislatures and governorships. In this episode, we delve into why conventional wisdom about politics doesn’t just miss the mark, but actively impedes what we must do to prevail against right-wing efforts to seize and hold power. Hear about the research, ad making, organizing and strategy that helped deliver key Democratic victories by reminding us of the collective power we have to decide our own future.
Doesn’t it seem from the press’ perspective that good news for Democrats is always bad news for Democrats?
Fine. Donald “91 Indictments” Trump won the Iowa caucuses Monday night. Handily. As expected. But with lower than expected turnout. Let’s examine why that’s bad news for Trump.
That’s bad news for Trump. Because 32% said he would be unfit for office if convicted of a crime. While it is unclear how many Monday caucus-goers were crossover Democrats there to put their thumbs on the scales, that means as much as a third of Trump’s support could bleed away if he’s convicted of his various charges before the election.
Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes. If Iowa’s conservative Republicans are at all representative of the rest of his base, that bleed is enough to lose Trump the presidency again even if the Supreme Court doesn’t deem him disqualified from running.
* 60% said they favor a federal law that would ban abortions nationwide.
* 66% said they did not think Democrat Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020.
* 64% said they decided who to support in the presidential nomination contest before this month.
* 47% said they considered themselves part of the MAGA movement, a reference to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. 49% said they were not part of that movement.
* 12% said the most important quality a Republican presidential nominee should have is the ability to beat Biden, compared to 43% who said shared values mattered most.
Monday Night Politics coverage from the sidelines featured a selection of Trump supporters who felt Trump had delivered for them. But supporters were noticeably unspecific about Trump’s accomplishments. He delievered a massive tax cut for the rich and his Supreme Court picks overturned Roe. Perhaps that was enough. But beyond that?
Trump won 43% of voters who were looking for shared values — a huge jump from just 5% with the group in 2016 — and won 82% of voters who were looking for a candidate who “fights for people like me.”
Again, sidelines interviews were unenlightening about what values they believe Trump shares in common.
Pollsters seem not to have asked whether attendees would support a candidate who violates the U.S. Constitution.
Trump won the Iowa caucuses, but this is NOT an impressive performance.
Almost as many people chose other Republicans as Trump in a state that isn't at all representative of America as a whole.
Another less-reported detail is that half of those who turned out in sub-zero cold came to vote for someone other than Donald Trump. Michael Tomasky comments on that (New Republic):
Early in the day on Monday, I saw Steve Kornacki touting a poll in which a plurality of Nikki Haley voters said they’d vote for Joe Biden over Trump in November, by 43-29. This is consistent with general polling that suggests that somewhere between a third and 40 percent of Republicans are anti-MAGA. That may be something the Biden campaign can exploit in November to some extent.
Candidates usually get between 92 and 94 percent of the vote of their party members. If the Biden team can keep Trump below 90 among Republicans, that could make a real difference when the votes are tallied in November. Right now, the “Democrats mad at Biden” story line is getting a lot more media oxygen—mostly because those Democrats who are angry at Biden over his Israel policy or those averse to him cutting a deal with Republicans on the border are more vocal at the moment.
But there does exist a quiet and not-so-small army of Republicans who don’t want Trump to represent them. Whether there’s any way for the Biden campaign to tap into that army’s psyche and snap the particular synapse that might make them vote Democratic, I have no idea.
I don’t know either. They might stay home. Or they might fall in line as Republicans will. Tomasky observes:
Businessman turned North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum said last summer that he wouldn’t do business with Trump. On Sunday, Burgum, no doubt taking measure of the drapery in the secretary of the Interior’s office, endorsed him.
We’ll see plenty of that, especially from Republicans with something to gain personally from another Trump presidency. But that general lack of enthusiasm from a broad swath of the GOP base is bad news for Trump.
Stuart Stevens believes Trump is “walking away” with the GOP nomination because he is what most of the party wants, because they are “insane.”
"Donald Trump is walking away with the Republican nomination because Donald Trump is what Republicans want." There is no simpler way to say it and everyone should come realize it now because this is what the party has become. @StuartPStevens has more on @MSNBC. pic.twitter.com/vWBY3Coq9P
Watch for this. If only 12% believe Trump’s ability to beat Biden is what’s most important, will that same bunch believe Trump again when he loses and says election stolen. Assuming he’s not already disqualified?
Keep an eye on how the national press covers this. The White House, as you know, has been under immense pressure to offer concessions to address the continuing large number of migrants coming to the US-Mexico border. Now there’s a bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate. Last night Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that bill in DOA in the House. But Speaker Johnson said something more specific and revealing. He refused to bring up the bill and according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl said “Congress can’t solve border until Trump is elected or a republican is back in the White House.”
