The Unvarnished Truth About Donald Trump

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Earlier this year, Atlantic editor McKay Coppins suggested that voters, in the interest of civic hygiene and personal enlightenment, attend a Trump rally. That would be the way to understand the candidate, his thoughts, and his supporters, Coppins argued. He himself has attended more than 100 such rallies since 2016, and he rightly noted that nothing captures Trump’s philosophy better than his campaign rallies.

I have only attended a few of these rallies myself (although among them was Trump's rally on the Ellipse on January 6, 2020, which should count double). But what we take away from this experience is, in the words of our colleague Tom Nichols, the visceral feeling that Trump is deeply ill.

Attending Trump rallies can be metaphysically taxing, and some seem to last longer than a Taylor Swift concert. Watching them from start to finish online is therefore sometimes a welcome alternative.

A few weeks ago, on C-SPAN, I attended my first Trump rally in a while, a rally under a hot dome in Las Vegas. I watched not because I expected to learn anything new about the candidate, but because I had been alerted by concerned friends and colleagues that Trump had attacked me by name. That hadn’t happened in some time, and self-interest dictated that I watch.

Trump is angry at me and The Atlantic for a September 2020 article in which I reported, among other things, that he had called American soldiers killed in combat “morons and losers.” (For more details, please read this article by Adrienne LaFrance.) Trump is also upset by a profile I wrote late last year of retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which Milley, a decorated combat veteran, is portrayed as someone who defended the Constitution against Trump’s depredations. In response to that article, Trump suggested that Milley be executed.

At his Las Vegas rally, Trump described me as a horrible radical leftist lunatic named Goldberg (he said the word Goldberg with what I may or may not have overinterpreted as a special sentiment. ). He explained at length why he would never disparage the American military. (Dear reader: he constantly denigrates the military.)

This was all predictable. What surprised me, watching his entire presentation, was the relationship between gibberish and normal sentences. In other words, there was even more gibberish than I remember from a typical Trump speech. The apotheosis of the gibberish was his long soliloquy on sharks and battery boats. No summary could do it justice, so here is an extended excerpt:

By the way, there's been a lot of shark attacks lately. Have you noticed? A lot of sharks. I saw some guys justifying it today. Well, they weren't really mad. They bit the young lady's leg because they weren't hungry, but they didn't understand who she was. These people are crazy. He said, “There's nothing wrong with sharks.” They just didn't really understand a young lady who's swimming, now, who's really been decimated and other people too, there's a lot of shark attacks. So I said, “So there's a shark 10 yards from the boat, 10 yards or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat sinks and the water goes over the battery, the boat sinks; do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over the shark and I don't get electrocuted?” Because I can tell you he didn't know the answer. He said, “Nobody's ever asked me that question.” I said, “I think that's a good question. I think there's a lot of electrical current going through that water.” But you know what I would do if there was a shark or if you got electrocuted, I would get electrocuted every time. I don't go near the shark. So we're going to stop this. We're going to stop this for boats. We're going to stop this for trucks.

Watch it in its entirety, and as you do so, imagine Trump's words coming out of President Biden's mouth, and then imagine the Democratic Party allowing Biden to continue running for president.

Trump is bombarding us with absurdities. It’s the banality of madness, as Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas puts it. By us, I mean voters, of course, but especially the editors and headliners in my field, who sometimes succumb to one of journalism’s most pernicious biases: the bias of coherence. We rightly believe that it’s our duty to make sense of things. But what if the reality is that today’s politics make no sense?

Here’s how it works: Trump looks crazy, but he can’t be, because he’s the presumptive presidential nominee of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who’s crazy. So it’s our responsibility to tone down his rhetoric, to identify anything that makes sense, to take his bizarre statements lightly, to rationalize them. That’s why, after his electric shark speech, much of the media coverage revolved around the high temperatures in Las Vegas and other oddities. The Associated Press headline on a story about the event read: Trump Complains About Teleprompters at Steamy Las Vegas Rally. The New York Times headlined its story: In Las Vegas, Trump Appeals to Local Workers, Avoids Talk of Conviction. CNN’s headline: Trump Proposes Eliminating Tip Tax at Las Vegas Campaign Rally.

At home, the headline of the Las Vegas rally was the disconcerting and surprising news that I am a far-left nutcase. Outside my home, however, the public should have been informed, first and foremost, that a former and possibly future president had launched into a ridiculous and illiterate diatribe about sharks and batteries, a diatribe that calls into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities.

Following the Las Vegas rally reinforced to me that our magazine can best serve our readers by highlighting aspects of Trump’s rhetoric and behavior that we would highlight in any other politician, including Joe Biden. I never intended this magazine to be part of the resistance. (You only have to read our coverage of Biden to understand that it is not.) I simply believe that we must tell the unvarnished truth about Trump and treat him like any other candidate for high office who is emotionally and mentally unstable. A penchant for consistency is understandable. But it is the reality we must live with long after the debates and rallies are over.

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