I Watched All 103 Minutes of "Dancin'" Donald Trump's Musical Town Hall So You Don't Have To!
It's even weirder and creepier than you think!
I have a strong, intensely negative, visceral response to hearing Donald Trump’s voice. It’s been that way for nine years now. When I hear that awful singsong cadence, I tense up reflexively. I try to limit my exposure to that hideous ghoul. That’s not easy when you live in a hotly contested battleground state like Georgia, where Trump ads are ubiquitous and unavoidable.
Yet I wanted the last big piece that I publish before the election to reflect my fierce hatred of Trump, as well as my masochistic willingness to endure the very worst life pop culture and politics have to offer so that you don’t have to suffer through it yourself. I want this to be my closing statement on a uniquely insane presidential race that has me feeling like I’m taking crazy pills.
So I went to the unusual extreme of watching every last interminable minute of the notorious Pennsylvania town hall when, for reasons no one can quite figure out, Trump responded to a pair of medical emergencies by transforming what was ostensibly a town hall in which he’d answer questions from voters into a bizarre dance party where he swayed awkwardly to some of the least danceable songs ever recorded. They were more suitable for funerals than political events designed to rile up the base.
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is easier to boogie to than “Dancing” Don Trump’s downers. G.G. Allin cranked out a series of “Hey Ya”-level bangers compared to the funeral dirges Trump subjected a crowd of confused and disappointed worshipers to.
It’s one thing to know that the surreal event described above actually happened and is not the product of mass delusion or a curious dream we all shared. It’s quite another to devote ONE HUNDRED AND THREE MINUTES of your life to experiencing every excruciating moment of an event that was bonkers even by Trump standards.
I’m not sure I would have survived the experience without the glorious schadenfreude of watching Kristi Noem, a rising star in the Republican Party, until she STARTED BRAGGING ABOUT ALL THE ADORABLE ANIMALS SHE’s MURDERED look like she’d like to take the town hall behind a shed and put it out of its misery the way she did poor Cricket, the puppy that displeased her.
I’m not sure why Noem thought channeling Cruella DeVille would impress voters who care more about cute dogs than poor people, but her unwise admission sent her political fortunes spiraling in the wrong direction.
Noem is the kind of woman Trump loves: a thin, sycophantic, conventionally attractive white sociopath infamous for her cruelty to animals and people alike.
The puppy-murdering governor acts as Trump’s hype woman and sidekick. She’s Flavor Flav to his Chuck D. In an unsurprising development, the 103 Minutes of Madness contains fawning references to both of the racist suckers Chuck D and Flavor Flav call out for their anti-black bigotry on “Fight the Power,” probably the greatest Hip Hop protest song: Elvis Presley and John Wayne.
“John Wayne said life is hard. But it’s harder when you’re stupid. I think that perfectly explains Kamala Harris, right?” jokes Noem.
Using the words of a famous racist to denigrate a woman of color would be bad form, even if Wayne didn’t tell Playboy in 1971, “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”
Motherfuck John Wayne.
One of the songs DJ Trumpy Trump spins is Elvis Presley’s “The American Trilogy,” which begins with the words, “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton/Old things they are not forgotten/Look away, look away, look away Dixieland.”
At least Trump didn’t choose one of Presley’s problematic or racist songs, just one that WAS UNOFFICIALLY THE NATIONAL FUCKING ANTHEM OF THE CONFEDERACY.
Noem goes on to say, “Can you imagine how hard it would be to wake up and be Kamala Harris?”
She means that it would be horrible to wake up as Harris and realize that as the first woman and the first woman of color elected Vice President, she was dumb and worthless and low IQ, and had accomplished nothing compared to a self-made man like Donald Trump, and consequently should be filled with shame.
I, on the other hand, imagine that it is hard to be Kamala Harris BECAUSE SHE’s A WOMAN OF COLOR RUNNING FOR THE HIGHEST OFFICE IN A VICICOUSLY RACIST AND SEXIST COUNTRY, RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT AGAINST A VICIOUSLY RACIST AND SEXIST MAN and his hateful cultists.
To give Noem credit, she doesn’t go negative until a full seventy-three seconds in.
First, Noem plays to the crowd by gushing, “I’m the governor of the great state of South Dakota, but I’m going to tell you one thing: Pennsylvania rocks!”
She then segues awkwardly to cheap insults when she jokes, “I know that you all embrace being the City of Brotherly Love, but I’m going to get real with you right here. Kamala Harris sucks, right? She sucks.”
