Heilemann: Trump Tulsa Rally Was a Waste of 105 Minutes of People’s Time
SCARBOROUGH: “Take a look at this.”
[clip starts]
TRUMP: “‘Sir, we can now leave the stage.’ I say, ‘Great, general, let’s go, I’ll follow you.’ And he goes like this. ‘Right here, sir.’ I said, ‘General, I’ve got myself a problem, general, because I’m wearing leather-bottom shoes, which is good if you’re walking on flat surfaces, it’s not good for ramps.’ And if I fall down, look at all that press back there. Look at it. (Crowd booing) And this was a steel ramp, you saw it because everybody saw it, it was a steel ramp, it had no handrail, it was like an ice skating rink. I said, ‘General, there’s no way I can make it down that ramp without falling on my ass, general,. I have no railing.’ We finally reached almost the end and the fake news, the most dishonest human beings, they cut it off. You know why? Because when I was 10 feet short, I said, ‘General, I’m sorry,’ and I ran down the rest. I looked very handsome. That was the only good thing. I said, to our great First Lady, I said, ‘Let me ask you a question. Was it that good a speech that I’m trending number one? Because I felt it was good.’ ‘No, they don’t mention the speech. They mentioned the fact that you may have Parkinson’s Disease.’ It’s true. So then my wife said, ‘Well, it wasn’t only the ramp. Did you have water?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I was speaking for a long time. I didn’t want to drink it, but I wanted to wet my lips a little bit. You know, you’re working hard up there with the sun pouring down on you.’ They said, ‘You couldn’t lift your hand up to your mouth with water.’ I said, ‘I just saluted 600 times! Like this!’ She said, ‘Well, I know what you did. You had on a very good red tie.’ That’s sort of expensive. It’s silk because they look better. They have a better sheen to them. And I don’t want to get water on the tie. And I don’t want to drink much. So I lift it up, the water, I see we have a little glass of water, where the hell did this water come from? Where did it come from?! And I looked down at my tie because I’ve done it. I’vew taken water and it spills down your tie and it doesn’t look good for a long time. And frankly, the tie is never the same. And I put it to my lip and I say — because I don’t want it — just in case. And they gave me the disease. They gave me another disease.”
(Cheering and Applause)
[clip ends]
SCARBOROUGH: “So, John Heilemann, as we were saying, Elvis in ‘77, complete with the sweat. But he talked about a ramp and he talked about water, and he talked about TVs on Air Force One for —
BRZEZINSKI: “Quite some time.
SCARBOROUGH: “— a long, long time. Never mentioned George Floyd’s name. He never mentioned the fact that we had the worst health care crisis. Never acknowledged that we had the worst health care crisis in over 100 years and how serious it was. Instead he was joking about — he claimed he was joking about not wanting tests. Didn’t acknowledge that we had the worst economic crisis in 90 years and how serious it is and how it may be with us for some time and we need to keep our heads down. And, of course, never really talked about the civil rights marches that are the most dramatic in a half century, since 1968, 1969. Instead, was doing, as you said, sort of a Shecky Greene Elvis ‘77 routine, that again, if you want to play in the Poconos this Friday night as an opening act, that’s fine. But if you’re running for president of the United States and you’re down double digits and this is supposed to be your big comeback, it was just bizarre. There’s not a message. He does not have a message going into the heat of this campaign.”
HEILEMANN: “Well, that’s the thing about fat Elvis, Joe. In that period when he’s in Vegas and he is at his dissolute, lazy, most addled, most lost period, he’s playing the hits. You know, he’s playing them from memory. You talked about the Hillary Clinton thing too. It’s all the 2016 stuff. He’s running out all the old favorites, he’s got these riffs, the standard cookie cutter culture war stuff, he’s throwing it all out there. He knows there’s some red meat to throw out here and there, but how much of that speech —of the 105 minutes, at least 35 minutes of it was a pure waste of time. He did 12 minutes on the ramp and the glass of water. 12 minutes on that. He has another 20 minutes of digressions and stuff that’s not either making a positive case for himself or putting a negative frame on Joe Biden. Most of the speech could have been written six months ago, five years ago. It’s out of time. We’re living in this tumultuous moment in America where the reason he’s losing and he knows he’s losing is that the race has become the one thing he feared the most, which is a referendum on him. He’s not blind, he knows what’s happening in the battleground states, he sees the polling, he’s obsessed with polls. He knows where he stands. He knows what’s going on in that sense and what the political cost that he’s paying. And instead of trying to meet that moment politically, forget as a leader or as a president because we can’t expect that from him, but just as a politician supposedly running for his life, he’s not out there saying, ‘Hey, I’m campaigning now with fierce urgency to try to save my job.’ Instead he’s wandering around out there and doing what we’ve been saying, fat Elvis meets Shecky Greene, play the hits and waste 105 minutes of people’s time. That’s not a formula for a President right now. Given all the numbers in front on of him right now, that is not the formula, the message that’s going to lead him back into contention in this race, let alone put him in a position to somehow win it.”
