Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

If you’re voting for Donald Trump on November 5, what do you hope to get out of the transaction? We know what Trump gets: get-out-of-jail-free cards for numerous crimes and billions in tax-free, slush fund money from political contributors that he can use to pay off his criminal lawyers and to keep afloat the fraudulent Boardwalk empire that otherwise long ago would have sunk beneath the waves of his earlier bankruptcies.

 But what’s in it for you?

Are you dreaming that Trump can end the wars in Ukraine or Gaza “with a phone call,” as he likes to boast?

Are you hopeful that by sealing off the United States from the world economy with tariffs (perhaps based on some Albanian economic model?), the country suddenly will regain the wealth it had in 1896 or that people will trade in their Audis for a newer model of the Ford Pinto?

Are you thinking that by restoring Trump to the presidency, the United States will yet again become a white Christian nation with its children in Sunday school and its illegal immigrants marching off to the borders in a replay of the Armenian genocidal exodus from the Ottoman empire?

Is your vote for Trump purely to poke your fingers in the eyes of anyone defending the rights of gay citizens to marry, of transgenders to have equality before the law, or of women to seek safe abortions?

Are you simply voting for Trump so that you can right the injustices done to an innocent man (the political equivalent of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive?) after he was charged, both in civil and criminal courts, with stealing state secrets, fomenting insurrection and sedition, sexually abusing more than two dozen women, and cooking the books of the Trump Organization to make the world safe to pay off porn stars?

We know a Trump vote is payback for endless grievances, but we don’t know exactly what grievances will motivate almost half the voting electorate in November to vote for a serial felon.

* * *

Clearly one reason to vote for Trump is to cast your ballot against constitutional government and the rule of law, both of which Trump has vowed to overturn if restored to the presidency.

At just about every rally these days, Trump says: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

Not one court in any of the fifty states nor any federal court has ever upheld the Trump claim of of election interference in 2020, so a vote for Trump in 2024 is simply a vote to suspend the Constitution.

* * *

A vote for Trump is also a vote for the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, who presumably will first be held in concentration camps and then marched (I assume) to the Mexican border.

The deportations (his supporters love chanting “Send them back….send them back…”) may well be a replay of President Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears, the expulsion and removal of the Cherokee nation from Florida and Georgia in the 1830s to the territory of Oklahoma, even after the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokees were an independent nation and not subject to U.S. federal law.

Sounding very much like his admirer, Donald Trump, President Andrew Jackson responded to the court judgment against his removal plans: “John Marshall [then chief justice of the Supreme Court] has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Jackson was everything Trump loved in a president: he was a white supremacist, a slave owner, and someone who earlier in his career had flirted with sedition and insurrection.

* * *

Wanting to know more about what receipts come with a November 5 vote for Donald Trump, I decided to attend one of his recent rallies—admittedly virtually—and stay with the proceedings from beginning to end.

Crowds at every Trump rally, no matter where they take place, are exactly the same, with the same parked pick-up trucks on the fringes and the same audience all wearing red hats.

At other rallies I have wondered if the crowd, like some Potemkin Village, is bused from location to location—sparing the Trump team from vetting yet another claque.

If in the end, it turns out that Trumpmania (like the rise of the Nazis?) was confined to about 60,000 diehard MAGA supporters, I would not be surprised.

* * *

This rally was held in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which is famous both as the hometown of famed golfer Arnold Palmer and also as the place where Rolling Rock beer was first made (until the brand was sold off to Anheuser-Busch, so that instead of making the beer from the waters of Loyalhanna Creek in western Pennsylvania, Rolling Rock could spring to life from the rapids of the Passaic River in downtown Newark, New Jersey).

At this rally Trump spoke from behind a bullet-proof shell—as if from a parked Popemobile—and he began his near two-hour oration (filibusters take less time) with a tribute to “my friend Arnold”.

Palmer won most of his tournaments in the 1950s and 60s, and he launched golf into the television age with some thrilling come-from-behind victories, especially at the Masters.

After that he became his own brand—with lines of sportswear, clubs, and cold drinks—and investments in everything from golf courses to real estate (like the wannabe Palmer now running for the presidency).

Despite his fame and fortune, Palmer remained accessible to the leisure class; anyone willing to pay his appearance fees, including Donald Trump, could claim an association with the father of modern golf.

To hear Trump tell the story of Palmer’s life—rags to riches thanks to the clubs in his hands—the two men might well have been Huck and Jim adrift on that Mississippi raft, while what I inferred is that Palmer didn’t mind showing up at some Trump promotional event, provided the check had cleared before his plane landed.

* * *

I have my doubts that more than a handful of the Latrobe MAGA crowd had any idea who Arnold Palmer was (other than a drink with iced tea and lemonade), but that didn’t stop Trump from droning on about Palmer’s golfing successes, his luck in finding an agent in Mark McCormick (IMG’s founder, along with Arnie), and how Palmer had started “with nothing”. (According to the exaggerating Trump, Arnie’s father was a “sod carrier” at Latrobe Country Club, although he was actually the club pro.)