In a deeply misguided display of toughness, Noem brags about being governor of the only state that did not take elevated unemployment benefits during COVID.
The federal government wanted to give South Dakotans who were struggling just to get by during one of our country’s worst public health crises free money to help them. Noem told the government they could take their free money for her sick and scared constituents and shove it up their asses.
She brags about telling Trump, “Listen, Mr. President, our people want to work, and they did. They went to work every day.”
They might have died in the process of working every day, but at least they didn’t accept desperately needed emergency funds like 49 selfish other states did.
Noem brags that she “passed the strongest bill in the nation that only women could play in women’s sports.”
In a glorious self-own, she insists, “When President Trump gets back in the White House, he is going to make sure that we don’t have mediocre men taking away opportunities from our exceptional women.”
A mediocre man trying to take an opportunity away from an exceptional woman describes Trump’s relationship with Harris, but Noem was, of course, transphobic as well as sexist.
In a later self-own, Trump complains about how the Democratic Party shamefully failed to respect the dignity and stature of Joe Biden, someone he depicts as the stupidest idiot in the history of morons, by having his Vice President replace him on the ticket after he became unelectable.
Trump says of Harris replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, “You can call it a coup, but I don’t even call it that anymore because a lot of people say, “What the hell is a coup?”
The easy answer is, “A coup is what Donald Trump tried to do on January 6th, unsuccessfully,” but the king of projection lacks the self-awareness to know that he should stay the hell away from the word.
Noem then calls for the hillbilly messiah to favor the worshipful masses with his presence. In an ominous portent of what’s to come, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” doesn’t stop playing once Trump reaches the stage.
Instead, Trump patiently waits for the patriotic anthem to end before beginning the town hall. He’s showing Greenwood’s cornball slice of pandering Americana more respect than it merits.
It’s an early signal that a distracted and possibly Adderral-addled thirty-four-times felon is more interested in sharing his unfortunate musical tastes than connecting with a base he clearly hates.
Every softball tossed lazily in Trump’s direction is a variation on the moment in The Simpsons when Lisa Simpson asks Mr. Burns, “Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?”
Only in this case, it’s more along the lines of “I come from a trans, Black Lives Matter, Antifa background before I saw the light. Can you talk about how your tough, America First policies benefit the American people, particularly in terms of protecting the border and inflation? Then can you discuss how Kamala Harris’ dangerously liberal policies are hurting the health and wealth of the American people?”
In a very Republican move, an attractive, light-skinned African-American woman lobs Trump an impossibly easy, leading question about the rising price of groceries that he incoherently answers by saying he’ll close the border and “drill, baby, drill,” then is rewarded/punished by getting to stand directly behind the disgraced ex-president for the rest of the event.
The idea is to highlight the tremendous support Trump enjoys from young women of color and how they don’t mind being strategically placed in the background while an awkward old white man shuffles around listlessly to sad songs for a half hour.
It doesn’t matter what Trump is asked; his response is the same. When he left office, America was a perfect, shimmering utopia that devolved into a nightmarish dystopia mere minutes after Biden’s term began.
Thankfully, all of our problems are caused by an open border that leads to runaway inflation and every other problem, so when there are mass deportations, our country will become a paradise again.
It’s all or nothing for Trump. He sees everything in black and white. If you support him, then you are, by definition, a patriot who loves your country. If you support Harris, then you are a radical left lunatic who hates their country.
In Trump’s mind, Communism and Fascism are the same thing, so all of those radical left Marxists also support Fascism, a far right-wing ideology. Trump just knows they both sound bad, and he is only ever involved with goodness.
Trump is foggy and glitchy. At one point, he tells the audience how important it is for them to vote on January 5th, which is exactly two months after the real date. I agree. I think all Trump supporters should show up at the polls on January 5th, 2025, and make their voices heard.
The twice-impeached ex-president rambles about Hannibal Lecter and, in a pointlessly post-modern move, talks about the press being bewildered by his constant references to a fictional cannibal/serial killer. With a look of deeply unearned pride, Trump explains that he brings up Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail because he’s a “sick puppy” and the people flooding over the border are “sick puppies” as well.
Then Trump smiles big to indicate that what he just said was very intelligent and wise, to the point that the fake, far-left lamestream media wouldn’t understand it. For Trump, this is a perfect rationale. It’d be like me calling everyone I don’t like Jason Voorhees because he was a big guy who killed people with a machete, and when people say things I find offensive, it feels like I’m metaphorically being pursued by a hockey mask-wearing maniac with a giant knife who wants to kill me.
