The alliance between the billionaire and the politician is pure strongman politics.
Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: “As I was saying …”
The audience loved that. The rallygoers had waited in line for hours in the hot sun to get into the field, and this was their reward. They had made it through warm-up speeches by J. D. Vance, Lara Trump, and Scott Presler, the last of these being the founder of Gays for Trump and the March Against Sharia, who promised any Amish people watching that Trump would “protect your raw milk … protect your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.” (One of the wonders of the MAGA movement is how it absorbs other political positions—in this case, crunchiness and pro-natalism—into one seamless mythology.) After that came the crowd’s moment to rejoice in the defeat of, as Trump put it, “a cold-blooded assassin [who] aimed to silence me and silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country.” An opera singer even performed “Ave Maria.”
Famously, the Gettysburg address was just 271 words long. Trump’s speech went on for 90 minutes. The contrast between the bits of the speech he read from the teleprompters, which covered “hallowed places” and monuments to valor, and the ad-libbed sections, which featured digressions about potholes and the Olympic boxing controversy, was stark. How can we say that America has an attention-span “crisis” when people are volunteering to listen to this stuff?
George Washington attempted
Assissinate not 12 miles away in same county, Almost three hundred years ago