Donald Trump relaunched himself this week, but it looks like he crashed again with a piss bow just down the road. This week, the announcement that he will run again in the presidential election in 2024 was received remarkably lukewarm. Of course there were the hangers-on who erred on the side of caution and said they still believed in Trump, but there were a lot of doubts coming from the Republican side.
In fact, I’d almost forgotten about that nagging voice, the stupid bragging, the blatantly stated lies, that serpentine look and lifeless eyes, that car salesman’s hairdo. But at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump announced his candidacy on Tuesday, it was all there again — a nightmare.
Donald Trump was disgusting and, it turns out, still is. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad if only he didn’t want to run for president of the US again. And so he wants that. Soon he will be 78 and he will compete against the then 82-year-old Joe Biden, who continues to pretend to be a young god with his baseball cap.
What’s going on in the US? Does the quiet evening of life no longer exist? Is eighty the new forty? Has Meta cracked the code of life, is dying suddenly completely passé?
Don’t give up, folks. There is a long list of Republicans who are seriously considering running as well, because they think Trump has no chance and, more importantly, they do. Wealthy sponsors turn away from Trump. His own daughter tweeted that she thinks her family is more important than helping her father. His former propaganda channel Fox questioned his candidacy. The former Trump newspaper The New York Post ironically on the front page about “a retiree from Florida” who had surprisingly announced that he wanted to run for president.
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu didn’t beat around the bush, referring to 2020: “He’s a loser.The Republican who would have dared to say that about Donald Trump two years ago would have been politically dead.
So it is with Trump, one minute you’re the hero and everyone is terrified of you, the next – and you never quite know where it has turned – you’re old news, dated and pathetic, everyone wants you gone and you are besieged by ambitious competitors.
In his speech at Mar-a-Lago, Trump talked about his successful dealings with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and assured his audience that under his rule Putin had never dared to go to war. He had apparently been president of paradise for four years, of the greatest nation in the history of the world. There was something desperate about it all, those illusions about the past; he read them from the autocue as if he was gradually becoming sick of his own blubbering.
CNN’s fact-checkers had also gone back to work, and counted more than twenty falsehoods in over an hour, which was not too bad for me, by the way.
Security people, meanwhile, had to prevent audience members from leaving the Mar-a-Lago ballroom prematurely because they could no longer bear the chaotic chatter of the retiree on stage.
Trump has long mistaken his fans for idiots he could fool into anything and, to be fair, they gave that impression. We have to wait and see if there will be a new Trump, but that the old one seems to have passed the date is progress and, above all, a relief.