Donald Trump spent Monday in New Hampshire, formally filing his candidacy for the presidential primary before holding a rally in the town of Derry. Four indictments, multiple civil suits, and being a member of the Republican Party (which lives in a state of disarray without a speaker) may have taken their toll on Trump. Gone are the high-energy rallies of yesterday with never-ending chants of “Lock her up.” The sense of grievance remains, but the connection between Trump’s thoughts and his willingness to remember talking points has frayed.
Some highlights from the Derry rally include:
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Trump thinking second-grade wordplay makes him a genius.
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Trump saying Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is the leader of Turkey.
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Trump making sweeping Christofascist statements against immigrants.
As eyebrow-raising as those bullet points may seem, they were delivered by a guy that looks like he wishes he could just be cheating at golf somewhere.
Trump made sure he worked in his original recipe of xenophobia and racist ignorance, touching on immigration as a war on Christianity (or something), and offering up a real scary-sounding policy idea in which he promised to “implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants.” In case you thought Trump might try to finesse this bit of fascism, you would be wrong. He added:
If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion, which a lot of them don’t, if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in, right? We don’t want you. Get out of here. Ya fired.
Trump also talked about some of the great dictators he admired, like Viktor Orbán. Trump called the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary “one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world,” adding, “He’s the leader of Turkey.”
I get it—when I was a kid, I mixed those two up. I was also not the president of the United States.
The top-line pablum from Trump was a run where he seemed to free-associate off of his attempt at an “America First” witticism, saying he told French President Emmanuel Macron that he, Donald Trump, was “for us.” Trump then added the rhetorical question: “You know how you spell us? You spell ‘us’ U.S.” Blarg!
Trump kept at this riff for a while, asking another rhetorical question. “Has anyone ever thought of that?” He proceeded to take credit for inventing that bit of wordplay:
I just picked that up. Couple of days [ago], I’m reading and it said, “Us.” And I said, “You know, if you think about it, us equals us.” Isn’t that, now, if we say something genius, they’ll never say it. You know, we get 25, 30, 40, 50, 80,000, 100,000 people to speeches. They’ve never said Trump’s a great speaker. Never said. I never heard it. I said to my people, “Do you think they’ll ever acknowledge? I must be doing okay.”
The Derry rally was filled with so much incomprehensible drivel that it is still hard to believe that any political party could be so mired in manure and corruption that this vapid dirtbag continues to be the odds-on favorite to win the primary.
