Source: Tedglick.com

Photo by Marie Kanger Born/Shutterstock.com

I watched Mafioso Don’s speech last evening for an hour and a half. I don’t think I’ve ever watched one of his speeches live from the beginning to almost the end, but I did last night.

The stakes are high, and it felt like I should see for myself how this miserable excuse for a human being was going to make his re-election argument.

A huge part of his plan, of course, was to pack the Tulsa arena to overflowing, 22,000 inside and 40,000 in an overflow area. That part failed miserably. No overflow crowd, and no packed arena. Trump was reduced to pretending, lying, that “bad guy” protesters outside had prevented people from coming in.

It was a big come-down for Dastardly Don.

But he soldiered on. And by “soldiered” I mean that he spent a quarter or more of his speech adlibbing–forgetting the teleprompter–about his Commander-in-Chief speech at West Point a week or so ago. But even there, what did he talk about? Not the content of his speech, which he claimed went over spectacularly with the troops, of course, but instead, amazingly, astoundingly, a presentation about all that he had to endure up there with the West Point generals:  the sun in his eyes, the heat, having to salute “600 times,” but most of all, the way in which the “fake news media” fixated on how weak he looked walking down a short ramp from the stage to the ground. Trump went on and on about how, because he had “leather shoes,” and because the ramp was like “an ice skating rink,” he had to be very careful, with little steps, telling the general next to him who had the right kind of shoes that he should be ready in case Trump slipped.

If Trump was a stand-up comic instead of a President, this trivial, self-pitying story might become known as one of the best, long, stand-up comic routines of the year.

For much of the rest of his speech it was the usual racism, lies, distortions of the truth, attacking AOC and Ilhan Omar, calling out “Sleepy Joe Biden” as a tool of the “radical left,” claiming that he has been the best President ever, promising that next year the economy will come roaring back and be the best ever, etc., etc., etc.

He also called for a decrease in testing for COVID-19, no lie, implying that the relentless, agonizing growth of new cases made him look bad.

I’ll be surprised if Trump gets much of a boost in the polls after this speech. If he does, it’ll be a bad sign. If he doesn’t, we can expect him and the Republicans to become more desperate and more ridiculous with their lies and distractions, and maybe with more repressive actions to justify his militaristic, macho, law-and-order rhetoric.

Ridicule and satire. That’s a key part of how we should take down this dangerous, pathologically-lying jerk. Donald Trump is a hideous clown.

Ted Glick is the author of the just published Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left’s Resistance to the Vietnam War. Past writings and other information can be found at https://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jtglick.

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