The point of the eulogy was to remind the crowd that Trump—not unlike the Great Gatsby—only knows “celebrated” and “interesting people.”

Only at the end of his Palmer soliloquy—to a crowd that would not know a brassie from a mashie—did Trump feel the need take the audience deep inside a PGA locker room and describe the Adonis that was Arnold Palmer in the showers.

It began what has to be the most bizarre anecdote ever told during a presidential election campaign. Trump said:

But Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out there, they said, “Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.” I had to say it. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold, this is bad, but he was really something special. Arnold was something special.

Mind you, this came out on national television in a presidential campaign two weeks before election day, but after a little tittering in cyberspace, the words vanished without a trace, as though Trump had told a whistle-stop audience a little anecdote about seeing General Eisenhower as a kid. Instead, he had indulged in a political rally with his homoerotic fantasies, perhaps to gloss over his own deficiencies when it comes to his driver. (As expert witness Stormy Daniels wrote in her memoir: “He knows he has an unusual penis. It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool…”)

The only good to come from the psychoanalytic exposure was that the press tracked down Arnold Palmer’s daughter, Peg, who said: “My dad didn’t like people who act like they’re better than other people. He had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

Anyone voting for Trump in November is giving a thumbs up not just to the patriarchy and its never-ending exaggerated golf stories, but, to use Peg’s words, to put “cheating” and “lack of character” back in the White House.

* * *

At any Trump rally, there are two soundtracks. One is the teleprompter speech that his staff has written for him to deliver, which sounds like this:

As we build our economy, we’ll also restore our borders. For four straight years, Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from prisons and jails. They come from insane asylums and mental institutions and all around the world. They come from Venezuela to the Congo. They come from the Congo now. A lot of them are coming out of the jails of the Congo, and she’s resettled them into our communities, to prey upon our innocent American citizens.

It’s the world according to Senator Joseph McCarthy (and his lawyer Roy Cohn, who later became Trump’s lawyer), with additional threats from the “enemy within.” It’s the fear of the aristocracy at the coming invasion of the hordes.

The other Trump soundtrack sounds like the utterances of a toddler running around a toy store. Here is a snippet from the Latrobe rally, as Trump digressed:

Boy, look at the crowd. Wow. Wow. Hello, everybody. How did the flyover look? Good? Good. It feels like you’re very close to the ground. I said, “Are we okay here?” It looks like okay from here, but let me tell you, you’re in that plane, that sucker feels low. I’m saying, “I hope everything’s working nicely on that plane.”

The “flyover” of the rally venue is how King Donald announces his arrival to the peasants gathering in the fields below. From what he calls Trump Force One he is bringing civilization to some forgotten native population, eager to share in the munificence bestowed on this and other cargo cults.

So maybe a vote for Trump is simply a vote for a colonial restoration, and to pacify an indigenous people with false idols (tariffs, the Wall…) or bolts of fire (an end to all inflation, no taxes on tips, boys out of girls’ sports…).

* * *

Only when you sit through an entire Trump rally do you sense the extent to which his campaign rests on vulgarity and the debasement of language.

I realize linguistic standards have changed since the 1960s, when George Romney (father of Mitt and governor of Michigan) was drummed out of the 1968 campaign for saying he had been “brainwashed” over the Vietnam War (probably the only accurate statement of his campaign). But the crudeness of Trump’s language on the campaign trail speaks—in my mind anyway—for the contempt that he holds for the democratic process.

Here’s how he summed up Vice President Kamala Harris, after going off on Elizabeth Warren:

But she’s [Warren] radical, left crazy. What she does to business people is horrible. She’s a horrible person, but she’s radical left and crazy. Bernie is radical left. And this one, Kamala, is further left than them. So you have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough, that you just can’t take it anymore. We can’t stand you. You are a shit Vice President. The worst. You’re the worst Vice President. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here. You’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.

As George Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language (1946): “The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.”

Eloquence made up a large part of the politics of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, and both Roosevelts, but to Trump, words are disposable trash.

What was worse: calling Harris “a shit Vice President” or the fact that the Trump vulgarity was not front-page news?

* * *

Later on in the rally, Trump showed the crowd a film excerpt to make the point that he had restored strength to the American military that a Harris presidency would run down. Trump introduced the clip from a Marine Corps boot camp training film, by saying: “Take a look at our real military.” The soundtrack played with a drill sergeant shouting:

You will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death. Praise the Lord. But until that day, you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grab-asstic pieces of amphibian shit…..It looks to me like the best part of you ran down the crack of your mama’s ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress.

Really? At a presidential election campaign stop? Is not a vote for Trump simply a vote for indecency?

* * *

The wonder of a Trump rally is how so many adults can sit through hours and hours of his racist dog whistling over immigration, his delusional Babbittry, and the stream-of-consciousness gibberish that flirts endlessly with violence.

