I missed out on all the fun last night. Sad

Trump at the Phoenix rally

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine 

 

Thanks for asking. But no, I didn’t attend the big Trump rally last night in Phoenix.

Even though the Phoenix Convention Center is only a couple hours from my house in Tucson, I didn’t drive up there for it. Wouldn’t have gone, even if it was being held at the Tucson Convention Center. Wouldn't have gone even if it was being held right next door.

 I’m starting to feel like something out of Dr. Seuss: I do not like that orange man. I do not like him here or there. I do not like that orange man anywhere. I do not like him, Sam-I-Am. Sad.
So no, I shunned the big doings in Phoenix. Doesn’t sound like I missed much.

In his introduction, Vice President Mike Pence said “President Trump believes with all his heart … that love for America requires love for all its people.”

And then Trump spent the next 75 minutes destroying the high ideals of Pence’s statement. According to Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post, it was “one angry rant after another,” attacks against the media and a defense of his back-and-forth response to the violent clashes in Charlottesville between white supremacists and neo-Nazis and the counter-protesters, that ended with the car-ramming murder of a woman.

Cathalena E. Burch, a former colleague at the Arizona Daily Star, summed up the event very nicely in her  Facebook post: “Really, 45 came all the way to Arizona to tell these couple thousand saps that the media sucks and then to lie what he said ON LIVE TV about equating Nazis with anti-Nazi protesters in Charottesville.”

And Trump also:

-- Threatened to shut down the government over funding for his Mexican border wall; 

-- Said he’ll probably scrap NAFTA;

-- Attacked Arizona’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, whom I didn’t much like but like much better now;

-- Hinted that he’ll pardon a notorious bigot and racial profiler, former Maricopa sheriff Joe Arpaio. Hey, who isn’t above the law?

“But as the night dragged on,” reported the Post's Jenna Johnson, “many in the crowd lost interest in what the president was saying.”

Many people left early, “while others plopped down on the ground, scrolled through their social media feeds or started up a conversation with their neighbors,” Johnson wrote. People had waited in triple-digit heat to get into the rally hall, only to have their bottles of water confiscated by security. They were tired and dehydrated and Trump couldn’t keep their attention.

“Trump has long been the master of reading the mood of a room,” Johnson wrote. But in this case, “his rage seemed to cloud his senses.”

Another Washington Post writer, Jennifer Rubin, says: “All in all, he appeared desperate, out of control and emotionally needy.”

Well, now I’m not at all sorry I missed that spectacle. Who needs an out-of-control and emotionally needy commander-in-chief?

Oh wait, that's what we've got.