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Two years ago, I paid a visit to Wilmington, North Carolina, a few weeks ahead of the midterm elections, ostensibly to cover the state’s Senate race, but also hear from Donald Trump.
A lot has changed since then.
Then, Trump had endorsed Ted Budd, a backbencher Congressman with no name, to replace Richard Burr, one of the senators who voted to convict Trump for his actions on January 6.
Of course, the rally at the Wilmington Aero Center barely focused on Budd, or any other Republicans for that matter. Instead, he made a dramatic scene after landing before taking the stage and meandering for the better part of an hour and a half.
This came shortly after the FBI had executed a search warrant on his Florida home in Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the classified documents and he faced a new lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom at the rally he dubbed “Peekaboo James,” a non-sensical and likely racist nickname.
Nonetheless, Trump had the crowd in Wilmington enthralled in 2022. Toward the end, he played ominous music as he spoke in an almost sort of prayer that had the crowd completely compelled.
Two years almost to the day, Trump returned to the Aero Center, this time as a candidate. However, Trump seemed much more diminished as he seeks to return to the White House.
To boot, Trump’s overtures seem much more desperate and are a sign that as he struggles to beat Kamala Harris, he does not stand on the same footing he once did.
Losing Biden as a contrast seems like it knocked the wind out of Trump’s sails. In 2022, and in truth, in most of Trump’s rallies since he left the White House, he mostly focused on Biden and would open his rallies with a supercut of Biden stumbling over his words and or seeming weak.
No such montage happened on Saturday, albeit early in his speech, he played a clip of Harris repeatedly saying the word “story,” as if to show that Harris is an overly-rehearsed and scripted candidate. But one could tell that Trump partially knows that he is flagging behind Harris, even in North Carolina, where is currently in a dead heat.
Indeed, just before the rally, Harris said she agreed to a second debate against Trump on CNN.
“The problem with another debate is that it’s just too late,” he told the crowd, bizarrely claiming he won the debate despite polls consistently showing Harris bested him.
Similarly, Trump did not mention Hannibal Lecter, the character in Silence of the Lambs he typically invokes, or mention windmills causing cancer, which Harris dinged him on during their debate in Philadelphia. He also did not go on many of his dottering weaving tangents he normally goes on.
During both rallies, Trump focused heavily on his bread-and-butter issues - immigration at the US-Mexico border and crime - but today, he also offered numerous unrealistic policy proposals, such as capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent.
“Some people are paying 25, 30 percent, it’s crazy,” Trump said.
He also discussed removing taxes on tips and Social Security, which many in his own party do not support.
On Saturday, Trump also gave a shout-out to his new buddy, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
“We’re going to reach— and it’s my plan. I will talk to Elon, get those rocket ships going,” he said. “We want to reach Mars before the end of my term.”
Similarly, Trump seems to have not figured out how to speak to women in the last two years. Instead, he ripped from a bizarre rant he made earlier on Truth Social about women, where he talked about how women are poorer and less healthy than they were during his administration.
“At long last, this national nightmare that we’re going through will be over,” he said. “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and feee. You will no longer be thinking about abortion because it is now where, it always had to be, with the states and with the vote of the people.”
This will certainly infuriate many anti-abortion conservatives, who feel that Trump turned his back on them by not supporting a national abortion ban.
Similarly, many women in North Carolina might not be satisfied given that the Republican legislature signed a 12-week abortion ban.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes, though, was the absence of Trump’s biggest acolyte in North Carolina. Two years ago, Mark Robinson was gearing up to run for governor and spoke ahead of Trump. When he hinted that he might run, he got almost as big of an applause as Trump.
Since then, Robinson has become a liability for Trump. Earlier this week, CNN reported how he frequently commented on an internet pornography forum where he talked about being a “black NAZI” and said he would own slaves if he could.
Despite publicly denouncing transgender people, his alleged comments showed he had an affinity for watching pornography with transgender women.
Not only did Robinson not attend, he did not appear at the rally in Wilmington. Indeed, while Trump shouted out numerous elected officials, he didn’t even mention the governor’s race, likely figuring it is already lost.
This is not to say that all is lost for Trump. For one, he still packed the Aero Center and received numerous applause breaks. Polling still shows that he is neck-and-neck in the state.
But the Trump show is not what it once was. To boot, unlike in 2022, he could not even walk off to Sam and Dave’s hit “Hold On, I’m Comin’” like once did.
Trump has always been a complicated man, but now he is just hard to understand as he fails and makes wild promises trying to stay relevant.
