By Steve BermanNot since 1841 has a politician killed the audience like Donald Trump in Iowa. William Henry Harrison’s inaugural speech went on for 115 minutes, and it killed him. There are many ways to die, but death by blather has got to be among the most inhumane.
The last—only—time I attended a rally for Donald Trump was on November 30, 2015, in Macon, Georgia. I remember the press corps, because I was one of them, sitting in a pen like a petting zoo, not allowed “outside” until the very end. Rally-goers could leave anytime, but the press, other than a few lucky photographers, could not. I believe CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond was on the campaign trail with Trump in those days; he’s now the network’s White House correspondent, but is on assignment serving on the ground embedded with the IDF in Gaza. Given the choice between daily war and horrific scenes of death, or attending another Trump rally, I believe, if asked, Jeremy would not hesitate to prefer the former.
Matt Taibbi attended the Sioux City rally, held on January 6th, though the significance of that date was really a theme. A typical Trump rally is an hour of insult comedy, interspersed with proclamations of victimhood, doomsaying about our country’s current course, and sometimes tidbits of relevant news. Sioux City was typical. Taibbi, sick with the ’Rona, thought the act was hilarious.
Listening to this stuff is like watching a Pope throw open the Vatican door with his balls hanging out. The brain screams to laugh at the situation, but everyone pretends it’s not funny. In a related note Trump went after the “fake news media” five or six times. “Is there anybody in this room that’s not going to vote for Trump?” he asked at one point, before quickly interjecting: “Don’t raise your hand. It could be dangerous. They’re going to say, ‘He incited an insurrection!’” Pointing at us now: “These stupid bastards! ‘He incited an insurrection!’” The hall again filled with laughs, like the set of a Don Rickles roast.
It’s all funny, until Mark Meadows repeats those words from the witness stand, with Trump sitting at the defendant’s table. Trump’s comedy goldmine is salted with his own legal troubles, and whistling past many graveyards—Access Hollywood, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn—is a feature of the campaign, not a bug. As it’s been proven for nine years now, where, say, Nikki Haley gets pilloried for suggesting the Civil War was not about slavery (then backtracking, not lost on Trump), Trump can call the worst people his best friends and his fans eat it up.
Trump called Haley a “birdbrain” in Sioux City; it’s his new nickname for Nikki. Taibbi thinks Trump is funny. If Trump wins another term in November, it will all be “funny like a clown?”
The act, like Rodney Dangerfield’s “I get no respect,” has not changed since 2015. Just the names and the insults have changed. Instead of Ben Carson “pathological,” Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, all of whom were swatted, backhanded, from the race in 2016, now Trump only has to deal with Ron DeSanctimonious and Haley. Easy pickin’s for him in Iowa.
He wears out an audience like Muhammad Ali wore out opponents in the ring.
In an hour and fifteen minutes, Trump said essentially nothing new, and he said it almost incoherently. It was like listening to my crazy uncle talk about buying his Mercedes with paper bags filled with cash. Crazy uncle Donald, except more boring.
“Boring” is exactly how one 19-year-old attendee described it to me. Even dyed-in-the-wool supporters packed it in early when Trump busted through the one hour mark with no sign of wrapping up.
I wrote that in 2015. Taibbi had nothing to add in 2023, except to say that Bush was worse and Obama even worse than that. “It’s too bad we’ll be in civil war and stabbing each other for shelter before it’s appreciated,” Matt wrote, “but Trump’s story is the great comedy of our time.”
After reading Taibbi’s take, one reader opined on Substack Chat, “I want to caution you about invoking easy equations like ‘job starved’ because the darker truth from my little corner of reality, is that if (a big if) Trump could actually govern to provide jobs for these men, they are now so feral and resistant to a hard days work, they’d run for the exits.”
This is true in many ways, about the Millennials disappointed that the world they were promised is like a buffet where you’re last in line and the food has run out. The older generation of white, middle class workers laments its loss of social power. “They want status,” the reader posted about the young, obese, unemployed in her town “dotted w/Trump signs and Confederate flags.”
“They want camo gear to hide the ugly truth that they don’t have the goods to actually participate in the American Dream. They just want the perks.” The Democrats have their own version of these. Perhaps Antifa did participate in the January 6th riot, just not the left’s version. I do know that Antifa is not funny, the people who “occupied” Atlanta’s “Cop City” were not funny when they shot at police, and the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th were not funny.
I’m not used to Matt Taibbi being mealy-mouthed and starting pillow fights, but his closing paragraph is what my old English teacher would call a “Waffle” — the only grade worse than an F.
Trump and his opponents probably share responsibility for turning American politics into a joke, but only one of the two parties is trying to tell us it’s not funny. And “that’s not funny” is a losing political slogan.
That’s bullcrap and he knows it. There are serious people in both parties who won’t put up with the comedy fronting for cruelty. I hope the serious folks will show up to the caucuses and then in New Hampshire, they’ll show up at the polls.
Whether we laugh or not—and a little laugh isn’t a bad thing—we can’t afford to just chalk things up to comedy, say everything’s fixed anyway, and submit to Soviet style fatalism. If things suck it’s because we made them suck.
Sorry, Matt, but death by blather is not funny anymore.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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