So, Trump shows up at a local airport in Waco, TX and delivers his usual, 90-minute ramble which contains more untruths than Carter has Little Liver pills, but the audience doesn’t care.
The audience also didn’t care that his rally took place thirty years ago in the spot where the cops stormed the Branch Davidian compound and 75 people were killed. In fact, I’m willing to bet that most of the rally-goers didn’t even know about the Waco siege because it’s not as if the people who are the most ardent Trump followers have any idea about what happened thirty years ago or, for that matter, what happened two years ago on Capitol Hill.
Trump is now calling the January 6th rioters ‘patriots,’ and in last night’s spiel he thanked Marjorie Taylor Greene for vising those jailed ‘patriots’ in jail multiple times and publicizing the terrible conditions under which they are forced to exist.
Last night’s event kicked off with Ted Nugent playing the Star Bangled Banner and then firing up the crowd by referring to Ukraine’s Zelensky as a queer. Nugent better start toning down his anti-gay rhetoric because this past week a Trump supporter named George Santos just filed a bill which would prohibit the United States from sending money to any country which discriminates against gays.
The truth is it doesn’t matter what anyone says at a Trump rally – nobody shows up at a Trump rally because they have the slightest interest in what Trump or any of the other speakers will actually say. These rallies are like NASCAR races – the only thing the crowd is a crash at a car race or some profanity at a Trump campaign event.
The 2024 campaign is beginning to work out just like 2016, at least on the GOP side. Trump entered the race in 2015 against a whole slew of competitors who had all kinds of political creds and experience that Trump didn’t have. But as soon as Trump hit the campaign trail, all those so-called veterans of previous GOP wars – Kasich, Cruz, Rubio, Bush, et. al., - fell by the wayside and Trump had the whole campaign to himself.
Nobody ever previously ran for President who defined his chief opponent as someone called ‘fake news.’ Nobody ever previously ran for President who defended his record with minorities by trying to locate ‘my African American’ in a crowd. Nobody ever previously ran for President by promising to keep America protected from all those immigrant hordes.
Over the past twenty years, I have been listening to various pundits predict the political fallout when the United States is no longer majority white. What I haven’t heard anyone attempt to figure out is what will be the political result when fifteen percent of the people who vote for Presidential elections are so friggin’ dumb that they are planning to vote for Trump for a third time?
Think about it, okay? How many American Presidents have lost a re-election campaign? Counting Trump in 2020, the number is a grand total of eight. But how many Presidents have lost re-election campaigns twice? If Trump’s the 2024 nominee, he’ll join a select club of – one!
And don’t make the mistake of thinking that Trump has the slightest chance of beating Joe next year. Because if the only people he could get to join him on the stage at Waco were the likes of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the guy who is now back to sitting in his Palm Beach apartment waiting to get served a warrant to come back to New York, has the same hopes of returning to the Oval Office in 2025 as I have to losing those extra, twenty pounds.