In a stock line, Trump brags that the MAGA movement is the greatest in American history. It is greater, in Trump’s mind at least than the Abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Suffragette movement, and the push to end child labor. Those might have been okay, but they could not compare to a bunch of reactionary white racists led by a demented reality television clown taking a bold stance against the powerless and endlessly demonized.
The awkwardness kicks into high gear when there is a medical emergency that neither Trump nor Noem seems to know how to handle, so he sits there awkwardly while the governor looks like she’d like to crawl out of her skin and/or disappear forever.
It was extremely hot, and Trump supporters had to wait for hours in sweltering heat without air conditioning or open windows/doors, and the MAGA minions suffered.
It was like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire but without the laughs. Or the Fyre Festival with shittier music and worse planning.
Trump and Noem joke that Biden has made it impossible for small businesses to afford air conditioning, but I would argue that it’s the Trump campaign's responsibility not to hold an event at a venue so inhospitable that people had to be led away on stretchers.
Trump sure knows how to take care of people! Truly, he is the shepherd of his flock.
Then there is ANOTHER medical emergency, and Trump loses his shit.
An annoyed Trump asks the crowd, “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
Trump could have been self-deprecating and said, “Who the hell wants to hear ME blather on and on?”
Instead, he said, “Who the hell wants to hear what YOU might have to say to me? What could be more boring than letting you have a part in this? Let’s just listen to songs I like instead.”
What’s fascinating and hilarious to me is that Noem, in her role as a token adult tasked with getting the man-baby who rules her party to behave in a relatively sane, reasonably professional way, tries mightily to get Trump offstage before too much damage is done.
Noem constantly gives Trump an out. She proposes that they “close with a song and a few quick questions,” but Trump doesn’t want to answer any more questions from the idiots in the audience, and he’s not about to let this nightmare end with a single song when he can afflict the audience with his insanity for a solid thirty minutes.
Nothing speaks to Trump’s incredible bond with the working people of our great nation quite like his enthusiasm for “Ave Maria,” an 1825 song from the Verdi opera Othello based on a Sir Walter Scott poem.
Unfortunately, an instrumental version of “Ave Maria” is played instead. This will not do. I hope someone got fired over that.
Trump insists that Luciano Pavarotti’s version be played instead. So, the instrumental version is followed by Pavarotti’s cover.
Noem looks uncomfortable in a way that made me very happy. She’s constantly trying to de-crazify the town hall, only to have her God insist that, actually, he would like it to be crazier and more self-indulgent, thank you very much, and he wasn’t going to listen to anyone other than the speed-fueled voices in his head demanding to be fed music it knows and loves.
The dog-destroying, free-money-hating Governor clearly hopes that Trump will depart the stage after his favorite version of “Ave Maria” is played, but he’s just getting started, baby!
DJ Trumpy Trump is just getting warmed up!
Trump didn’t just play dreary dirges for his own benefit; he also favors a confused and uncomfortable crowd with his signature dance moves.
There was, of course, the Dual Dong Diddler, where Trump looks like he’s simultaneously jerking off two naked men standing a foot or two apart. He’s also partial to the Window Washer, The Wave, and the Sway, where he moves back and forth in a matter at once somber and oddly playful.
Call him DJ Jeb on the ones and twos because he is LOW ENERGY, baby!
A visibly annoyed Noem tries to make what Trump is doing seem less bizarre and erratic by mirroring his dance moves and treating him like a small child who is behaving erratically.
DJs at public events play upbeat songs that everyone knows that are fun to dance to. That’s not the strategy that DJ Trumpy Trump employed.
In a counterintuitive move, the increasingly erratic wannabe dictator favored downbeat, even depressing, songs that are difficult, if not impossible, to dance to and that his audience may or may not know, like Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye,” a staple at funerals. He also played “YMCA,” a wholesome song about the homosexual orgies you can enjoy at the titular establishment beloved by sports fans and Republicans who are otherwise much less enthusiastic about gay culture and sexuality.
Even the Village People have told Trump to stop playing their song.
Let’s just say that there is a reason that Sinead O’Connor’s legendarily mournful, intense cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” is not a Jock Jams favorite: it’s the opposite of a high-energy dance tune. It’s also the work of an eccentric, famously androgynous African-American musical genius and a troubled Muslim woman with a famously complicated and contentious relationship with Christianity.
