Thread by @LauraJedeed

I was going to read some grimdark and chill tonight but apparently Donald Trump is doing a rally in Georgia and nothing could be grimmer or darker so let's see if he says anything interesting or if it's the same old shit

Hashtag #TrumpRally

While we wait I'm going back to watch Herschel Walker, Trump's candidate for the United States Senate, give a genuinely incomprehensible speech

I literally have no idea what the fuck he said. The ends of his sentences do not match the beginnings

Here's what I was able to garner: he doesn't understand why people consider him a conservative. He believes we should come together and that the constitution is good. He is qualified for Senate because he loves America, and only people who love America should run for president

Also Mr. Walker is, um, "going to die Jesus Christ's death" which will make for good TV at least

Genuinely one of the most baffling speeches I have ever seen

Herschel Walker's history of physical threats and severe mental illness seems somewhat disqualifying but what the fuck do I know

usatoday.com/story/sports/n…

Between speeches, audio clips hammer the crowd with talking points

A grim voice lists things Republicans should fear: inflation "crippling our familes," insecure borders, "America defeated and embarrassed overseas," freedom under attack, evil values "shoved down our throats"

A Republican at one of these events might tell you the theme is strength: fighting for America, fighting back against the evil Democrats and Chinese and etc.

But the overall message is abject terror. The kind of thing that makes strength seem like the most important thing

(I'm not the first person to note how often the far right presents their fears in highly sexualized ways, but it stands out to me every time, I am once again asking everyone at these rallies to get a Fetlife account and leave the rest of us alone)

Trump seems to have selected the trio of politicians he's endorsing based on how hard they supported his efforts to overturn the 2020 election

So I guess it makes sense that all speeches so far have hammered election fraud

usnews.com/news/politics/…

Christ this shit is exhausting, I'm going to shut up until or unless something interesting and new happens

Pleased to announce Trump has returned to disco as a soundtrack for the waiting crowds instead of the Patton speech

https://twitter.com/LauraJedeed/status/1429245733241335810?s=20

Trump has emerged. Only half an hour late. Weird

Trump is sounding extraordinarily cogent today

I don't mean his points make any sense, I mean his speech seems way more rehearsed and less meandering than his speeches have in years

Aah yes, it's time for the ritual booing of the press covering the event

Press sucks: the only bipartisan position left in America

Trump defending "the riders of the horses" in this picture. Decrying that people "laugh in the faces" of these border patrol maniacs

Trump is doing a thing he did last time as well that's new this year: he singles out someone in the crowd and asks how many rallies they've gone to. Says he's seen them before

The answer is always dozens

Trump groupies, man

BREAKING: Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock is a Marxist, apparently

Very excited to learn this

(Yes there is content, no I'm not going to talk about it right now, so far you've heard it all before)

Trump claims the Democrats are claiming the Republicans are the "number one threat to United States security. Can you believe that?"

Which, given what speakers at this rally have said about the Democrats for the past 2.5 hours, is HILARIOUS

Trump reminds the crowd that he never conceded the 2020 election. Cheers, obviously

Trump reminds the crowd that unlike Hillary Clinton, he never conceded, and that she made a mistake to concede because it's bad and embarrassing to concede

There's a lot to unpack there

Ahahahaha HERE WE GO BABY

Last time Trump got booed for saying he got the vaccine

This time he's just saying the vaccine mandate is bad. In passing, mind you, but still

https://twitter.com/LauraJedeed/status/1429255152247132160?s=20

Donald Trump does the typical thing where he points out veterans in the audience

But now he's calling a lance corporal who was over in Kabul up to the podium to talk. AND HE DOES

Y'all I cannot overemphasize what a violation of DoD directives this is

military.com/benefits/milit…

Law and Order but only when it serves us

It actually makes a lot of sense to NOT allow active duty military take the stage on behalf of a former president who insists the election was stolen and I really hope I don't have to explain why

Oh neat Trump's claiming that the Afghans who managed to get out of Afghanistan and come to America never worked with America and brought over "child brides"

Now we get a litany of sex crimes committed by Afghans

The fear of the other is almost always a very sexual fear

So look, it's early, but so far Trump hasn't really hammered the "stolen election" bullshit

He's mentioned it several times, don't get me wrong, but he's spent much more time focusing on the dangers of immigrants generally and how bad Biden is

Ooh, this is new!

