No wonder Donald Trump looks so haunted

Trump may have to accept there are limits to how far you can get by simply putting on a MAGA hat and blaming China.

Donald Trump returns from the Tulsa campaign rally looking as triumphant as a cleaned out gambler. Picture: AP.

Image is everything, and the image was not good. Late on Saturday night the President of the United States got home to Washington after a disappointing rally in Tulsa. It was dark, and he stepped off the helicopter, and his tie was draped around his neck, and a MAGA hat was held loosely in one hand. He looked like a cleaned-out gambler, or a jailed businessman who had just been granted bail and given his shoelaces back. It was the walk of a man who has horrified himself and just wants the day to end. “And I will worry tomorrow,” he could have been thinking, “about where to bury the body.”

Granted, this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. As in, even after the most successful rally imaginable he was hardly going to look like Brad Pitt emerging from a lake. Still, two things have always made Trump formidable. One is the unfaltering adoration of his support base, so loyal that he famously once said they’d vote for him even if he shot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue. The other is the knack of bullying reality until reality just gives up the fight.

But in Tulsa, it seems, both of these things suddenly weren’t there. The fans didn’t come, and reality stayed real.

“We’re going to be in Oklahoma,” he said, only last Thursday. “And it’s a crowd like, I guess, nobody’s seen before. We have tremendous, tremendous requests for tickets like, I think, probably has never happened politically before.” Perhaps he even meant it? According to his campaign team beforehand, over a million people had registered an interest. In the end, local fire marshals counted 6,200 people entering the Bank of Oklahoma Centre, which can hold 19,000. Outside, they had built an overflow stage for an excess crowd, on which nobody stood, speaking to nobody. [UK Independence Party leader] Nigel Farage was there, having been granted permission to leave Britain for America after the Department of Homeland Security deemed it in the national interest. Mystifyingly, they didn’t mean ours.

Many of Trump’s critics already regard Tulsa as the beginning of the end and they may be right. An awful lot of us, though, would have to admit that we still don’t understand what it would be the beginning of the end of. During the 2008 presidential election, in The New Yorker, the humourist David Sedaris wrote that the great American political choice reminded him of being on an aeroplane with a stewardess offering him a meal. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

Back in 2008, of course, the platter in question was John McCain sprinkled with Sarah Palin, but it still captures the bafflement of Trump’s election in 2016 pretty well. And as for not only voting for him, but going to a rally? Five months before an election? No, sorry. I cannot empathise. I can pretend to, but it would be a lie.

Although that said, watching clips of them, I’m often reluctantly struck by how funny he is. Even at his most deranged-sounding – as in Tulsa, where he ranted for ten whole minutes about the coverage he received for being wobbly walking down a ramp ("I was wearing leather-bottomed shoes!” he howled) – there’s an awful lot of implied winking towards fans who are in on the joke. He’s also, though, flatly nasty. “Although you bet there’s something wrong with Joe Biden,” he said, right after all that. Perhaps you remember, all those years ago, when he did an impression of a disabled reporter, bending his wrists and distorting his voice. Every commentator alive thought that was the end of him, and every one was wrong.

As ever, though, the big question with Trump is whether he knows what he is doing, or whether he just does it. I reckon the latter. Actually, the Sedaris view (glassy turd) and the Trump view (5th Avenue shooting) are not terribly different. Both infer support that is unmoored from reality.

This is the root of the journalist Salena Zito’s oft-repeated maxim that Trump supporters take him “seriously, but not literally” while his critics do the reverse. Going right back to the days when he started shrieking about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Trump has always been able to count on his base preferring the fight to the facts.

The thing is, America’s COVID facts are pretty sticky. The coronavirus has already killed 120,000 Americans and infections, especially in places like Oklahoma, are going up. It was reported that six members of the team sent in advance to set up the rally had tested positive for the virus, having literally brought it with them. I’m not sure how many people travelled from heavily-infected DC to Tulsa for the rally itself, although from the look of all those fat men in shiny ties and Stepford Wives in bodycon, it was quite a lot of them.

It is one thing to laugh along to cable news or social media at the spectacle of the president baiting blue-stocking liberals by joking that fewer tests means fewer cases. It is quite another to be asked to do the same inside a convention centre when you’re next to some plague-carrier from Babylon and you haven’t even brought a mask in case somebody thinks you’re a liberal.

They’re not fools, Trump’s base. Not as much as he needs them to be right now. As 12,000 empty seats show, there are limits to how far you can get by just putting on a MAGA hat and blaming China. So no wonder they didn’t go, and no wonder, today, he looks so haunted. Because what else has he got?

The Times