I was going to hold off on this blog until tomorrow but my golf club is still not open so I might as well put something up today as well. Which is a comment about Trump’s rally last night in North Carolina which got a crowd that, as my sister just said, was smaller than the crowds that used to show up for the free concerts in Central Park.
And she’s not talking about the Diana Ross concert, okay?
When I was a high school kid, one of the things I liked to do was walk through Times Square in the evening and look at all the stores, the restaurants, the billboards, and the blinking lights. This what it looked like:
Most of all, I made a point of always walking past Jack Dempsey’s restaurant because on most nights he would be standing out front, waving to everyone who drove by and honked or shaking hands with people in the street, including me.
This would have been when Dempsey was in his late 60’s, but he still looked like he could climb in a boxing ring and go a few rounds. He was a big guy with long arms and enormous hands, and he just had this ‘don’t mess with me’ look about him, plus he always had a big smile on his face.
You would be smiling all the time too if you had started out as a poor kid in a mining town in Colorado and ended up as the most famous heavyweight boxing champion of all time. Or at least of all time until someone came along named Muhammed Ali.
I was thinking about Dempsey when I went online this morning and read about Donald Trump’s rally that took place in North Carolina last night. In 2016 Trump held a rally at this same location which attracted more than 15,000 people. Last night’s event may have pulled in a thousand folks and his website doesn’t list another event.
On his way to the rally, Trump endorsed Doctor Oz, who has quit his TV show to run for Senate in Pennsylvania and fill Toomey’s seat. Oz is best known not for his work as a surgeon, but as a promoter of various quack remedies for weight loss, including a product called Pure Green Coffee, a company which paid a $9 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission because it lied to customers about how much weight they could really lose.
Oz and Trump are exactly alike in this respect, because Trump had to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit brought against him by students who enrolled in Trump University, only to discover that they had been duped.
When all is said and done, there’s really nothing quite like being able to stand next to a famous person, not just if they are famous because they were heavyweight champion, or a huckster of diet pills on TV, or even an impeached President of the United States. And that’s the reason why we will never see the end of Donald Trump as long as he’s alive.
And as much as I can’t stand the dopey bastard, I don’t wish him any ill will. So for all I know, Trump will be out there promoting himself for as long as he can.
But he’s going to have to figure out a way to get more people to show up at his rallies than the pathetically-small crowd that showed up last night. Because what Jack Dempsey had going for him was that he didn’t have to worry about whether or not people wanted to meet or greet him. He just had to stand on the sidewalk in front of his joint and they drove or walked by.
Trump doesn’t have that kind of access to a continuous stream of people at his Mar-a-Lago resort. So where should he roost? Maybe he can just set himself up in the parking lot of a different Walmart every week.