Two things to note here. First, Johnson isn’t saying they won’t consider this bill. He’s saying they won’t consider any bill until Trump is elected. Sherman appears to have accepted the GOP wording – that “Congress can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected.” But there’s more here. Johnson is saying openly that they won’t pass any bill until Trump is elected. In other words, however out of control they claim the border is they want to keep it that way through November to use it as a political issue. There’s a bipartisan deal but House Republicans are rejecting it out of hand. That’s not terribly surprising. But your political opponents seldom state it so openly. It’s an opening for the White House. Let’s see if they take it.
Also keep an eye on the elite DC press. Johnson has just said he refuses to take any action until the election. He’s saying as clearly as he can he wants to hold on to it as a political issue rather than try to pass a bill. Will they keep adopting Sherman’s wording?
In a word, yes.
Why do they want to keep this going. Because this kind of thing thrills their blood thirsty base:
A woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande on Friday night in Eagle Pass, Texas, after U.S. border agents were prevented from responding, federal officials said Saturday.
In a statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said U.S. Border Patrol agents were made aware of the migrants’ distress by the Mexican government but were unable to enter the area from the U.S. side after Texas National Guard troops, under the direction of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, prevented them from doing so.
“In responding to a distress call from the Mexican government, Border Patrol agents were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area,” the spokesperson said.
The deaths were highlighted Saturday by Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, who said the deceased were part of a group of six migrants in the river Friday night who were in distress.
Mexican authorities recovered the bodies of three of the migrants Saturday, Cuellar said in a statement. Identities and exact ages were unavailable.
“Border Patrol attempted to contact the Texas Military Department, the Texas National Guard, and DPS Command Post by telephone to relay the information, but were unsuccessful,” Cuellar said in the statement.
He continued: “Border Patrol agents then made physical contact with the Texas Military Department and the Texas National Guard at the Shelby Park Entrance Gate and verbally relayed the information. However, Texas Military Department soldiers stated they would not grant access to the migrants — even in the event of an emergency — and that they would send a soldier to investigate the situation.”
I’m sure the Great Pious Christian Mike Johnson prayed for more just like it.
McCay Coppins makes a point that I’ve been trying desperately to make a while now: people should be exposed to Trump not protected from him. They need to see what he’s become:
If Donald Trump has benefited from one underappreciated advantage this campaign season, it might be that no one seems to be listening to him very closely anymore.
This is a strange development for a man whose signature political talent is attracting and holding attention. Consider Trump’s rise to power in 2016—how all-consuming his campaign was that year, how one @realDonaldTrump tweet could dominate news coverage for days, how watching his televised stump speeches in a suspended state of fascination or horror or delight became a kind of perverse national pastime.
Now consider the fact that it’s been 14 months since Trump announced his entry into the 2024 presidential race. Can you quote a single thing he’s said on the campaign trail? How much of his policy agenda could you describe? Be honest: When was the last time you watched him speaking live, not just in a short, edited clip?
It’s not that Trump has been forgotten. He remains an omnipresent fact of American life, like capitalism or COVID-19. Everyone is aware of him; everyone has an opinion. Most people would just rather not devote too much mental energy to the subject. This dynamic has shaped Trump’s third bid for the presidency. As Katherine Miller recently observed in TheNew York Times, “The path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same.”
Perhaps we overlearned the lessons of that first Trump campaign. After he won, a consensus formed among his detractors that the news media had given him too much airtime, allowing him to set the terms of the debate and helping to “normalize” his rhetoric and behavior.
But if the glut of attention in 2016 desensitized the nation to Trump, the relative dearth in the past year has turned him into an abstraction. The major cable-news networks don’t take his speeches live like they used to, afraid that they’ll be accused of amplifying his lies. He’s skipped every one of the GOP primary debates. And since Twitter banned him in January 2021, his daily fulminations have remained siloed in his own obscure social-media network, Truth Social. These days, Trump exists in many Americans’ minds as a hazy silhouette—formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions—rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.
To rectify this problem, I propose a 2024 resolution for politically engaged Americans: Go to a Trump rally. Not as a supporter or as a protester, necessarily, but as an observer. Take in the scene. Talk to his fans. Listen to every word of the Republican front-runner’s speech. This might sound unpleasant to some; consider it an act of civic hygiene.
If he ever held any around where I live in Shithole California I would certainly do it. (As it is I watch way too many rallies and interviews with ecstatic Trump voters on Right Side Broadcasting.) I would like to see what Coppins describes in person and I agree with him that it probably says more than just following it on TV:
Regardless of your personal orientation toward Trump, attending one of his rallies will be a clarifying experience. You’ll get a tactile sense of the man who’s dominated American politics for nearly a decade, and of the movement he commands. People who comment on politics for a living—journalists, academics—might find certain premises challenged, or at least complicated. Opponents and activists might come away with new urgency (and maybe a dash of empathy for the people Trump has under his sway). The experience could be especially educational to Republican voters who are not Trump devotees but who see the other GOP candidates as lost causes and plan to vote for Trump over Joe Biden. Surely, they should see, before they cast their vote, what exactly they’re voting for.
