For just under 40 minutes, the Republican candidate who won’t release his medical records stood on stage and “swayed,” “bopped” and “danced” to a playlist of his favorite songs. It would have been a fitting end to a boozy night out with friends, perhaps, but as The Washington Post noted, it was an exceedingly “bizarre” way to conduct what had been sold as a “town hall” just three weeks before the presidential election.
Monday’s event, about 30 miles outside Philadelphia, was supposed to be as an hour-long opportunity to hear Donald Trump answer questions from voters in a must-win swing state. A recent poll found Pennsylvanians are most worried about the economy, the future of democracy, immigration, gun control and abortion; this would be an opportunity for the former president, who has dodged serious interviews and rejected another debate after face-planting at the last one, to provide cogent answers to pressing concerns — all while rebutting critics who question his mental fitness for office.
But after precisely four softballs lobbed by vetted members of the audience, Trump stopped taking questions altogether. Two people had medical episodes at the event, after which the former president decided it would better to instead stand on stage in silence as music played for the better part of an hour.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music [sic],” Trump said. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
Attendees then stood around and, instead of hearing a leading candidate for the White House detail their plans for addressing the cost of housing or access to health care, listened to a series of artists who despise him: the Village People, Guns N’ Roses and Rufus Wainwright. Also North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was there, the Republican perhaps best known for killing her dog and telling everyone about it, forced — after failing to get Trump to take a “few more fast questions” — to stand awkwardly beside a wobbling 78-year-old who’s a coin-flip away from the presidency.
“Sir, do you want to play our song and greet a few people?” Noem asked at one point.
“What song?” Trump responded.
“Well, you said you wanted to close with a specific song,” Noem reminded him.
Trump appears lost, confused, and frozen on stage as multiple songs play for 30+ minutes and the crowd pours out of the venue early pic.twitter.com/6r0TE2qCYM
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 15, 2024
The music then played for some time, interrupted only when “Trump began to speak again, as if remembering that he was still at an event that was billed as a town hall,” the Post reported. Trump urged people to vote (“on January 5,” he mistakenly said earlier in the evening) before returning to his playlist.
Even before his latest performance there were growing concerns about Trump’s fitness for office. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, the former president's speeches have “grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past,” the former president more than once appearing “confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality.”
In September, Trump claimed that he had received rapturous applause during what was widely seen as a disastrous debate performance; in fact, there was no clapping because there was no audience at all. Then earlier this month, Trump, at one in a series of what the Times referred to as “disjointed” events, claimed that “the president of North Korea … is basically trying to kill me,” appearing to confuse the Stalinist dictatorship with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump with a record of telling falsehoods to the press, tried to put a positive spin on a peculiar evening.
“Something very special is happening in Pennsylvania right now at the Trump townhall,” he wrote on X. Trump “is unlike any politician in history, and it’s great.”
But even friendly media outlets found it hard to make sense of this special performance, coming with about 20 days to go until the presidential election (on Nov. 5).
“Well, this is a very strange Trump Town Hall in Pennsylvania,” Bryan Llenas, a Fox News correspondent, posted on X. “I don’t know what happened tonight other than two people needed medical attention and it became clear Trump didn’t think Q/A should continue,” he wrote. “So for about an hour there was an impromptu concert. Idk. Goodnight.”
Well, this is a very strange Trump Town Hall in Pennsylvania. It turned on a dime after two Trump supporters passed out/fainted/needed medical attention in back to back episodes that paused the Q and A format for a while.
— Bryan Llenas (@BryanLlenas) October 15, 2024
The Q and A portion never restarted after four questions… pic.twitter.com/hIgV8HlEhk
Others were more willing to speculate.
“The October surprise is that Trump has completely lost his marbles,” Anthony Scaramucci, the former president’s one-time White House communications director, posted on social media.
The Harris campaign likewise used the incident to argue that Trump, who would be the oldest president in history at the end of another term, is suffering the sort of decline that drove President Joe Biden out of the race.
“Trump appears lost, confused, and frozen on stage as multiple songs play for 30+ minutes and the crowd pours out of the venue early,” the Democratic campaign posted on X.
The Democratic candidate herself adopted a tone of trolling concern about the health and well-being of a man whose musical performances are punctured by racist lies and threats to deploy the military against “the enemy from within.”
“Hope he’s okay,” the vice president wrote on social media.
