Thursday, October 17, 2024
DJ Trump rips up the political script, and brings down house
Donald Trump’s town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Centre, in the suburbs of Pennsylvania’s most populous city, became an impromptu concert on Monday night (Tuesday AEDT) when the former president ditched the political script and fired up the base, cranking out hits from Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria to gay anthem YMCA by Village People.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music … Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” the likely future Republican president declared before launching into a nearly 40-minute DJ session – unprecedented in US presidential campaign history – from his personal playlist.
The 78-year-old bopped and jived onstage at his Oaks indoor campaign rally before thousands of adoring fans in his characteristic style. The episode infuriated Democrats, who seized on it as evidence of Trump’s supposed cognitive decline. “I hope he’s OK,” Kamala Harris’s campaign team sneered on social media.
But that wasn’t the full story. Two attendees had just fainted in the cramped hall. “Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump joked to laughter before launching his music session, which included Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U.
Even South Dakota Republican governor Kristi Noem, who was co-hosting the rally, appeared shocked that her leader had flicked the switch to vaudeville, literally.
Trump felt the moment demanded music after the two health episodes soured the mood. And he was right. “Nobody’s leaving,” Trump teased the crowd. “What’s going on?”
And he was OK, too, as evidenced less than 24 hours later when he sat down in Chicago with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait for by far the most intellectually demanding one-hour interview on economics and geopolitics of the US campaign so far, to numerous standing ovations from an elite business audience.
That 24-hour period highlighted the contrasts of this campaign: the most unscripted and genuine, however flawed, candidate in US presidential politics up against the most scripted and fabricated.
By all means, support Democrats for policy or other reasons, but this is surely undeniable. Imagine being Trump’s political advisers in September after he declared women “won’t be thinking about abortion”, Democrats’ top campaign issue, if he’s elected.
While Trump dominated an exchange with one of the top English journalists, Harris sat down on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) with black youth podcaster Charlamagne Tha God, hot on the heels of her Call Her Daddy interview a week earlier.
“I say the same thing when I go to Detroit as I do in Philly,” Harris told him, when asked whether it was awkward that she repeated the same tired phrases: “opportunity economy”, “time to turn the page”, “middle-class background”.
And all this in the same week that even establishment left-wing media had to cover accusations the Vice-President had plagiarised numerous sections, including word for word from Wikipedia, of her 2009 book Smart on Crime.
This is surely why the Washington establishment loathes Trump so much. He will be far harder to manage than Joe Biden and certainly Harris should she succeed him. Trump, whatever you think of him, is what the founding fathers of the US envisaged, an independent leader who makes his own decisions, in charge of the executive branch rather than controlled by it.
Democrats must be hoping Trump self-sabotages as Harris’s slender polling advantage steadily erodes. When he announced his candidacy in late 2022 I had thought Trump was an appalling candidate, likely to lose, and hoped Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would thrash him. But I, like most of the media, was wrong. Trump 2.0 appears sharper, more disciplined than Trump 1.0.
His behaviour in July when he was almost killed was undeniably courageous and eerily fateful even for the unreligious. Who of us would have stood up under a hail of bullets, inquired about our shoes and later refused hospital care? Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, whose hopes of a Harris victory I’ve come to believe, must have been astonished. This was real – and, to be fair, unexpected from a perennial Vietnam draft dodger – courage.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
The only presidential candidate to exhibit more bravery in similar circumstances was Theodore Roosevelt, who insisted on finishing his speech, bleeding, after being shot in 1912.
Even Trump’s vitality has surprised me. A gaunt and lethargic Bill Clinton, who is the same age as Trump, appeared on the Democrats’ campaign trail this week, the former political maestro delivering Republicans a golden video when he declared an illegal immigrant wouldn’t have been able to commit murder in the US had the border been properly vetted.
I don’t want this to read like hagiography. If Republicans lose this unlosable election, which is sure to be close, it will be because of Trump’s political baggage, a mix of forced and unforced errors from his time in the White House, prove insurmountable.
DeSantis or Nikki Haley would have trounced Biden or Harris by a far greater margin given the miserable record of the Biden administration, inflation, unconscionable illegal immigration and a host of unpopular cultural positions the Democrats insist on shoving down the throats of middle America come what may.
Trump is the betting market favourite three weeks out from polling day and a handful of points behind in national polls. Harris will appear on Fox News on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), which could signal a lack of confidence in her prospects among campaign staff. The idea that Trump would go on MSNBC is laughable.
After near 40 minutes DJing, Trump left the stage as Memory, from the musical Cats, played. If Trump loses, no one is going to forget this campaign or the unlikeliest of political comebacks.
We should relish the contrast in style while it lasts; it’s unlikely to be repeated for generations.
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Disdain for Trump all we learned from angry Harris’s Fox interview
Few viewers would have emerged from watching Kamala Harris’s highly combative interview with Fox News having learned anything about her or her policies except her visceral disdain for Donald Trump.
During the 30 minute interview with Bret Baier, she became at times visibly furious with his lines of questioning. But it was Trump’s rhetoric and mental state that she repeatedly attacked throughout, adding that she would “support and enforce federal law” as president.
Baier and Harris talked over each other continually, and most of Harris’s answers tended toward verbiage - grammatically correct, but saying very little concrete.
“I am running on ‘turning the page’ from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump,” she said at one stage, using two phrases about pages and burdens for which she’s often mocked.
Baier began predictably with perhaps Democrats’ weakest policy area, illegal immigration, challenging Harris to state the number of illegal immigrants her administration had allowed to enter the US, which official estimates put to be at least six million.
Harris refused to acknowledge the unprecedented surge had anything to do with Biden administration, and wouldn’t apologise to the families who had lost loved ones after they were murdered by illegal immigrants, events even Bill Clinton conceded earlier in the week might not have happened had the border been more secure.
“Of course, to the extent our administration’s policies had anything to do with those tragic murders, we apologise, and my administration will do much better” was what she should have humbly said, rather than blaming Donald Trump whose border policies were immediately reversed by Joe Biden in early 2021.
At least she gave a stronger answer when asked how she would be different from Joe Biden as president, a question she flunked terribly last week in a soft-ball interview on The View, where she said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.
“I will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency; like every new president I will bring my life experience, professional experience, fresh and new ideas, I’m a new generation of leadership,” she said.
“For example I have not spent the majority of my career in DC,” she added, quickly trying to talk about her policies to bring down the cost of housing.
Harris ‘lost it’ when Baier played a clip of Donald Trump, who was asked earlier on Fox what he’d meant by his controversial claim the US had “an enemy within”, claiming the clip played was unfair.
When Baier challenged on why and how she had changed her positions on public funding for sex change operations or decriminalisation of illegal immigration, she gave unclear answers.
For Harris critics, the interview will be rich fodder to claim she’s not up to the task of being president. Her performance was at least as much the result of the very bad hand she’s been dealt: trying to defend the Biden administration of which she’s been a central part, whose track record is so unpopular.
It’s difficult to find many positive let alone effusive comments on Harris’s performance on social media. It’s unlikely she’ll give another Fox interview before November 5, but she deserves credit for at least agreeing to it. And it would be great to see Trump in an interview on MSNBC, but given he believes he’s ahead, that’s unlikely.
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