Donald Trump gave a particularly incoherent speech during a recent rally, as he rattled through a lengthy list of odd grievances that didn’t quite ring true, devoid of some very necessary segues.
In front of a crowd of about 700 people (although Trump claimed it was 45,000) in Doral, Florida, on Tuesday, the former president hit all of the normal beats of his campaign trail speeches, and then some. Trump attacked President Joe Biden for his weak performance in the presidential debate last month and for many of his policies. He dropped Kamala Harris’s name more than a few times, arguing that it doesn’t matter who the Democrats’ candidate is, he will beat anyone in a “thundering landslide.”
Over sweeping music, Trump went for a tear-jerking moment, only to suddenly veer into complaining about something else. It’s included in full because it’s just that wild.
“We will institute the powerful death penalty for drug dealers, where each dealer is responsible for the death, during their lives, of 500 people or more,” he said. “Mothers will never again be forced to watch their children overdosing in hosp … and we will never allow mothers to watch their child hopelessly dying in their arms screaming, ‘What can I do, what can I do? Help me God, what can I do?’ We are a nation whose once revered airports are a dirty, crowded mess,” Trump continued, pivoting suddenly.
“You sit and wait for hours and then are notified that the plane won’t leave, that they have no idea when they will. Where ticket prices have tripled. They don’t have the pilots to fly the planes, they don’t seek qualified air traffic controllers, and they just don’t know what the hell they are doing.”
From the death penalty to crying mothers and crappy airports, if Trump was hoping for an emotional moment, he seems to have missed it by a mile. His breakneck pace and awkward delivery suggest that the presumptive Republican nominee doesn’t actually care about a single one of his randomly assembled points. How can anyone take him seriously when he speeds from his often-repeated, baseless claims about immigrants to whining that as a country, “We don’t eat bacon anymore”?
Trump continued to rely on blatant fearmongering to excite his supporters, who grew sleepy and disinterested as the former president rattled on through his 75-minute speech, according to The Guardian.
“We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington, D.C., and clean it up, renovate it, and rebuild our capital city so that it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime. But rather it will become the most beautiful capital anywhere in the world,” Trump said.
“Right now, if you leave Florida, ‘Oh, let’s go, darling, let’s look at the Jefferson Memorial, let’s look at the Washington Monument, let’s go and look at some of the beautiful scenes,’ and you end up getting shot, mugged, raped,” he warned, promising that he’d run the city “tough and smart.”
The violent crime rate in D.C. has dropped 30 percent since 2023, according to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. But of course, Trump is unconcerned with actual crime statistics. Instead, he’s interested in keeping his base in red states ignorant, fearful, and angry about life in blue states.