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Last week, the Washington Post wrote about why so many of the people that wait in line for hours to get into Donald Trump’s political rallies wind up leaving before they’re over. The answers are not necessarily surprising. Trump often takes the stage more than an hour late, and in his current state of diminishment his speeches are mostly a matter of him maundering, salty and glum and increasingly damp, through a free-associative list of half-remembered cable news gripes. Some of the people the Post spoke to left because they were sick of “the insults,” which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat. But most left because they had other things that they needed to do, and couldn’t really justify not doing those things because they needed to finish watching a gleaming septuagenarian oaf get halfway through saying the 14 words and then laze off onto a tangent about “my good friend Beetlejuice.”
One obvious fix for this issue, which clearly bothers Trump a great deal, would be to make his rally speeches shorter. There are some complicating factors, there—Trump’s characteristic inability to do less or be quiet; his desire to demonstrate vigor and stamina by standing onstage and saying “millions and billions” in increasingly agitated ways for two hours; the fact that he doesn’t really have anywhere else to be. But Trump is also not wrong in saying, as an unnamed associate told the Post, that “they want a show. They want two hours.” Those crowds may not want what Trump is putting down, which is two hours of drowsy authoritarianism and dusty celebrity gripes paced like a sleep apnea episode, but they are not there to consider the fine points of policy. They are there to be entertained. There are good reasons to question both their choice of entertainment (lurid genocidal fantasies powered by odious and ancient bigotries and cable news) and entertainer (a prissy old golf creature who’d kill a million strangers to get wished happy birthday on Entertainment Tonight), but there’s no reason to overthink it.
Maybe the issue is that Trump is no longer much of a showman. He doesn’t really make jokes anymore and long ago stopped talking about anything but himself or whatever bit of pogrom-incitement is currently running on the channels he watches; it might be that the little Trumps who line up and stand around to watch the big one just get bored once they realize that they’re no longer a part of any story he’s likely to tell. Trump has a performer’s instinct for when something is not working, but he can also only ever do more of the one or two things he knows how to do. If the show is going to get any better, in short, it is not going to be because of anything he does, and so it might help to bring in some charismatic guest stars. A performer who can say all the vile shit that Trump says—there is no reason to mess with what works, there—but maybe in a more unsettling way, and if possible in an unplaceable accent and with the sort of pacing that suggests someone who is about to be hospitalized with a case of the hiccups. But where would the campaign find such a performer?
There is something kind of funny about Elon Musk and his fellow members of Silicon Valley’s defective alpha cohort investing heavily in Trump at what now seems like his absolute peak, although it won’t really be easy to laugh about it for some time. But there is something extremely funny about the idea of Musk, who is undeniably very rich and famous but also a world-historically wack and charmless individual, hyping up a crowd of foot-sore and increasingly bored small-business fascists standing around in a field. It is a testament to the awful movement that Trump has built that it can enfold both the least-trusted car dealers in every American county and 53-year-old tech reactionaries who use the word “based” as an adjective, but it does not really seem like a good idea to have them hang out.
But at some point delivering “a show” is a value-neutral endeavor. If you’re Trump, you might want to bring out a guest star, but you would not really know what to do with them. You might understand that you need to bring someone recognizable up onto the stage, but you surely don’t really care what that person does once they get up there beyond saying some stuff about you. You wouldn’t really remember or even really hear anything they said except for those parts.
Although I guess there are certain things you might not want your guest to do. You wouldn’t want them to distract from what you’re doing, for starters.
Like you’d expect them to understand their role and be content with playing it, and ideally be capable of doing it in a way that the crowd might connect with.
And if your guest is a really rich and powerful person, you’d want to make it so that your guest’s mastery and your own seemed to mirror each other. Not in an aspirational way—the crowd is not supposed to think that they could become either of you—but in a way that creates a sort of surface in which the audience might see themselves reflected. The idea would be to give the sense that these powerful men, while they may be hard and even cruel, will take care of everything for you—kill your neighbors, cut your taxes, whatever you’re into—in exchange for your loyalty. The impression created from seeing other powerful people onstage with you should be one of unified command—a blank edifice of power behind which the crowd could safely gather, provided they are willing to pay the price of admission.
But failing that you’d at least hope that your extremely rich and powerful guest wouldn’t jump around behind you with his tummy hanging out while you’re talking. Ideally you’d want your rich and powerful guest not to act like a weird child, because it would tend to undermine the sense you were trying to convey of how powerful you both are, and how much fun the audience might have serving and serving and serving such impressive people for the rest of their seething, scrambling little lives. But the show has got to go on either way.
