October 11, 2024 11:17 AM UTC

What to Expect as the Donald Trump Nonsense Tour Lands in Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump descends upon the Gaylord Resort in [squints] Aurora today to air his rambling list of grievances and explain why everyone in Colorado has been killed by Venezuelan gangs.

And Aurora taxpayers get to pay for it (the reimbursement check will undoubtedly not be in the mail).

If you’re planning on joining the MAGA cultists at the Gaylord or just curious to hear what Trump has to say (he is scheduled to take the stage at 1:00), we thought it might be helpful to give you an idea of what to expect from The Big Orange Guy today. As numerous media outlets have been reporting in recent weeks, Trump’s speechifying has somehow become even more bizarre in the last couple of months.

Just this week, David Bauder of The Associated Press examined the conundrum for journalists in covering Trump:

Are reporters “sanewashing” Trump, or are they succumbing to the “banality of crazy?” Should his rallies be aired at length, or not at all? To fact-check or not fact-check?

“If it wasn’t so serious, I would just be fascinated by all of it,” said Parker Molloy, media critic and author of The Present Age column on Substack. “If it didn’t have to do with who is going to be president, I would watch this and marvel at how difficult it is to cover one person who seems to challenge all of the rules of journalism.”…

…Most issues stem from Trump’s disdain for constraints, his willingness to say the outrageous and provably untrue, and for his fans to believe him instead of those reporting on him.

It has even come full circle, where some experts now think the best way to cover him is to give people a greater opportunity to hear what he says — the opposite of what was once conventional wisdom. [Pols emphasis]

The New York Times has long been prone to “sanewashing” Trump’s rhetoric, but even The Old Gray Lady has recently shifted course:

Former President Donald J. Trump vividly recounted how the audience at his climactic debate with Vice President Kamala Harris was on his side. Except that there was no audience. The debate was held in an empty hall. No one “went crazy,” as Mr. Trump put it, because no one was there.

Anyone can misremember, of course. But the debate had been just a week earlier and a fairly memorable moment. And it was hardly the only time Mr. Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately. In fact, it happens so often these days that it no longer even generates much attention. [Pols emphasis]

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

Trump, 78, is the oldest major party nominee for President in U.S. history; Trump would also be the oldest President America has ever seen if he wins in November and completes another full term (he would be 82 in 2028). As the Times reports, Trump’s babbling in 2024 is much different than it has been in the past:

A review of Mr. Trump’s rallies, interviews, statements and social media posts finds signs of change since he first took the political stage in 2015. He has always been discursive and has often been untethered to truth, but with the passage of time his speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past.

According to a computer analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump’s rally speeches now last an average of 82 minutes, compared with 45 minutes in 2016. Proportionately, he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like “always” and “never” than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, explained these findings further in a recent appearance on MSNBC; Trump, he explained, is speaking “at a fourth-grade level”:

BAKER: If you listen to what he’s saying, which is what I did for the story — go back and watch rally after rally, speech after speech — especially going back 10 years, you really see a whole different way of communicating…

…He uses much more ‘all or nothing’ language. [He] uses more negative words than positive words. He’s speaking twice as long as he did when he first got on the stage eight years ago, nine years ago. His rallies — he’s doing fewer of them; only about one-fourth as many as in 2016. And he’s using a lot more profanity.

That last finding — Trump is using profanity 69% more often these days — is often a sign of what experts call “disinhibition,” which is often a sign of age-related mental deterioration.

Trump has never had a problem with spewing a multitude of falsehoods, but his lies have become more brazen and detached from any plausible explanation. As Kathleen Parker writes today for The Washington Post:

As a rule, I’m not one to use the words “lie,” “lying” or “liar.” Their power to destroy someone’s reputation is too great for comfort. But Trump has forced many of us…to abandon the soft-pedaling etiquette of euphemism and to say what is factual. Lying, for Trump, is so reflexive that he needn’t bestir his fourth-grade vocabulary to seize headlines and malign those he finds inconvenient to his purposes. [Pols emphasis]

In a separate column for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank took a deep dive into the last week of Trump’s nonsensical barnstorming tour. The rabbit hole is long and dark.

In Butler, Pennsylvania:

Trump falsely claimed that there are “over 13,000 illegal alien convicted murderers roaming free in our country … that were released from jail from all over the world,” particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Illegal immigrants, he said, “have equipment that our military doesn’t have” and are “taking over apartment buildings” in Colorado. It’s all part of a “mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers and thugs.” He told the audience that if “this crazy, incompetent” Harris wins, “this same group is going to meet in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’ll be much safer than your particular state.”

He proposed the ludicrous idea that public schools are changing children’s genders. “Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a ‘he’ and comes back as a ‘she.’ And they do this, and they do it, and often without parental consent.”

The unrelenting downpour of fabrications posed a catastrophic threat to one’s sanity — and yet, Trump’s storm was also completely unorganized.

In Juneau, Wisconsin:

He rattles off fabrications so quickly there is little time to absorb them: Among them, he proclaims that former German chancellor Angela Merkel “was thrown out after about a year.” (She served for 16 years.)

Trump says he arranged for Elon Musk to send “big doses” of his satellite internet service, Starlink, to North Carolina, even though “I don’t know what the hell it is.” He says journalists “hate our country” and Harris is a “dummy” who will “permanently erase” borders and raise taxes “by 78 percent or something.” He vows to take “the horrible people that we’re allowing into our country,” and “shove ’em right down their throat” of the countries they came from. While he’s at it, he also complains that a fly is bothering him, “a very aggressive sucker.” [Pols emphasis]

In an interview with Ben Shapiro:

Interviewed by Ben Shapiro, Trump says that both Biden and Harris should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment, but he draws a blank on the line of succession: “Who’s third in line?”

(In fairness, we don’t want to acknowledge that House Speaker Mike Johnson is that close to the Oval Office, either). 

In Scranton, Pennsylvania:

Trump expands on his FEMA fabrications, saying the agency has “no money” because “they gave the money to illegal immigrants coming in, many of whom are killers.”

He gives the crowd his views on wind energy: “Wind is bulls—.” He says people won’t be able to watch TV when “the windmills aren’t wind.” The creator of that perplexing comment also gives his thoughts on Sunny Hostin, a host of ABC’s “The View,” who interviewed Harris: “I’m sorry, women. She’s a dummy.”

Trump plays a video mocking “the very woke military that we have now.” It juxtaposes clips from “Full Metal Jacket” with scenes of drag queens.

And finally, on Thursday:

He then goes to Detroit and tells a meeting of business executives that “your car industry is going out of business” and that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”

Inspiring stuff!

After visiting Colorado today — a state Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden by 14 points in 2020 — Trump will immediately fly off to Coachella, California. As NBC News reports, Trump is also planning a stop in New York.

In case you were wondering if you might have missed some late development in voter registration changes, fear not: Trump has no chance of carrying any of these states in November. Answering why Trump is making stops in Blue states with less than a month left in the 2024 election is a question that is as elusive as the rest of his rhetoric.

You can click here if you’re interested in watching the livestream of Trumpalooza in Aurora and hearing about how Colorado is now the Venezuela of the north. Alternatively, you can get the same general effect by sticking your head in a toilet and asking a friend to bang on the side of the tank with a broom handle.

Either way, it will all be over soon.