New York Times, May 11, 2018
Headline:The Post-Campaign Campaign of Donald Trump
Byline: Charles Homans
It was in the last half-hour of Donald Trump’s speech in Moon Township, Pa., that a sense of what exactly it was that I was watching — what I and everyone else had been watching throughout Trump’s presidency to that point — finally clicked into place with startling clarity.
Onstage, Trump seemed to intermittently remember the tax cuts and the booming economy, and even more intermittently that he was supposed to be promoting the candidate, whom he had reportedly derided in private as “weak.” But he mostly did what he usually does at his rallies: recite the latest verse of the ballad of Donald Trump, the president who would be doing great things for the people in this room were it not for his many antagonists.
“I’m very presidential!” Trump told us, with mock indignation. Then he stiffened in his suit and adopted a stentorian tone, like a fourth grader doing an impression of his school principal. “Laaaadies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “thank you for being here tonight. Rick Saccone [a Republican Congressional candidate who later lost the election] will be a great, great congressman. He will help me very much. He’s a fine man, and Yong is a wonderful wife. I just want to tell you on behalf of the United States of America that we appreciate your service. And to all of the military out there, we respect you very much. Thank you. Thank you.” He broke character for a second: “And then you go, ‘God bless you, and God bless the United States of America, thank you very much.’ ” He turned and faced the V.I.P. guests in the riser behind him, and did a sort of rigid penguin walk.
The crowd whooped and laughed — not the cruel laughter you come to know at Trump rallies but real belly laughter, for what was a genuinely funny bit. Trump, who loves nothing more than being loved, kept penguin-walking, and everyone kept laughing. It took a few more seconds for the spectacular strangeness of the moment to settle in: We were watching a sitting American president imitating an American president.
Except now, he wasn’t. Watching Trump step into the archetype momentarily and then just as quickly step out, it hit me: Even in Trump’s mind, that president was someone else, somewhere else. It was as if I were sitting on a commercial flight, at cruising altitude, when the pilot suddenly plopped down in the next seat, commiserated about the tarmac delays and poor in-flight service, then popped an Ambien and went to sleep.
There is a widely held theory that Donald Trump did not, and maybe still does not, really want to be president. Whether or not this is true, what can be ventured with greater certainty is that no candidate has ever delighted as visibly as Trump did in campaigning to be president, and that his having been elected was the period at the end of a sentence that he would happily have let run on forever. For Trump, the campaign trail was a place of self-actualization. On the stage was where he seemed most himself — so much so that, not even a full day after his election, the president-elect mused to his staff about the possibility of another series of rallies.
After taking a few weeks in January and February to be inaugurated and acquaint himself with the business of running the country, Trump held another rally. He has been holding them regularly ever since, sometimes as often as twice a month.
The spectrum of people at these rallies was not appreciably different from the spectrum at Trump’s actual campaign rallies, which was itself fairly representative of the broader rallygoing Republican electorate in 2016 — and interviewing people at campaign events, as every reporter believes secretly but is not allowed to admit, is almost always a waste of time for everyone involved in the exchange, like asking Mets fans at a Mets game why they like the Mets.
These rallies rarely produced news, and what news they produced was usually limited to something Trump said, which meant you could just as easily cover it from the comfort of your own couch, thanks to the handful of live-broadcasting TV crews that was always packed onto a riser in the back of the venue. These people served double duty as a hate totem for the events, the most reliable targets for ritual humiliation from the stage.
But there was something about these rallies that you couldn’t see from your couch. I have never interviewed Trump, but people I know who have often remark on an uncanny element of the experience: the absence of any indication of an off-limits private self distinct from his public image.
The tens of thousands of people who came to see him speak at campaign events might have numbered well below the millions who had watched him on TV, but the sheer physical fact of them — he would talk endlessly at his rallies about the lines trying to get inside the building, the poor put-upon fire marshals who had to deliver the bad news — seemed to entrance him. During the general election, Trump once called a reporter I know excitedly from the air as he descended to an event, and told him to turn on cable news; he was looking down at the rally and marveling at the size of the crowd.
From the first, the postelection rallies were bemoaned as, at best, a waste of presidential time, but this missed their peculiar intimacy. To feel as if you were witnessing something essential and true about Barack Obama, you would have had to see him alone in his study late at night. To witness the same of Trump, you have to stand among thousands gathered to see him — and see him seeing you seeing him.
“You!” Trump said, pointing to a man in the crowd. “I just saw him on television — he said: ‘I love Trump! Let Trump do what he has to do!’ ”
“Come here — let him up, I’m not worried about him,” he said as the man made his way to the stage. “Hop over the fence! He can do it — look, this guy’s in great shape. This guy is great — don’t worry about him.”
The man’s name, it would later be ascertained, was Gene Huber. He was a car salesman from Boynton Beach, very tan, with a close-cropped corona of graying hair, in good shape just as the president said, wearing a commemorative T-shirt from Trump’s inauguration featuring the same presidential seal as the lectern behind which he now embraced Trump in a bear hug. “This guy! He’s been all over television, saying the best things,” Trump said. “Say a couple words.”
“Mr. President, thank you, sir!” Huber said, slightly wild-eyed with adrenaline, looking not at Trump but at the cameras. “We the people, our movement, is the reason why our president of the United States is standing in front of us today. When President Trump, during the election, promised all these things he was going to do for us, I knew he was going to do this for us.”
