Thread by @HoarseWisperer

Alright, good people.

I'm going in.

Live-tweeting Trump's rally in Wildwood, New Jersey as broadcast on Fox News.

This will be a rollicking ride down into the political underbelly of my own home state.

Keep me in your prayers.

1/

As a precaution, I have affixed an olde tyme leather football helmet.

While not fully protecting me from the concussive effects of an hour-plus of unfiltered Trumpitude, it nonetheless helps.

2/

While we await this cavalcade of lunacy, allow me to set the stage for those following along.

New Jersey is separated by a vague conceptual line of much dispute. There is a "North Jersey" and a "South Jersey". Never the two shall meet.

Wildwood is decidedly South Jersey.

There are many good people in South Jerz but it is nonetheless true that portions of the state's southern hemisphere have a certain Pennsyltucky quality to them.

Trump is parachuting into one of those areas - and is counting on dimwits from hither and yon trucking in from afar.

The rally was yet another of Trump's quid pro quos.

In exchange for buffoonish popinjay Jeff Van Drew converting from Dem to Repub, the Bloviator in Chief is popping into town in a futile attempt to keep Van Drew in office.

He will lose. Badly. Possibly in the primary.

And here we go.

Trump walks out on stage. He looks remarkably like a man who fell sound asleep in a tanning bed with those little plastic glasses on.

His face is positively pumpkin-esque save for his newborn-piglet-pink eye sockets.

No joke, he looks like he just lifted his face out of the plate at a pumpkin pie eating contest.

It is a remarkable orange. Almost shimmery gold. Like the metallic face paint of a Times Square mime.

He looks like a man with a beta carotene addiction.

Trump opens by citing New Jersey's unemployment rate.

Fun fact: New Jersey elected a progressive Democrat, Phil Murphy, and he has quickly swept in a range of reforms after Chris "Try the Meatloaf" Christie was all but thrown out of the state.

Thanks, Phil!

Trump now bragging about killing Soleimani.

Crowd now on its second chant of U-S-A... which I suspect may be the longest word they can spell.

Apropos of nothing, Trump throws out a reference to "Crazy Bernie Sanders".

Wanders back into bragging about murdering terrorists.

This is already like MAGA slam poetry. Random read meat phrases absent any real meaning.

Like an endless stream of low-intellect fortune cookies.

Trump now alleging he has the best polls since he was elected.

Then, thanks to his deranged cocktail of narcissism and buffoonishness, he accidentally blurts out the truth:

Says he only used to talk about polls when they were good.

(now he just lies about them)

While Trump rambles briefly Jeff Van Drew, let me insert that I am watching this garish spectacle without the benefit of adult beverages.

That compounds my suffering immensely.

Immensely.

Trump introduces Van Drew.

Van Drew steps to the podium and in a weird shrieky yell prompts the crowd to clap for Trump again.

He sounds vaguely like a junior high teacher trying a bit too hard to rev up the pep rally the night before the big game against the Podunkula Raiders.

Van Drew stiffly reads off prepared remarks.

Spoke for all of three minutes.

And now Crazypants is back at the mic and I think we're about to go off script and off the rails.

And... yuuuuup.

Trump calls Warren "Pocahantas" and then, with nary an attempt at connective tissue, pivots to claiming there are over 100,000 people inside and outside the arena.

Then, and I'm laughing here, he admits the arena holds 10,000.

I haven't watched one of these in quite some time and I had almost forgotten how unhinged they are as acts of oration.

They are literally like the drunken mumbles of your racist uncle in the waning minutes before he falls asleep in his recliner.

There is no continuity.

Trump tries to appeal to the locals by throwing out a Jersey reference.

Claims he could sell out "Meadowlands Arena" and suggests he might do it next summer.

Fun fact: Meadowlands Arena has been shuttered for years.

Trump gives a quick shout-out to Chris Christie. Camera pans to a side-angle shot of what appears to be a hostage situation.

Chris Christie looking about as happy as a man queued up for a colonoscopy.

Babyfingers now calls up Kellyanne Conway who quickly appears to allege South Jersey is Trump Country.

Note: Democrats won nine of New Jersey's eleven House districts in 2018.

In 2020, we'll make it ten out of eleven.

Sorry, Kels.

Trump pivots back to awkwardly reading off the prompter while making his trademark insipid "okay" sign with his fingers.

Now rattling off labor statistics.

This doesn't strike me as a math crowd.

While he prattles on randomly about things New Jerseyans don't remotely care about, let me just interject, as a Garden Stater, all of this is quite sad.

Despite being a state with many virtues, MTV's Jersey Shore was nonetheless not altogether unrepresentative of some residents.

Trump now issuing an ominous warning about the Green New Deal.

Says it will lead to cows being gone.

Note: there are no known cattle ranches in shore town of Wildwood, New Jersey.

Well, I guess there never will be now. Sad. Sorry, cows.

Trump moving straight into his bigoted race-baiting shitbag fodder.

Says he put a stop to immigrants "ransacking our communities".

Some woman behind him is smiling like she just learned she's having a baby. I want to smack that dumb smile right off her face. Metaphorically.

The human props behind Trump are all women.

I can see eight faces. As Trump rolls through remarkably racist, anti-immigrant hate speech, six are stone-faced.

The smiling lady would eat the racist peanuts out of his stool. She is downright ebullient.

Trump now telling a story of a murder allegedly committed by an undocumented immigrant.

Fox News interrupts to go to quick comments from guests.

And... whoa... the first guest bluntly says, essentilly. this shit is not working and cost R's a ton of seats in 2018.

