Here was the headline: “Trump shuts down city in show of strength with first rally since being charged in documents case.”
The city is Pickens, SC where Trump held a rally yesterday.
I lived in South Carolina in the 1970’s, and me and my hunting buddy Sherrill Smith would sometimes drive up and around Pickens in late August or early September, looking for a spot to hunt deer. We usually put up a stand alongside a field which was farmed by two black sharecroppers, Rabbit and Love, with the deal being that in exchange for turning their bean field into shooting gallery, we would give them half the meat from anything we shot.
Pickens had around 3,000 residents back then, and the population today is about the same. According to the 2020 census, the median family income is around $35,000, which is about half the median family income for the entire United States.
In other words, Pickens hangs on probably because the Feds send in enough welfare, disability, and other transfer payments to keep the place alive. The town, which was classified as a village until recently when it somehow got reclassified, I suspect, to qualify for more federal budget pass-throughs, was a shithole back in the 1970’s and it’s a shithole today.
The idea that Trump’s big rally would have ‘closed down’ a town which, to all intents and purposes, has been closed down for at least the past fifty years, is a joke.
Trump will no doubt continue to hold rallies in places like Pickens where he’s guaranteed to get a good crowd no matter what he says because nobody comes to his rallies to listen to what he’s going to say.
The folks who come to a Trump event want to meet and greet their friends, talk about what happened at other Trump events which they attended, get a hot dog and maybe some KrazyKorn for the kids, and buy a t-shirt or a hat to take home as a present for Pops.
Trump will continue to go around the country and will continue to draw large crowds. After all, this is a guy who has been involved in the entertainment business now for more than a dozen years. But the fact that he’s got a public, crowd-pleasing spectacle down pat with the country rock music, the insulting way he talks about everyone else and his endless bravado along with his crass jokes and outright lies, doesn’t really get him any more votes.
Do you really think there’s anyone out there who hasn’t made up his mind about Donald Trump? Do you think there’s anyone who will drive for four or five hours, then stand on a line for two or three hours more and then listen to Trump talk for an hour who needs to be reminded that he wants his name on the ballot in 2024?
Let me put it to you this way. If there were 10,000 people at the Pickens event yesterday, what this really means is that there were 10,000 people yesterday who didn’t get drunk, didn’t get into an accident or a fight, and didn’t sit in front of their wide screens eating chips and guzzling a beer because they had nothing better to do.
Good for them. In fact, God bless every single one of them. And I’m being serious when I hope that everyone who goes to a Donald Trump rally will live out their lives under the blessings of Almighty God.
Because the truth is that the folks who came to Pickens are going to cast a red vote next year even if the GOP ticket is headed by Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. For that matter, I’ll do exactly the same thing on the blue side of the ballot as well.
The good news is that Joe can get re-elected without any of those votes. So, when you finish reading today’s drivel, why not click right here and send him a few bucks?
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