August 20, 2024 | Reading Time: 5 minutes
Trump is losing his audience
Gibberish is boring.
We all know how important crowd size is to Donald Trump. That’s why liberals and Democrats enjoy sharing video clips on social media of his campaign rallies in which there appear to be lots of empty seats. But I think liberals and Democrats are missing the forest for the trees. Crowd size is not as important as crowd interest. The question isn’t whether they’re coming. It’s whether they’re staying. They aren’t.
About 7,000-8,000 people attended Trump’s rally on Saturday in eastern Pennsylvania, according to Mary Wheeler. (A New York Post reporter, who was at the venue, said it can hold around 10,000.) About an hour into Trump’s speechifying, however, attendees started heading for the exits, according to USA Today reporter Zac Anderson. “Looks like people are starting to trickle out of the Wilkes-Barre Trump rally as he goes past the hour mark. There appears to be more empty seats.”
Why aren’t they staying?
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump White House spokeswoman who’s now co-host of “The View,” suggested a reason. “One I keep hearing from voters is simply exhaustion,” she wrote on Monday. “The ‘Trump Show’ appealed to many who were frustrated with the Washington status quo and were willing to try something totally different. Trump is running for a third time – and a fourth time if you count his soft-run in 2012. Many voters who liked his policies on the economy, border, etc., are fatigued over the drama that comes with Trump.”
Griffin wasn’t talking about crowd sizes. Neither was she talking about Trump voters. She was speaking more generally about the kind of voters Trump needs to win the election, but isn’t attracting currently. US Senator Lindsey Graham echoed that same sentiment over the weekend. To appeal to these so-called independent voters, especially suburban white women, Graham urged the former president to stop with the name-calling, the outbursts and otherwise incendiary rhetoric. Trump the policymaker can win the election, he told “Meet the Press.” But “Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not.”
However, Trump voters and indie voters have a lot in common when you consider the other meaning of the word exhaustion. Not only are people exhausted in the sense that they are tired. They are exhausted in the sense that they are bored. Their interest, energy and motivation appear to be depleted. They came for “The Trump Show” Saturday. They left after it got boring. It seems prudent for Trump to stop being a showman, but what kind of showman loses his audience like that?
I don’t want to make too much of crowd interest, but from what I can tell, this is a pattern, and if rally goers keep losing interest in Trump’s rallies, it could mean double trouble. He’s already failing to attract the attention of people who might support him. He’s also failing to keep the attention of people who already do. Some voters aren’t listening, and perhaps never will. Those who are listening aren’t listening for long. Lindsey Graham is right to warn against the danger of alienating indie voters. But he may be wrong to assume Trump voters are in the bag.
But “The Trump Show” isn’t boring because it’s familiar, as Griffin suggested. It’s boring because it doesn’t make sense. It’s like he fired the show’s original writers, but forgot to hire new ones. The result is that he’s nearly always improvising and “off message,” and the result of that is that he’s nearly always incoherent. That might be fine if Trump put more oomph into it, but he doesn’t. It might be fine if supporters made sense of his nonsense, but most don’t. It’s too much work. When they get bored, as they evidently do at his rallies, they simply drift away. (To see example of how Trump is boring them, go to the sidebar below.)
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This is important to say. As Lindsey Graham suggested, the conventional wisdom among Republicans, former Republicans and the reporters who reflect their views is that Trump must stop playing the role of showman to win over indie voters, especially white women. He must stop saying things like he’s much better looking than Kamala Harris. (Yes, he said that.) “Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” Charlie Dent, a former GOP congressman, told The Financial Times. “The focus is still all about maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m sceptical that the maga base will be large enough to win.”
But the conventional wisdom among Republicans is misguided or worse, a cover up for what they already know but can’t do anything about it. Trump already stopped playing the showman. That’s why supporters are leaving his rallies. The spectacle isn’t as spectacular. The hero isn’t as heroic. He can’t seize their attention like he used to. And he may no longer be capable of seizing it. Something is very wrong. He’s habitually incoherent. His press conferences usually devolve into a word salad so impenetrable it’s like he’s speaking a foreign language. Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien said recently that he’s not well. A showman never loses his audience, but Donald Trump seems to be losing his.
The interest of Trump crowds, rather than the size of them, is worthy of our attention, because it suggests Trump supporters are seeing something the rest of us are not, namely Trump can’t communicate anymore. He can’t even be entertaining. He talks and he talks, to be sure, but he isn’t persuading anyone to do anything, not even his own people to stick around for him. “The Trump Show” used to be must-see TV before it turned to gibberish. Now the audience is moving on.
An example of Trump’s word salad
To get an idea of what his rally goers are experiencing, and why many of them get so bored that they drift away after an hour, read the following. I suggest reading it, because I think reading strips away things that prevent us from seeing Trump’s habitual incoherence.
The following is a transcription of closing remarks to his press conference Thursday at his golf club. They come courtesy of Aaron Rupar, publisher of Public Notice, a newsletter I recommend highly.
I just want to end by saying we have tremendous potential in this country. We can do amazing things and we can do them fast. We have to get the criminals out. We have to get them out immediately and fast and tough. We’re going to rely on local police. Law enforcement has been so incredible. And they know. Somebody said, “How will you get them out? How would you know?” The local police know the name and serial number and middle name and last name and where they come from of every single bad guy that’s come into our country. And we’re going to rely on local police and we’re going to make sure they have immunity from prosecution, because frankly, our police are treated horribly. They’re not allowed to do their job. You know that better than anybody. They’re not allowed to do their job. If they were allowed to do their job, we wouldn’t have cities that have crime rates. You look at Chicago. On the Fourth of July weekend, in Chicago. Think of this. A hundred and seventy people were shot and seventeen died. Afghanistan isn’t anything like that. And speaking of Afghanistan, the single most embarrassing day in the history of our country. And yesterday, I saw the … you know, they gave 85 billion dollars’ worth of brand-new military equipment. I rebuilt the military, so this was equipment, to a large extent, I bought. But brand-new, and they had a parade yesterday, a beautiful parade. We were going to get out with dignity and strength. We were there for 21 years. And we were going to keep Bagram, because it’s one hour away. Bagram is this massive Air Force base that I visited. It’s a massive base and we were going to keep it, because it’s one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. And they were showing it off yesterday, but the fact is now China controls Bagram. Can you imagine that? And we left. We were going to stay there. We were going to keep it. We were going to get out with dignity and strength. We were going to take our soldiers out last, not first. We took our soldiers out. I dealt with Abdul.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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