Huber yielded the microphone and exited the stage. “A star is born, a star is born,” Trump said. “I wouldn’t say that Secret Service was thrilled with that, but we know our people, right? We know our people. A great guy — and so many others, I see some others, they’re being interviewed. The media will give them no credit.” He shook his head at the treatment of this man, who had been rendered real to Trump by his appearance on television, whom the media would diligently and regularly interview henceforth, when they recognized him at the subsequent rallies that Huber religiously attended after quitting his car business post-Melbourne to dedicate himself full time to supporting the president, a cardboard cutout of whom, Huber told CNN, he kept at home and saluted every day.
Like Trump himself, Huber was now famous for being famous, and in June reporters found him camped out in line the night before Trump’s rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wearing a T-shirt printed with a photograph of himself hugging Trump on the stage in Melbourne, beneath the words WE THE PEOPLE.
The texture of this was familiar to anyone who watched Trump during the campaign. The conventional speech was there, nominally, a formal structure around which Trump improvised, embroidering it with anecdotes that may or may not have happened, turning over parts of the speech in the light and opening up the back end of it to show the audience, to let them in on the secrets, to convey a sense that he was leveling with the people who had the good sense to be there at that moment, offering a sensation of truth if not always the complete thing. It was fun to listen to, because Trump — and this is still perhaps the most incredible thing about his candidacy, in retrospect — was somehow the first politician in however many decades of modern American political oratory to capitalize on the fact that nobody likes listening to modern American political oratory.
There was also a dissonance to these speeches, however, now that Trump had settled into his presidency. Before the election, his subversion of the forms of American politics served to underscore the basic argument of his campaign, which was that America’s problems could be solved easily if you overthrew the country’s governing class, with all their idiocies of convention. But Trump and his voters had done exactly that, and America’s problems had not instantly disappeared. One of Trump’s more reliable impulses is evading responsibility, and he spent much of these speeches herding together the scapegoats — the media, the recalcitrant Democrats, the F.B.I., the system — who might account for his situation, without appearing to realize that he was drawing the self-portrait of a man who had wanted power but gotten authority instead.
Sometimes, watching Trump at the rallies, I would wonder idly what quotations from these events would look like etched into granite on some plaque or building like other presidents’ speeches. (YOU ARE THE MOVEMENT. I AM THE MESSENGER. I AM JUST REALLY THE MESSENGER — ALTHOUGH I’VE BEEN A VERY GOOD MESSENGER, LET’S FACE IT, RIGHT? I’VE BEEN A PRETTY GOOD MESSENGER.)
We’re used to presidents delivering speeches in front of an audience, but rarely really to it. It is the speech, not the speaking of it, that is the point; its true audience is not the people in the room, but the country, or the world, or history. These speeches operate in the shadow of proper nouns: the Military-Industrial Complex Speech, the Berlin Speech, the Malaise Speech. Do you remember that Ronald Reagan delivered his Evil Empire Speech to a convention of evangelicals at the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando, Fla.? Of course not. He wasn’t speaking to them; he was speaking to history.
Trump does not speak to history except in extremely rare cases, like his Inaugural Address or his State of the Union address, in which circumstances absolutely, nonnegotiably force him to do so. Otherwise he is always speaking to a proximate audience; unlike other presidents, the speaking, not the speech, is the point. The words would make little sense without their immediate social context. To be a member of his audience is to feel valued, part of an intimate and privileged “you” defined in relation to some broader population: Gene Huber’s “we the people” rather than the Constitution’s.
You feel flattered, in spite of yourself. Trump is so at ease on the stage that you momentarily forget what a hermetic figure he is, how odd his few direct interactions with his constituents, as president, have been: his incongruous congratulations to rescue workers after Hurricane Harvey (“We love you. You are special. What a crowd. What a turnout”), his calls to wounded survivors of the Parkland school shooting in their hospital beds.
“Do you like me?” he asked us in the airplane hangar in Moon. The crowd did like him, and cheered. “I like you, too,” he said. “I love you! I love you! So — is there any more fun than at a Trump rally? You know, a lot of times, I have to do, like, readings — we’ll pass an environmental bill, they’ll want me to go to a — I’m very spoiled, if I go to a small place, and they have 2,000 people, it’s like, why don’t we open a stadium or something? We’re spoiled. Other guys, they go out, they get 50 people, they’re satisfied. We. Need. Crowds. Like. This.
They’re [the media] never going to cover — they never show the crowds. They never like to show the crowds, ever! The only thing is the noise. You can’t imitate — it sounds like a Penn State football game. It sounds like an Ohio State football game! I’ll say to friends, ‘Did you see my speech last night?’ ‘Yes.’ I have to say it: ‘How good was I? How good?’ And they say, ‘Good.’ I say, ‘Did they show the crowd?’ ‘No they didn’t. But you know what, I could tell by the noise, that crowd was really big.’ You can’t hide that. You can’t hide that.”
I was there, and I can report that yes, the crowd was really big. You couldn’t hide that.
Questions: Has Donald Trump re-defined what it means to be President of the United States? Describe the new Presidential style. Are there strengths to this style that Matthew Glassman (“Trump is a dangerously weak President”) overlooks.