[[link removed]]

I LISTENED TO TRUMP’S RAMBLING, UNHINGED, VITUPERATIVE GEORGIA
RALLY—AND SO SHOULD YOU  
[[link removed]]


 

Susan B. Glasser
March 14, 2024
The New Yorker
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s
easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American
democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Watch his
speeches. Don't look away. _

,

 

I’m sure you had better things to do on Saturday evening than
watch Donald Trump rant
[[link removed]] for
nearly two hours to an audience of cheering fans in Rome, Georgia. His
speech was rambling, unhinged, vituperative, and oh-so-revealing. In
his first rally since effectively clinching the Republican
Presidential nomination, Trump made what amounted to his response to
Joe Biden’s State of the Union address
[[link removed]].
It’s hard to imagine a better or more pointed contrast with the
vision that, two days earlier, the President had laid out for America.

And yet, like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane
oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies
and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political
success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his
ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a
real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to
defeat him.

This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the
2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is
not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the
actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s
fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s
rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his
speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval
Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are,
once again, benefitting him.

Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of,
Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the
President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms,
referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor”
in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition.
Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of
the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered
them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.

Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side.
Biden’s barbed references
[[link removed]] to
Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American
democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment,
revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the
Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old
precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the
former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just
“get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I
say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came
in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do
“whatever the hell they want” to _nato_ countries that don’t
spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden
condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and
“unacceptable.”

Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with
Biden. Instead, the Washington _Post_ counted nearly five dozen
references
[[link removed]] to
Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets
drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an
opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,”
“flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump
is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the
fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked
so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024.
In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got
the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter
[[link removed]]:
a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.

And yet there was the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, writing this week
[[link removed]] in
the _Wall Street Journal_ that it was Biden who had “lowered
himself with shortsighted and counterproductive blows” in his State
of the Union speech. Trump’s entire campaign is a study in grotesque
slander, but Rove did not even mention Trump’s Georgia rally while
sanctimoniously tut-tutting about Biden. And I don’t mean to single
out Rove; it was hard to find any right-leaning commentators who did
otherwise. This many years into the Trump phenomenon, they’ve
figured out that the best way to deal with Trump’s excesses is
simply to pretend they do not exist.

Hanging over both speeches was the increasingly burning question of
performance, as the country is now forced to choose between two aging
leaders
[[link removed]] aspiring
to remain in the White House well into their eighties. Trump has
arguably lowered the bar for Biden, with his constant insults aimed at
the President’s age and capacity, and Biden managed to clear it,
turning his State of the Union into an affirmation—for fretting
Democratic partisans, at least—that he has the vigor and fight to
keep going in the job.

Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not
rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words
and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and
frequently malicious. (This video compilation
[[link removed]],
circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he
complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his
bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael
Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant
wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In
another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing
as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel
to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his
speech by saying:

But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they
talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know,
the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged
because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it.
Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.

Makes perfect sense, right?

It was no surprise, of course, that Trump began his speech by panning
Biden’s: “the worst President in history, making the worst State
of the Union speech in history,” an “angry, dark, hate-filled
rant” that was “the most divisive, partisan, radical, and
extreme” such address ever given. As always, what really stuns is
Trump’s lack of self-awareness. Remember his “American carnage”
address? Well, never mind. Get past the unintended irony, though, and
what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is
being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies
about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in
every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.

Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the
greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”;
“I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham
Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of
untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in
Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent
inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,”
with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world
and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and
pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in
Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being
controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind,
“weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system
to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be
summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe
Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”

Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally
everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day
standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating
into the political lexicon. Consider their latest cause célèbre, the
tragic recent death of a young woman, Laken Riley, in which the
accused is an undocumented migrant. Trump explicitly blamed Biden and
his “crime-against-humanity” border policies for her death.
“Laken Riley would be alive today,” he said, “if Joe Biden had
not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United
States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals
into our country.” Against such treachery, Trump offers a simple,
apocalyptic choice: doomsday if Biden is reëlected, or liberation
from “these tyrants and villains once and for all.” Wars will be
ended at the mere thought of Trump retaking power; crime will cease;
arrests will be made; dissenters will be silenced.

I recognize that a speech such as the one that Trump delivered the
other night is hard to distill into the essence required of a news
story. His detours on Saturday included complaints about Jeff Zucker,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, Megyn Kelly, “the big
plagiarizer from Harvard,” Ron “DeSanctimonious,” the
Washington _Post_, “Trump-deranged judge” Lewis Kaplan, “the
fascist and racist attorney general of New York State,” “corrupt
Fani Willis,” Merrick Garland, and the F.B.I., which, Trump claimed,
“offers one million dollars to a writer of fiction about Donald
Trump to lie and say it was fact where Hunter Biden’s laptop from
hell was Russian disinformation.” What was he talking about? I
don’t know. The man has so many grievances and so many enemies that
it is, understandably, hard to keep them straight.

But whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s
easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American
democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of
his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of
our times. The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the
current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact
checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the
“bottomless Pinocchio” was invented.

On Tuesday, days after this performance, Trump and Biden each locked
up their respective parties’ nominations. The general election has
now begun, and Trump, as of this writing, is the favorite. In the next
few months, the Biden campaign and its allies plan to spend close to a
billion dollars attempting to persuade Americans not to make the
historic mistake of electing Trump twice. My thought is a simpler and
definitely cheaper one: whether or not it’s news in the conventional
sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to
American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. 

_Susan B. Glasser
[[link removed]] is a staff
writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in
Washington._

_Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington
publications, including Politico, where she founded the
award-winning Politico Magazine, and Foreign Policy, which won three
National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure as
editor in chief. Before that, she worked for a decade at the
Washington Post, where she was the editor of Outlook and national
news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton,
served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics,
spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She edited Roll Call, a Capitol
Hill newspaper, early in her career._

_Her books include “Kremlin Rising
[[link removed]],” “The Man Who Ran
Washington [[link removed]],” and, most
recently, “The Divider [[link removed]],” a
best-selling history of Donald Trump in the White House, which she
co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker._

_Subscribe to the New Yorker Newsletter
[[link removed]]: The Best of the New Yorker in
Your In-Box_

* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* democracy
[[link removed]]
* elections
[[link removed]]
* Joe Biden
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]