Umm... wow.

Fox News just pre-empted him. This is wild.

They're showing picture-in-picture. Trump is waving his arms around in a silent pantomime like a drunk pigeon attempting to achieve liftoff from a park bench.

Meanwhile, panel guests are ignoring him and talking about other things.

Apparently, this was just a brief break to bridge between the 7:00 and 8:00 hours.

And now Tucker Carlson is kicking in...

And they pre-empted him again!

Holy cow. Carlson's opening graphics roll in and then up comes Dopey Opie... and down goes the picture-in-picture of Trump.

They just cut him off. Cut away from his rally.

...all so Carlson can talk about...

...the coronavirus.

Like I said, I haven't watched one of these in a while but back in the day, they would have never cut away from a Trump rally - especially when Trump was poised to be in rare form.

They used to defer to him as the best advocate for Trumpism.

And now they cut away.

More on that later.

Meanwhile, I clicked over to an even worse network, OAN, and am once again being bombarded by the short-fingered vulgarian's crude discourse.

Inexplicably, Mango Mussolini alleges Republicans are lowering drug prices while Democrats are raising them.

Does he think we're running rival drug stores?

Is this like a CVS vs. Walgreen's thing?

Babyfingers now randomly talking about a program which may exist in some form but he has clearly largely imagined in his mind.

Claims people are coming from around the world because they're sick but had to go home and die until he made it possible for them to be test subjects.

So, essentially, as Trump understands programs to accelerate clinical trialing, sick foreigners are much like lab rats who have now been graced with the opportunity to be test subjects for American pharmaceutical companies.

This guy can make even normal things evil somehow.

The lady in the MAGA hat is the happy racist.

She’s the zealot in the background prop crowd.

The three women around her look like they have already lost interest and wonder why they came.

Trump now talking about how he is solving things left and right - including some things he didn't even tell people he was solving!

You know what's coming...

SPACE FORCE!

Drink. For both of us, drink. I remind you that I am without beverages.

His face seems to somehow be getting even more orange with an angry redness surfacing below the dayglo tan.

His blood pressure must be astronomical.

His palms, meanwhile, are the color of bologna.

And we just had our first "Sir... Thank you, sir..." mythical story of a man who "came up to him" to thank him for making his wife respect him again thanks to his... I don't know... 401k or something.

Needless to say, people don't randomly approach a president for chats. He doesn't work at a fucking Panera.

Where does he imagine we are to believe these myriad mythical encounters take place?

Trump: "There are a lot of bad people in the swamp."

(waits for crowd cheer)

And then, the crowd struggles to get a "Drain the swamp" cheer going. Can't get in sync.

My lord, that was like watching an extremely white crowd try to clap on beat at an Earth Wind and Fire concert.

"Our second amendment is under siege! In Virginia, they want to take your guns away."

Why would people in New Jersey have guns in Virginia?

That was a trick question. They wouldn't... but many of the illegal guns in New Jersey actually come from Virginia.

Take 'em away, VA.

Trump now revving up for what feels like it is supposed to be the crescendo.

Rattling off couplets of alliterative town names... From Paramus to Pennington... from Trenton to Toms River.

Reading off the prompter.

How does anyone enjoy this insipid hokum?

Taking back our country. Yadda yadda.

Crowd behind him now randomly looking around like an audience at an elementary school graduation that has already sat through the Star Spangled Banner on flutaphone and now just wants to hear their kids' names so they can go home.

And just like that, Trump brings it in for a landing with his canned "Make America Strong Again... Make America Great Again..." blah blah blah.

And he is done.

And the Rolling Stones "Can't Always Get What You Want" kicks on. It is unintentionally fitting.

Before I adjourn this hasty type-fest, let me just close with a couple notes that might matter in some way.

I sat through a lot of these early on. While I mocked them, I also took in what was happening, how it felt, and what that meant.

They're informative in their own way.

They provide a window into how Trump is doing to some degree... and they provide a window into the emotional temperature of his most loyal base.

I will never forget the one he held in Alabama around the time of their special election.

It was downright alarming. Rabid.

You could feel the crowd's hate-filled hunger for venom. It crackled in the air. It was palpable. It felt like the precursor to terrible things.

They have grown so much more tepid over time. They have lost their rabid energy. They have lost their electric hostility...

Back then, they felt like windows into incitement. Dangerous walks closer to violence. There was a toxic mutual consumption. Trump feeding an angry crowd. Them feeding his bottomless need for adoration.

This one felt performative. Disconnected in a way.

Part of that is because, as, rather ironically, the Fox News guest said, this is all just the same old shtick.

The guest was right. This could have been any of his same old speeches from two years ago.

There is nothing new. It is just a flavorless reheat of an old dish.

And the crowd, at least judging from the looks on the faces of the people behind him, seemed more like curiosity seekers there to see someone famous up close more than rabid believers in the rising despot.

I can't describe it but the balloon has lost some air. A lot of air.

I used to come out of these thinking "Jesus, we have a major problem on our hands."

And tonight's parting sensation is more "He is losing his power to energize and incite."

Even his most baiting lines drew applause but not raw energy per se.

Alright, I need to wrap this up.

Thanks for following along.

Hope you had a beverage or six while reading. I am envious at having been unable to join.

On the other hand, if you want to throw a beer in my tip jar via the links in my bio, I'll both be in your debt and love you.

That wasn't so bad.

And that's the first time I've been able to say that after one of these.

The master of ceremonies hasn't changed but the crowd seems to be less wowed by the circus.

That's a good thing.