Trump Speaks!

So, I listened to quite a bit of Donald Trump's major speech in Indiana this evening, and I want to make a couple of comments.

First, a major one:  Trump has played things very close to the vest the last couple of weeks, in fact ever since Hillary's memorable speech showing how easily he can be demolished.  Both Trump and Hillary have really reined themselves in since then, and for the same reason: they were both afraid that Trump could easily have made himself so toxic that the Republicans would find a way to ditch him before the convention.  Hillary doesn't want that, because Trump is the worst political candidate since Joseph Goebbels ran for office, and Trump doesn't want it because everything is about him, and he can't stand losing.  So here is the question:  how long can Trump restrain himself before he reverts to his malignant self in public?  Can he last much longer than the convention, which is going to give a tremendous boost to his ego?  Can he possibly hide his real self until November?

Well, tonight, Trump more or less abandoned his written speech, and what we saw (at least what I saw) was someone skating right on the edge of a cliff, in danger every moment of reverting to a raving maniac.  I hardly think there is room for doubt that he cannot engage in this behavior more than a few times before he breaks loose and really reveals the demons within him.  And if I had to bet, that is what I would bet on, within a couple of weeks of the convention, if he can actually make it through his convention speech itself.

Next, Trump had a new (at least to me) off the cuff idea about the Middle East.  We are not going to let any Middle Eastern refugees in the country under a Trump dictatorship presidency; instead, we are going to build "safe zones" for them in their own countries.  Not a word, of course, what would make these zones safe, how many American troops it would take, or how many hundreds of billions of dollars it would cost, nor of course, the least recognition of how stupid the whole idea is.  Maybe he's going to build some great big walls around parts of Syria and Iraq, and assume the ISIS, Hezbollah, etc. with their tanks and artillery and rockets just won't be able to figure out a way to get through them.  Oh, of course, he did have one idea to pay for it: when we go back to these countries, we are going to steal their oil.  Now, there's well thought out foreign policy, bound to make the nations of the world "respect" the United States.

Now, another observation:  The crowd, mainly appearing to be made up of old people and twenty or thirty-something overweight white males, was simply not very responsive to Trump's speech.  They got excited about the wall, but the rest of it- the race baiting, the cheap shots at Hillary, the nonsense about the Middle East, did not stir them at all.  And this is a week before the convention, when a carefully picked audience like this should be going nearly berserk- in fact as his audiences were a month ago.  This is not a good thing for Trump; I wonder if we will see anything in the mainstream media about it.

And one final thing.  Trump talked at length about the shootings in Dallas, but never mentioned a single one of the police murders of black people that precipitated them.  He spoke about demonstrations in eleven cities tonight, as though they were armed uprisings against the country, implying that they needed to be violently put down.  I'm not going to waste any more time on this hateful raving, except to say that the whole meaning of this part of his speech can be boiled down to one sentence:  "We've spent so much time worrying about the Spics, that we haven't had enough time for dealing with the niggers."

That's it.  If that is what you want in a President, you know who to vote for.



And this:  From a post by Murfster35 at Daily Kos yesterday:

"Since his full body immersion into the world of Presidential politics and teleprompters, Orange Julius has lost his rhythm. In the last couple of weeks, at large rallies and without a teleprompter, Trump almost seems lost. He rambles, he repeats himself with apparently even knowing it, it’s almost like he’s now lost without the teleprompter, and he sucks when he uses that. And it shows. The crowd response is not what it used to be. Maybe its because the old saws have lost their teeth, but I believe it’s mostly because they’re delivered sporadically and without the force and venom that took Trump to the top in the first place...The magic is gone."

So I'm not the only one that has noticed this.  Can he get his mojo back without regressing into open race hatred?  We'll see soon.