A Closing Statement

They're saying the loud part out loud.

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“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

—Voltaire

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Has someone tried turning America off and on again?

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, his third presidential campaign has been making its closing argument through a grim slurry of slurs, threats, and lazy bigotry. But the broader enterprise seems exhausted. His campaign surrogates and cable news allies have gone out of their way to talk about his unprecedented stamina and energy, even and especially when his public appearances have become increasingly melatonin-scented. The peevish former president will appear onstage—sometimes gleaming and geeked-up, sometimes dour and flat—and pivot disconcertingly from side to side before horking up some undigested chunk of reactionary cable news gristle for longer than anyone expects or quite wants. Sometimes you might see something else, like the richest man in the world capering around behind Trump like a weird child who snorts lines of Pixie Sticks. Sometimes you’ll see the janky descent of a bedazzled man in real-time, like Trump standing on stage with a faraway look on his face and saying “Let’s make it into a music,” then sway and grimace for 40 minutes while various bombastic songs shuffle over the PA system. No one knows what to do about this, but they know they can only say that it owns and that it is very normal.

The rally on Sunday was nominally about Trump. But as is the case with this circa-now Amphetamized Influencer Era of conservative politics, it wound up as a carnival of grievance. There were disgraced ex-mayors and disgraced ex-wrestlers and disgraced TV psychiatrists and Trump’s weedy sniffling adult sons and Tucker Carlson and various crackhead-energy kooks and replacement-level sadists and aspiring genocidaires aiming to free-ride into power by hiding their hideous chittering anti-charisma behind Trump’s luxurious bulk.

Generally, this is a lineup of awful personalities that would be standing outside of Madison Square Garden yelling at strangers who are trying to get inside Madison Square Garden. But there was something uncanny about this specific performance of apocalyptic Americana, the ways that all these individuated and bespoke grievances have warped the people getting up there, one after another, to express and embody them. They looked and sounded wrong, unnatural. They had stilted deliveries. They were shiny or dusty or poreless. They leered and cackled and boomed. They whistled like teapots full of boiling vinegar when they referred to Kamala Harris as a “Samoan-Malaysian” with a “low IQ” or when they plunged into bizarre rants about how she is “the antichrist” and has “pimp handlers.” The richest man in the world returned to chant “USA” to a crown of adult Republicans, giving the exact effect as jingling a bunch of keys in front of a baby, except he pronounces USA like he’s Canadian. His face was melting like a candle, there was something wrong with his voice, and he nearly said “hawk tuah.”

The whole thing was a frothing mess of bottomfeeders airing their deranged desires to watch Trump hurt and humiliate the institutions and people they wanted to see hurt and humiliated. But the most memorable moment of this rally came from a shitty standup comic who, I assume, appeals to your flat-brim hometown friends who have to blow into a breathalyzer to start their car. Tony Hinchcliffe made headlines with a tired joke about how Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage. But this is something like his usual routine, just with various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities swapped in as punchlines for, like, Tom Brady or whoever. It’s a lame hack move for a stand-up comic to open at any political rally, and they lose some of their comedic license when their zingers are delivered behind a Trump 2024 podium. Tony Heathcliff was either too idiotic to recognize this, or he is just cynically cashing in on the publicity because he’s an untalented grifter who panders to anti-woke midwits. Accidentally tanking the election for Trump in the eleventh hour could be the funniest thing he has ever done, which would also make him overdue for a mediocre Netflix special.

Tony Heathbar fans are now throwing themselves from the second story of Fuddruckers like stockbrokers at the start of the Great Depression. His set was full of lousy jokes, but they were not fundamentally different in form or content than Trump’s own material. They punched down in all the directions that MAGA acolytes have been trained to cheer for, but without the insulation provided by Trump’s gold-plated impunity. The gags landed on the dais all cringey and inert and exposed. It’s not that the bigotry itself was offputting; the crowd would thrill to different versions of the exact same hazy prejudice from other speakers over the next several hours. But that the person offering it has a weasely smug voice, a punchable face, and an unlikeable demeanor—and he is certainly not the bloated grown-up Boss Baby avatar who has been the main character of the American imagination for nearly a decade. People all over social media have been pointing to an August episode of Joe Rogan Experience when he said Trump should have Tony Henchman punch up his material, but he could never deliver a line like this:

Trump remains at the center of MAGA, as he is that vengeance’s expedited and stupid scowling face, but there is also a sense of him receding. He’s receding because he has been degrading in plain sight for nearly a decade, but also because internet-addicted right-wingers have totally captured his campaign. In retrospect, inviting an insult comedian to open for a political rally a week before Election Day and roast a key voting demographic was not the most strategic decision. Furthermore, even having someone like Tony Baloney speak at a Trump event shows the extent of how trapped these people are in their internet and even epistemological bubbles. This is a coalition of crabs in a bucket all posting and posturing and praying over Trump, and they have been talking to each other in circles for months. This is an echo chamber of vile washouts and goofs and cable news casualties and clammy eliminationist tryhards, and they have relinquished whatever tenuous grasp they once had on what may or may not be offensive to a relatively normal human. This is the sequel to J.D. Vance talking about cat ladies.

Polls show the race as very close, but Trump’s campaign still projects bravado and triumphalism because it can’t really do anything else and for reasons that are, if you want to be generous, strategic. The fundamental tenet of Trumpism is that its leader can never be wrong about anything, and the strategic aspect could come into play if Trump loses next week, as such a defeat would arrive to his followers as inconceivable and fraudulent. This deluded belief, theoretically, would power the next attempt on Trump’s part to overturn that outcome through the courts or electoral fuckery or other means. In the absence of any meaningful consequences to date for Trump where his last coup attempt was concerned, what binds these people to their leader has always been the desire to hurt people and get away with it in the way that he always has. A whole vile worldview and way of life depends on that being true, so they line up behind him like Pringles in a tube. This fantasy shot through an otherwise incoherent closing argument, and it was both plain enough to see and luridly metastatic.

Sure, there may still be a coalition of undecideds who base their vote on whoever the Washington Post endorses, but this rally was not designed to persuade as a political appeal any more than a slur shouted from a passing car is an invitation to conversation. This is the bloody subtext from a Republican Party with a decades-long appetite to stop history and replace the future with the past raging into the fore. One after another, they vow revenge against a swelling tranche of Americans who are not them. It is not an argument, or an offer, or a joke. It is exactly what it sounds like.

But we can defeat the outsized, dying gasps of this movement by rendering it unelectable, by organizing, and by offering a better alternative. Anger and disillusionment in our political discourse are exhausting, and it’s easy to throw up our hands, tune out, and crush a pint of Häagen–Dazs and binge all of Love Island while these MAGA freaks do their best to make the world demonstrably worse for our most vulnerable populations. Don’t let the barrage of constant draining bullshit resign you to apathy. No matter what happens, we have to rally around the people who need us the most.

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