Last Night, a DJ Saved My Campaign Rally

According to one dystopian scenario, future historians will record that the American republic died not with a whimper and a whimper, but with a playlist. At a surreal town hall event in Oaks, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump rushed to wrap up his speech to voters in critical condition so his DJ could cut to his favorite rallying tunes.

“If my boys can do it, let’s make it a music festival… If my boys can hear me, put on my chart, my favorite chart of all time,” Trump said in one of countless rants at the event. He then looked across the stage at the same deceptive chart of encounters with immigrants at the U.S. border that he was pointing to when an assassin shot him at a July rally he was holding across the state in Butler. “It’s my favorite piece of paper in the world, I kiss it and take it to bed with me,” Trump continued, adding that he would still feel that way “even if it had bad numbers on it.” Then he went back to the playlist: “Turn on Pavarotti singing ‘Ave Maria.’ Turn it up nice and loud. We want a lot of action.”

Like the obliging Trump DJ, the candidate made it to the end of the stage, gesturing to the audience and at one point yelling to the Gold Star family who had asked him a question earlier in the evening: “This is for their boy — stand up. This is a boy for them.’ And then back to center stage: “Let’s not ask any more questions, let’s just make music — who the hell wants to hear more questions, right?” Trump’s team didn’t immediately get down to the music, however, which gave Trump a chance to spin a few more random topics that popped into his head: the must-win status of Pennsylvania, Bernie Moreno’s candidacy in Ohio, the campaign’s transition from Biden to Harris. The evening’s hapless but sycophantic moderator, South Dakota GOP Gov. Christy Noem, tried to intercede, blandly reverting to MAGA’s trademark slogans: “We’re not going to complain about things, are we? We are going to fix them. We’re going to make America great again.” To this the candidate replied: “The door is open. That’s good. I don’t know who’s trying to get in there, but you know… Isn’t that nice? And it’s not at all like outside, you don’t even have the cost of air conditioning when you have it in this wonderful factory.’

All of this was a prelude to the most infamous segment of the proceedings: Trump silently humming and gesturing to crowd members as his favorite setlist played. The process seemed to have reached its peak Juche when Sinead O’Connor’s cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U” blared in front of a bemused crowd, when a picture behind Trump and Noem read “Trump was right about everything” — an already dubious claim that seemed to diminish by the second . Yet for all the high-profile craziness that overtook what was supposed to be a carefully-rehearsed display of sycophancy from Trump’s swing-state supporters, the most troubling moment came when Noem, disoriented by her sudden transformation from dog stand MAGA in the campaign equivalent of a home health aide, had to guide Trump through this exchange:

NOEM: Well, sir, would you like to play your song and greet a few people?

TRUMP: What song?

NOEM: Well, you said you wanted to finish the song.

TRUMP (DJ behind the stage): Ok Justin, how about some real beauties and we sit back and relax?

To be fair to Trump and Noem, the town hall was interrupted twice before the train wreck phase, as medical personnel tended to pick up rally attendees who had passed out from the heat in the overcrowded and stifling factory where the event was being held. This was the reason why Trump marveled at the breeze that blew into the room as soon as security officers opened the door. But the sight of Trump standing and swaying in place for the final 39 minutes of the event was not exactly clear and competent leadership. Towards the end, he seemed to remind that this is a campaign meeting and reminded the listeners of his playlist that “this is the most important election in the history of our country.” But then the sleepy swaying resumed. The crowd could only wonder what he had to do before his members gradually dispersed and left – a far cry from the mood of motivated voter turnout that the town hall was supposed to evoke.

Oakes’ town hall highlighted a central issue in this election that the national political press has addressed only sporadically: For all the barrages and pressures that commentators and reporters have heaped on incumbent Joe Biden since his debate in June, Donald Trump is unmistakably losing the plot. Last week meandering and unfilled with a sequitur address before the Detroit Economic Club, Trump stood motionless on stage for five minutes before beginning his speech. His infamous rallying speeches are now so laden with impenetrable references and surreal asides that even a staunch normalization New York Times was forced to note that they “again raise the question of age” – of course, without summarizing the result Times‘ epic role in easing this issue over the course of the campaign.

in any case, Times Apparently deciding that his own initial attempt to broach the taboo subject of Trump’s mind was too much, so when the paper covered Trump’s debacle at Ox, it instantly reverted to its impenetrable normalization style, calling the moment a “strange detour” in its headline. After emergency medical care, writes reporter Michael Gold“Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisation, made a detour. Instead of trying to restart a political agenda, he seems to have decided at that point that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned—and, as it turns out, himself—to just listen to the music instead.” At least that’s what Trump’s deplorable situation at the Ox has prompted The Washington Post publish a a rare foray into refreshingly direct Trump reportingunder the headline “Trump rocks and spins for 39 minutes to music in Bizarre Town Hall episode.”

Still, the belatedness of these admissions of Trump’s poor grasp of the real speaks to the elite press’s failure to confront the candidate’s character over the past nine years. After all, Trump’s nomination speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee contained many of the same aporias and fundamental lapses in reasoning that prompted many in this most fervent MAGA crowd to start a conversation and scroll through their smartphones. As I left the venue minutes before the ritual balloon release to deliver the message, a surprised event worker who was smoking outside asked me, “He yet are you talking?” However, the elite press masked this dismal performance with a flurry of headlines claiming that the candidate, spooked by Butler’s assassination attempt, was on the rise a statesman’s call for national unity.

This false elevation of Trump is now commonly referred to as “brainwashing,” an apt characterization that, through its fixation on Trump, belies the media’s own blind investment in a simulacrum of political sanity in the face of acute institutional disunity. The point is that the same establishment press, while turning a blind eye to Trump’s sheer lunacy, perpetrates fantasies of a different rank as commonplace truths: the farce that the Supreme Court is an impartial, depoliticized body of supreme consensus, the deadly fiction that Israel is misunderstood agent of democracy in the Middle East, and the myth that Trump does not actually means what he says when he promotes fascism, racial hatred and campaigns of political revenge. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out what playlist they think they’re listening to.