Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Waukesha County Expo Center in Wisconsin.
By Jessica Sutherland for Daily Kos
Walter Einenkel contributed to this story.
Daily Kos Staff
It’d be understandable to want to skip right past this story, which explores the bizarre speech Donald Trump gave in Wisconsin on Wednesday night, a rare day off from his criminal election interference trial in Manhattan. The politician Trump has been unavoidable for nine years now, and at every turn, he gets worse.
And Wednesday night was no exception. Hot off nine contempt of court violations and a disastrous Time magazine interview that he surely thought went very well, Trump continues to spiral. But as President Joe Biden begged at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the media must cover the realities of the threat Trump presents, not just the gaffes or the horse race polling. Those on the right side of history must expose the dangers and avoid the cynical amusement that contributed to Trump’s 2016 win. He cannot be ignored. To pay attention to what he’s saying at rallies—and how well it’s received—is a duty voters all share as the fight heats up to defeat him once and for all in November.
Because as awful as he sounds to so many Americans, he sounds wonderful to others. Americans suffering from Trump fatigue ignore him at the peril of themselves, their communities, and the nation. And people cannot fight the enemy they do not know.
“America ain’t so great right now,” Trump told his fawning crowd, insisting the nation is “a laughingstock around the world.” It’s not a new refrain, but it’s a necessary one to ensure his movement’s MAGA acronym—Make America Great Again—makes sense. Voters must believe the nation under Biden, and Barack Obama before him, is in steep decline to believe that Trump is its savior.
That terrifying prospect is what Trump needs to maintain to hold on to his dwindling base, much less grow it: the fear of a dying America that only he can save.
And so he fearmongers vaguely about Bidenomics and in deceptive detail about immigrants, who he insists are terrorists moving into suburban and rural neighborhoods. (“Congratulations,” he offered as a sarcastic aside).
He laments student debt relief while vaguely promising a similar effort. He praises toppling Roe v. Wade while telling his devotees it’s what everyone always wanted and only he gave it to them.
And amid all of it, he still insists the 2020 election was stolen. But perhaps the most telling thing about Trump’s speech isn’t what Trump said, but how people in the crowd responded. They cheered and they booed when Trump expected them to. They clapped and they screamed, they faded to silence and bated breath like orange clockwork. Trumpism is alive and well, folks, and it’s not just treading water—it’s spreading.
And to ignore what this man is saying, six months out? That’s an overcorrection from the mistakes of 2016. And that’s how Trump wins.
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