I realize that the following excerpt is a little long for an article quotation, but on paper (more than when heard on TikTok), it captures the extent to which the wires in Trump’s brain are both crossed and have short-circuited. Trump told his rapturous crowd:

Because people can see, and they’re smart, and we could sometime explain it, but one after another… You had Fani, F-A-N-I, which is usually pronounced Fanny, and she added a little action to it, Fani. That was a scam. They’re all scams. They’re all scams. It’s a corrupt system, and it’s a corrupt justice department, and it’s a corrupt DA, corrupt Attorney Generals. They use it to get elected because you can’t get elected with open borders, with transgender operations all over the place, with men playing in women’s sports, with high taxes and banned schools. No school choice. You can’t get elected with all… I could go on for ten minutes. Your vote will decide whether we give up on America or whether we save America. It is the most important election you’re ever going to have. Really is. By the way, how nice is this place? Isn’t it beautiful? Look, people, as far as you can see, they give you a little extra security nowadays, you notice? Hey, I got more machine guns than I’ve ever seen in… Look at these guys. I got more machine. I never saw guns like that. I said to my son, Don… He knows a lot about guns, and Eric knows a great shot. They really understand. I said, “What kind of a gun is that?” They said, “Dad, you don’t even want to know.” They are serious guns. We’ve got more guys and everyone who’s like central casting too. Holy shit, I’m looking. They look like Arnold Palmer. They look like Arnold. Can’t look better than Arnold. But with your support, we’ll bring back our nation’s strength, dominance, prosperity, and pride. We’re going to do it. This will be America’s new golden age. A hundred years from now, the presidential election of 2024 will be looked upon as America’s greatest victory. I hope that’s true because we’ve been through so much together, and the finish line is finally in sight. After four horrendous years, Kamala Harris can’t say one thing that she’d do differently.

This bizarre passage is taken verbatim from Trump’s Latrobe speech, and yet we’re told that in the presidential polls the election is “too close to call” or that Trump is ahead in the battleground states.

To what extent is a vote for Trump a vote for nihilism—the idea that the government is corrupt and unaccountable and that we would be better with a non-President (Trump) and his laugh tracks of insults?

* * *

Before Trump left the stage in Latrobe grooving to the rhythm of Y.M.C.A. (“They have everything for young men to enjoy/You can hang out with all the boys…”), he dropped some strong clues that in Israel’s wars with Gaza, Hezbollah, and Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu can count on his full support to carry on with the genocide.

At other times, Trump says the war would never have happened if he’d been president or that he could end it with a phone call.

Starting with Joe Biden and his failings, the riff drifted onto Israel. Trump said:

And he’s [Biden] telling Bibi, Netanyahu, “Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t do this. All our great congressmen are there. Don’t do any of these things.” And Bibi didn’t listen to him. And I tell you what, they’re in a much stronger position now than they were three months ago, that’s for sure. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this happen. And Bibi called me today and he said, “It’s incredible what’s happened.” I said, “It’s pretty incredible.” But he wouldn’t listen to Biden because if he did, they wouldn’t be in this position. And she’s worse than him. She’s not as smart as him. And I’m not saying he’s the smartest. I’m not saying he’s the smartest, but she’s not as smart as him.

Presumably Trump and Bibi have an accommodation that if Trump is re-elected, Israel can have a free hand in wars with Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

Israeli forces raining cluster bombs on the ruins in Gaza might well be Trump campaign extras, designed to make Biden and Harris look weak and indecisive, and to make Trump look like Goliath with his shield over Israel.

In many ways a vote for Trump is a vote for Netanyahu, who—if Trump is re-elected—wins twice: he gets rid of kibitzing Biden, and he gets a mandate for a wider regional war with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, not to mention further segregation in the West Bank.

Another reason to vote for Trump is to endorse Israel’s interference in a U.S. presidential election. Last time the meddling came from Russia; this time Israel?

* * *

The Latrobe rally ended with Trump calling to the hot mic and greenhouse a few local celebrities, including former Pittsburgh Steelers Le’Veon Bell and Antonio Brown.

Trump said:

And also, I tell you, if you’re a football fan, these guys are good. I guess they’re going to the game a little bit later or something. Are you going to the game? Are you going or you’re going to watch it on television? Former NFL stars, Antonio Brown. Oh, he was a good player. He was a good player. And Le’Veon Bell, really good players. And Mike Wallace. Come on up, fellas. Come on up.

It seems to make sense that Antonio Brown would have found a place of prominence with the Trump campaign, as the last time he was on the national stage it was 2021 and his team then, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, were playing the New York Jets in Met Life Stadium.

Brown got into an argument with several of his coaches over playing time, and the next thing anyone knew, Brown had stripped off much of his uniform and thrown it into the stands, and then, with the game still being played, trotted half naked through the end zone into the locker room while waving to the crowd.

That meltdown ended Brown’s NFL career but it’s good to see that the Trump campaign has picked him up off the waiver wire, as he would seem a natural fit, either for the MAGA showers or Project 2025.