It has become apparent that very few coastal lefties, progressives, or liberals actually watched any full-length Trump speeches. I have a different problem: I may have watched too many. During early spring I went down a multi-week-long, late-night, Trump YouTube rabbit hole. I found myself watching hours of raw video feed of Trump campaign speeches. Insomnia got me there but I stayed for the mesmerizing dada quality of the Trump show, and for the mind-bending experience of watching a reality TV freak articulate surprisingly subversive political truths about the economy and America’s role in the world.
Contrary to how he was portrayed in the mainstream media Trump did not talk only of walls, immigration bans, and deportations. In fact he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes. Don’t get me wrong, Trump is a racist, misogynist, and confessed sexual predator who has legitimized dangerous street-level hate. Most of all, Trump is a fraud. And his administration will almost certainly be a terrible new low in the evolution of American authoritarianism. [...]
In Trump’s discourse A does not necessarily connect to B. If you don’t like A, just focus on B. The structure of Trump’s discourse will never demand that all the pieces be connected. That, in part, is what he meant with the Orwellian phrase “truthful hyperbole.” He has even described his own statements as mere “opening bids” in a negotiation. [...]
Often Trump’s sentences were just distinct phrases strung together. The lack of structure, far from boring, gave his stump talks an almost hypnotic quality. The listener could relax and just let it flow. In this regard Trump seems to a have stepped from the pages of Neil Postman’s old book Amusing Ourselves To Death, in that he personified the cut-up dada style assault on coherent thought that is the essence of television.
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