[…]
I found the wholesome, church-barbecue vibe a little jarring. For months, my impression of the 2024 Trump campaign had been shaped by the apocalyptic rhetoric of the candidate himself—the stuff about Marxist “vermin” destroying America, and immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” The people here didn’t look like they were bracing for an existential catastrophe. Had I overestimated the radicalizing effect of Trump’s rhetoric?
Only once I started talking to attendees did I detect the darker undercurrent I remembered from past rallies.
I met Kris, a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers, standing near the press risers. (She declined to share her last name.) She was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. (She waited until Lindell, who happened to be loitering near us, was out of earshot to confide that she preferred Rumble.) The conversation was friendly and unremarkable—until it turned to the 2020 election, which Kris told me she believes was “most definitely” stolen.
“You think Trump should still be president?” I asked.
“By all means,” she said. “And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Military-wise,” she said. “The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she went on to explain. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.” If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.
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That’s the crazy nonsense I hear when I watch those long broadcasts on RSB video before the rallies. You just cannot believe how completely deluded these people are.
“Joe Biden has been dead since 2019. James Woods the actor is playing Joe Biden.”
At some point we’re gonna have to have a national conversation about how many of Trump’s supporters are in the throes of a serious mental health crisis. pic.twitter.com/ws3UZq76xC
Coppins’ impression of Trump is typically perspicacious:
Seeing him speak in this setting after so many years was strange—both instantly familiar and still somehow shocking, like rewatching an old movie you saw a hundred times as a kid but whose most offensive jokes you’d forgotten.
He goes on to describe Trump’s typical, crude, rambling stump speech replete with the vulgar swearing which is apparently returned by the crowd shouting “fuck Joe Biden!” (That must be the evangelicals…)
But this was particularly interesting:
If one thing has noticeably changed since 2016, it’s how the audience reacts to Trump. During his first campaign, the improvised material was what everyone looked forward to, while the written sections felt largely like box-checking. But in Mason City, the off-script riffs—many of which revolved around the 2020 election being stolen from him, and his personal sense of martyrdom—often turned rambly, and the crowd seemed to lose interest. At one point, a woman in front of me rolled her eyes and muttered, “He’s just babbling now.” She left a few minutes later, joining a steady stream of early exiters, and I wondered then whether even the most loyal Trump supporters might be surprised if they were to see their leader speak in person.
My own takeaway from the event was that there’s a reason Trump is no longer the cultural phenomenon he was in 2016. Yes, the novelty has worn off. But he also seems to have lost the instinct for entertainment that once made him so interesting to audiences. He relies on a shorthand legible only to his most dedicated followers, and his tendency to get lost in rhetorical cul-de-sacs of self-pity and anger wears thin. This doesn’t necessarily make him less dangerous. There is a rote quality now to his darkest rhetoric that I found more unnerving than when it used to command wall-to-wall news coverage.
It should be unnerving and journalists should show it and analyze it and tell this story! Good for Coppins for doing it. I know they don’t generally want to portray the crowds as they really are but it’s part of this story.
Shortly before Trump began speaking, I met a friendly young dad in glasses who’d brought his 6-year-old son to the event. He’d never attended a Trump rally before and was excited to be there. When I asked if I could chat with him after Trump’s speech to see what he thought of the event, he happily agreed.
As Trump spoke, I glanced over at the man a few times from the press section. His expression was muted; he barely reacted to the lines that drove the crowd wild. The longer Trump spoke, I noticed, the further the man drifted backward toward the exits. Of course, I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe he was just a stoic type. Or maybe his enthusiasm was tempered by the distraction of tending to a 6-year-old. All I know is that, halfway through the speech, he was gone.
The die hard MAGAs will never tire of him or his schtick. He is their favorite entertainer/leader/guru and whatever he says is, as he would say, perfect.
That guy who left will probably vote for Trump anyway. He was just disappointed to see that the guy he thought Trump was is really a creepy old man behind the curtain screaming “get off my lawn.” But I suppose you never know. Maybe he had an epiphany. But there does have to be at least a handful of people whose memories of him are gauzy now who would be shocked that the image they had in their minds is very different from the reality. He’s worse than ever. And his plans are being fleshed out by the Republican establishment institutions which have decided that MAGA is their destiny.
If you can’t get to a rally and want to punish yourself with a Trump rally, you can always go to Right Side broadcasting on Youtube and they stream them live. CSPAN does quite a few of them too. You should force yourself to see at least one. It will remind you of the stakes in a hurry.