Trump talks about the "Russia hoax" (aka the impeachment). No big deal. He does that all the time

And then he directly mentions January 6th for, to my knowledge, the first time at one of these rallies, and says it's the same kind of hoax from the same people

Republicans have struggled with how the fuck to deal with J6, an event that basically showed what fucking liars they are every time they blabber on about law and order

Putting the incident in the "hoax" box along with Russia and whatever else they don't like is clever

(calling something clever does not constitute endorsement, I hate it)

The audience boos Mitch McConnell

We are about 40 minutes in and Trump has started rambling

What I'm trying to say is that the first 40 minutes of this speech was shockingly tight. Really drives home how exhausting the presidency was for him and/or how hungry he is

This man is absolutely going to run in 2024

"I got impeached twice on fake news!"

He's focusing primarily on the Russia impeachment but keeps slipping these things in. This is how something as absurd as "J6 was just like Russiagate and both were hoaxes" moves from absurdity to seemingly self-evident fact

OK we're talking at length about election conspiracies now

Took about 45 minutes to get here, but we got here

My eyes glaze over

Trump declares that the Arizona audit found that Trump won, not Biden, but that the media lied about it.

"The big lie," he calls it. What the media is doing

Breathtaking

It seems that 96% of mail-order ballots that came in over two days in Arizona were duplicates, per Trump

Astounding

Trump has been reciting numbers for the past 5 minutes or so

The sheer volume of statistics crushes all doubts for the believers. It feels like overwhelming evidence, even though as far as I can tell Trump is just making it up off the top of his head

Trump gestures to the cameras at the back and claims the media is cutting off his speech because they think what he's saying is too dangerous

I am watching this, of course, from my house, on a video stream that has very much not been cut off

(There is a time and a place for shutting people out--the Twitter thing was a good move--but it's worth noting that people like Trump can use perceived censorship for propaganda purposes)

Trump: "We've never had a military retreat before!"

*Laughs in Vietnam*

Trump tells the crowd he might say the f-word later on in this speech and they cheer because this is the fourth grade apparently

I will keep you posted

Sigh

Trump says that 41 legislators from all over the country are demanding forensic analyses in all 50 states and that they recommend decertifying the election

Trump says the AZ election should be decertified

This is their stab-in-the-back myth and we will never be free of it

They're doing the thing where the candidates Trump is endorsing come up and talk about how great Trump is

This is the opposite of how endorsements usually work, but it's definitely the way things work when your party has a charismatic Leader at its core

It seems I've broken the thread

https://twitter.com/LauraJedeed/status/1441922112319492099?s=20

Trump talking about January 6th more, which, again, is very new

He decries the death of Ashley Babbit

He says the J6 insurrectionists are imprisoned in horrible conditions and if we're going to do that we'd better do it to Antifa and BLM, who "Burned Portland"

Trump is attempting to normalize January 6th--to repaint it as an incident in which people were killed and imprisoned unfairly, something either better than or equivalent to the BLM protests

I predict that, before 2024 is upon us, Republicans will call the people who stormed the Capitol patriots

OK, it's finally ending

Nothing new in this speech aside from some innovative Arizona lies and also a big step forward in the J6 normalization efforts. Doubling down, again

I'm going to go read about barbarians and magic now

Have a great night

Epilogue: as YMCA starts playing the camera pans back and you can see how every single Black person in attendence got placed directly behind Trump.

To the left, to the right: the crowd is white as driven snow