TRUMP's RALLY: The Art of the Flop

Donald Trump craves any number of things – power and money being the two that first spring to mind. However, there is something that he craves even more than those. And that’s attention. He absolutely and utterly yearns to be in the limelight. His whole career before occupying the presidency was based on brash publicity stunts and being part of New York’s high-profile celebrity scene.

Trump needs the continual affirmation of others like the rest of us need oxygen to breathe. It’s what defines him and, with no surprise at all, despite his pre-office claim that he could be “very presidential if needs be”, he has brought that attention fixation into the White House. The dignity and sobriety of the highest office in the land now lies in tatters.

Trump’s tenure as president has been a ghastly, non-stop circus of hatred and incompetence, gelled together with that continual need for approval from his nauseating “base.” Which is why Trump has continued with his Klan-inspired hate-fests, better known as his rallies, since assuming office.

Prior to the pandemic, his faithful would pour into stadiums around the country, or at least parts of the country, and let their bronzer-drenched hero lap up their adoration. Then all the rally “fun” had to abruptly stop as the Coronavirus burst forth. Trump, deprived of his rallies, switched to attempts to give regular briefings on the Coronavirus in the White House so as to stay in the limelight. And true to the fact that everything Donald Trump touches turns to dust, those quickly descended into alarming farce such as the suggestion of possibly ingesting bleach to tackle the Coronavirus. Genius.

Then come Saturday just gone, Team-Trump had their first rally in months, in Tulsa, Oklahoma – a glaring display of racial tone-deafness given the history of that particular city. On top of that, health experts, doctors and scientists all advised of the risks of so many people in such a confined space.

Couple that with Trump’s disdain for wearing a mask and Mike Pence’s reckless declaration a few days prior that the pandemic was slowing down and the media had “hyped” the severity of the virus, and you had a potentially dangerous if not deadly situation (110,000 Americans have now died of Coronavirus and over half the states of the union are reporting increases in cases).

Naturally, Trump being the attention seeking blowhard that he is, he predicted that a million people would try and obtain a ticket for the rally. An over-spill venue was set up for what was predicted to be the surge of rally-goers. But then it went wrong for Donnie, so very wrong.

His Tulsa Klan rally, with thousands of empty seats inside the arena, was an abject failure. Just over 6,000 people turned up in an arena that can hold up to 19,000. Reports are that Trump was both stunned and left fuming that his unpopularity was being shown to all the world in the most visual fashion. He’s always banked on his rallies as being the best way to get the affirmation of others he so badly needs. But not this time. Not by a long stretch.

To add insult to MAGA injury, with his tail firmly between his legs, Trump has now forever been captured forlornly trudging back to the White House from Marine One after coming back from Tulsa. Clutching at a MAGA hat, his trademark red tie is slumped around his open collar shirt, his orange fake tan is worse than ever, and Trump cuts a broken figure lost in thought. Not lost in thought about America’s huge race issues, police brutality or the Coronavirus pandemic. Absolutely not. He was troubled by the fact that his precious little hate-fest was so poorly attended.

Trump does not care one tiny jot about regular Americans. He only cares for himself. Trump’s star is though now really starting to fade. The American people are sick to the back teeth of his race-baiting, narcissism and xenophobia. Still he holds his royal court of lickspittle loyalists, all tripping over themselves to stay in their monarch’s good books. Vice-president Pence and Attorney General Barr have taken their boot-licking of Trump to tragic new lows – all at the expense of the American people. Pence is spewing lie after lie about the pandemic, while Barr is perverting the Department of Justice in an effort to make it serve the will and whims of Trump. All of this is an afront to the American people and American democracy.

Time is running out for Trump. November is inching closer and his polling numbers are starting to crater. Unemployment is at rates not seen since the Great Depression and the Coronavirus, which he has handled so dismally, is not going away any time soon. Trump, the great showman, needs now to put pen to paper and let us have The Art of the Flop. Now that would be a best-seller for the worst president this country will ever have.