Trump might think of himself as a music lover, but his primary relationship with music and musicians this campaign has been getting threatened with legal action when he plays a song by someone who despises him at a rally or rages against superstars enthusiastically endorsing Kamala Harris.
With the possible exception of Oliver Anthony, it seems safe to assume that many, if not most, of the artists Trump played have either taken a strong anti-Trump stance or seem like they would be mortified to be associated with him in any way.
I half expected the angry, zombified corpse of Leonard Cohen to rise from the grave to strangle Trump to death with his bare hands for playing Rupert Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah.”
I don’t have to imagine what Wainwright thought of Trump’s usage, as he released a statement reading, “The song ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen has become an anthem dedicated to peace, love, and acceptance of the truth. I’ve been supremely honored over the years to be connected with this ode to tolerance. Witnessing Trump and his supporters commune with this music last night was the height of blasphemy. Of course, I in no way condone this and was mortified, but the good in me hopes that perhaps in inhabiting and really listening to the lyrics of Cohen’s masterpiece, Donald Trump just might experience a hint of remorse over what he’s caused. I’m not holding my breath.”
It sounds like he was less than pleased!
Trump also played “November Rain” to the mortification of Axl Rose, who emerged as a surprisingly cogent and incisive critic of Trump and his administration on social media during the disgraced Ghosts Can’t Do It actor’s time in office.
The twice-impeached bigot is particularly moved by the guitar solos of Slash. As an African-American Jewish musician, Slash belongs to two groups with ample reason to despise Trump and his movement due to its racism and anti-Semitism.
The most on-brand song in the mix is Oliver Antony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which became an instant MAGA anthem due to its Trump-friendly lyrics and themes.
Even “Rich Men North of Richmond,” the most overtly Conservative song on the playlist (other than, you know, Elvis’ tribute to the glory of the Confederacy), has lyrics like, “These rich men north of Richmond / Lord knows they all just wanna have total control” that seem to condemn Trump, a rich man north of Richmond who wants to have total control.
Trump’s people tried to spin the town hall of the damned as a fun populist surprise for Trump’s delighted fans where a McDonald’s-loving man of the people, who just happens to be a billionaire touting huge tax cuts for fellow billionaires like his bestie Elon Musk, defied convention by having a fun dance party instead of a staid, traditional political event.
But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t a dance party. It wasn’t for Trump’s fans. It was for Donald Trump. Donald Trump was playing songs that he liked for his own benefit. It wasn’t populism; it was arrogance. It was narcissism. It was the guy with the worst taste in music insisting on choosing the playlist.
This bizarre expression of Trump’s crumbling mental state accomplished the seemingly impossible: it made me feel sorry for Kristi Noem, who, in her saddest moment, points at Trump during “Nothing Compares 2 U” to illustrate that, in her hate-poisoned mind, nothing compares to the crazed misogynist.
In a shameless bit of sane-washing, I watched the one hour and forty-three-minute shit-show on YouTube via a local Fox affiliate, which gave it the hilariously off the title, “Trump holds town hall in Pennsylvania suburbs with a focus on the economy.”
That’s like titling a video on the January 6th insurrection, “Tour of Capitol by Trump supporters proves unexpectedly rambunctious,” or a story about Trump’s pussy-grabbing comments, “Trump discusses an unconventional manner of greeting attractive women in leaked audio.”
“I want this to be a really important evening. Those two people who went down, they’re patriots, and we love them,” Trump rants at one point.
I wish that this proved an important evening when even Trump’s most dogged supporters could no longer deny his steep mental decline.
That’s unfortunately not the case. I don’t think this bizarre, self-indulgent, and selfish monstrosity hurt Trump. It might even have helped him. If you don’t actually watch the whole fucking thing, you might come away with the misconception that it was a fun goof from a guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously when it was anything but.
Don’t be so bad at your job that people dance with joy in the street when you lose it. I know that plenty of people did a merry jig when Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020, with a notable assist from me and my fellow Georgians. I sure did.
I want to be able to dance on Trump’s grave politically (and, full disclosure, literally: I fucking hate the guy), but I’m way too cautious and pessimistic to bust out my dancing shoes just yet.
As always, I will be hoping and working for the best and dreading the worst.
This piece has been up all day and has not attracted a single subscriber, not even a free one. If someone, anyone, would subscribe (paid, preferably) it would make me feel a lot better about the enormous amount of time and effort I put into it.
This is your best piece on Trump. Precisely in your wheelhouse.