There has been a great deal of commentary about “sane washing” in the coverage of the 2024 presidential election. This refers to the way journalists massage Republican nominee Donald Trump’s rhetoric until it is indistinguishable from fairly typical, not to mention coherent, political speech.
But when watching a Trump rally, it becomes increasingly clear how difficult this is to avoid, even for Trump’s staunchest critics. To pick out the actual content of a speech, such as the one he gave in Erie, Pennsylvania overnight — the warnings of an “invasion” of illegal immigration, endorsements of police brutality and outlandish personal attacks on his opponents — seems like a kind of misrepresentation, even if it’s true.
The several X accounts and news sites dedicated to sharing clips that make Trump look buffoonish and dangerous still fail to capture how he actually talks:
These are rough, vicious, rougher than anything you can imagine. There is no-one, and I say it all the time, if you wanna do a, do a movie — and some of these people you’re gonna be looking at in two minutes — if you wanted to do a movie there’s no actor in Hollywood that could play the role, there’s nobody that could… these actors, you know, they’re a little bit shaky, they can’t play the role, they bring in a big actor and you look and you go, ‘Oh, he’s got no muscle content. He’s got no muscle, we need a little muscle.’ They bring in another one: ‘But he’s got a weak face.’ Now these guys got the whole package.
We include the above, completely verbatim, as an acknowledgement of failure. Even telling you what we think he was talking about here would be to meet him more than halfway. In summarising Trump’s speech, we have failed to capture the querulous, rambling earth covering those reactionary landmines.
The performance was, by Trump’s own admission, “dark”, to the extent that it even elicited the merest whimpers of dissent from Republican Lindsey Graham (just enough to get a few “high-profile Republicans push back on Trump” headlines out there).
Here then, completely unedited for posterity purposes, are some of the things Trump recently told a cheering crowd in Pennsylvania.
On Kamala Harris
Crooked Joe Biden became… mentally impaired. Sad. But lyin’ Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way. There’s something wrong with Kamala. And I just don’t know what it is but there is definitely something missing, and you know what, everybody knows it. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. Anybody would know this.
If she wins it’s not going to be so pleasant for me, but I don’t care, I don’t care.
On law enforcement
The $950 is a misnomer because you can steal whatever you want, you can go wherever. But you’d see originally, you saw kids walk in with calculators. They would calculate, they didn’t want to go over the $950, they’re standing with calculators adding it up, you know, these are smart… smart people. They’re not so stupid. But they have to be taught. Now, if you had one really violent day, like a guy like Mike Kelly, put him in charge, Congressman Kelly, put him in charge for one day. Mike, would you say, right here, he’s a great congressman, would you say, Mike, that if you were in charge, you would say, ‘Oh, please don’t touch them, don’t touch them, let them rob your store, let…’ all these stores go out of business, right? They don’t pay rent, the city doesn’t h—, the whole, it’s a chain of events, it’s so bad. One rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. It would end immediately.
Why he’s campaigning at all
I’m here only because they cheat. And they cheat in this state. Especially in Philadelphia, and I’ll mention a couple of the areas. But for the most part, and— Philadelphia is out of control. Detroit is out of control. Atlanta is out of control. Places are out of control. Because if there was no cheating, if God came down from high and said, ‘I am going to be your vote tabulator for this election,’ I would leave this podium right now… We have to have a landslide because they cheat so damn much.
