I know you’re asking the same question I am: “Sweet Mary, mother of God, what the hell did we just watch?” For the good of the order, I watched every second of Donald Trump’s train wreck of a speech today, marveling at how astoundingly, truly, terribly horrible it was in every rhetorical, legal, and political dimension.
Greg Sargent made a phenomenal point in The New Republic today about how this verdict shattered Trump’s aura of invincibility.
He’s right, and Trump’s speech today did more damage than anyone could have expected precisely because Trump felt the need to shore up his damaged ego with a bizarre, discursive speech that will go down in the annals of American rhetoric as a true, zero-of-five-stars flop. It was like Francis Mallman at a PETA convention. It was like Ron DeSantis at Wigstock. It was like Steve Bannon at the annual meeting of the American Society of Dermatology.
His head lemur was askew and frothed into some previously unknown configuration, his body language was low-energy, and he seemed to have shrunken two sizes. His makeup was greasy and more cloyingly obvious than usual.
He looked deeply, profoundly unwell, like a man who wakes up in a flophouse room coved in blood with the body of a dead hooker, a live monkey, and no memory of the night before.
He was a broken, defeated man behind that rickety podium today. Utterly bereft of his old swagger, his energy level was as tired and worn out as the lobby of the decaying office and condo tower of which he was once so proud.
I mean, this was just painful as hell. He rambled, he mumbled, he plunged into box canyons of anecdotes and imaginary memories. He busted through the still-in-effect gag order issued during the trial.
He compounded his legal problems further, for nothing. His performance wasn’t strong or commanding or forceful — all adjectives the MAGA base adores and image apply to this moral pygmy.
Rather, it felt more sad and desperate, like a spelunker trying to navigate a dark and dangerous cave. Trump was alone in the echoing lobby of his decaying Tower, even in the crowd of media cameras. No family member stood on stage with them. No elected Republican in matching blue suit and red tie flanked him.
His biggest mistake was his attempt to keep litigating the case in which he was found guilty of 34 felonies. He’s making his sentencing even more problematic, and even causing complexity for his appeal process.
It was a massive mistake, and I assure you that Donald Trump insisted on it.
The man who shook American politics to its roots in 2015 in the same lobby today looks smaller, weaker, more exhausted and more defensive than most Americans have seen before. His defenses were the kind of rote, tiresome alternate facts that won’t work at the appeals level, and won’t work for the electorate.
Even his most fervent allies will find there’s not enough mayonnaise in the universe to make chicken salad out of today’s chickenshit.
The Biden campaign’s response was spot-on target:
“America just witnessed a confused, desperate, and defeated Donald Trump ramble about his own personal grievances and lie about the American justice system, leaving anyone watching with one obvious conclusion: This man cannot be president of the U.S.”
Amen.
I don’t even know where to buy that many flags.
Just what if the major news networks, newspapers, magazines, etc, did not attend his “speeches”, otherwise known as ramblings. No one followed him around, basically ignoring him like he does not exist. Can you imagine how that would affect him? There are many examples of petulant children acting out with bad behavior and criminal activity. For what? For the attention, of course. Only Trump’s behavior is on a grander scale. Once when I was in grade school so many years ago, we had a bully in our class. He terrorized everyone and none of us were willing to get our lights punched out. But then a group of us had had enough of him. Four or five of us got together and confronted him. He did not back down, but began escalating his bullying. He grabbed one of us in a bear hug and began squeezing him so tightly the kid was having trouble breathing. Finally, the kid reared his head back and came forward so fast smashed his forehead into the nose of the bully, breaking his nose, literally smashing it. He started screaming and crying as the blood poured out. One of the kids had a baseball bat and swung it as hard as he could across the top of his foot, breaking his metatarsal bones, hard enough to cause enough damage to require surgery and a cast for weeks. We all pledged not to confess to our retribution. The bully also would not admit to being to being bested by a group “weaklings”, claiming he had fallen out of tree. He never bulled any of us again. He remained an asshat, but no one paid attention to him and he was relegated to the annals of nothingness, irrelevancy in our lives. He channeled all his pent up anger to the football games where he was a force to be reckoned with, but only during the games. He was accepted as a fellow player and only toward the end of his senior playing days was he fully accepted in our group and a person value. Did he apologize? No, not really, but his change in behavior was enough. Imagine that person as Trump. Instead of letting Trump throw rocks, we instead threw rocks at him. He would implode into a blubbery mass of humanity. Will it happen? Probably not, but it would be fun to see.