If this is what he sounds like when he wins, imagine how he would react to defeat.
Donald Trump swept to victory after victory on Super Tuesday, all but clinching the Republican presidential nomination, but you wouldn’t have known it from his joyless victory speech.
For hours his fans had partied in the gilded ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, accompanied by Abba’s Dancing Queen, Elton John’s Rocket Man, Queen’s We Are the Champions and other golden oldies. Waiters glided between them serving pastries, prawns and sausage rolls. Each time Fox News – displayed on four giant TV screens – declared another state for Trump, they whooped and cheered and chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump! USA! USA! USA!”
Then, after 10pm, into this gaudy pageant walked the Grim Reaper, raining on their parade with a 19-minute speech laden with doom and gloom about the state of the nation.
This was Trump as Eeyore.
No balloons, no confetti, no parade of family members on stage and no mention of opponent Nikki Haley. No fun.
“Some people call it an experiment – I don’t call it an experiment,” Trump said of the United States. “I just say this is a magnificent place, a magnificent country, and it’s sad to see how far it’s come and gone … When you look at the depths where it’s gone, we can’t let that happen. We’re going to straighten it out. We’re going to close our borders. We’re going to drill baby drill.”
As the unhappy warrior spoke, 10 guests headed for the exit, apparently worn down by the misery of it all.
The strange thing about Trump’s subdued mood is that this should have been his “I told you so” speech, full of braggadocious crowing over the media and his vanquished foes. After all, when he used Mar-a-Lago in late 2022 to announce his third consecutive run for president, there had been widespread scepticism: Republicans had just flopped in the midterms and it was far from certain whether Trump could beat the coming man, Ron DeSantis.
Who’s got the last laugh now? It should have been Trump on Tuesday night, revelling in the opulence of crystal chandeliers and gold leaf and Corinthian-style columns, after swatting aside a dozen challengers, leading Joe Biden in opinion polls and watching legal dominoes continue to fall his way.
But it turns out he has upended and inverted yet another political convention: optimism. Not for him Ronald Reagan’s morning in America or Bill Clinton’s place called Hope or Barack Obama’s yes, we can. Instead only murder, mayhem and total darkness.
If only he had still been running things, he lamented, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine, Israel would not have been attacked and Iran would be broke. Now inflation is “destroying the middle class, it’s destroying everything”. He added morosely that inflation was called the “country buster”.
But wait, there is one bright spot: the stock market! It’s going gangbusters. According to Trump, this has nothing to do with Biden, “the worst president in the history of our country”, but the Republican frontrunner’s own healthy poll numbers indicating his return.
Then it was back to the bad news of border security and immigration.
“Our cities are being overrun with migrant crime, and that’s Biden migrant crime,” Trump grimaced. “But it’s a new category and it’s violent, where they’ll stand in the middle of the street and have fistfights with police officers. And if they did that in their countries from where they came, they’d be killed instantly. They wouldn’t do that. So the world is laughing at us. The world is taking advantage of us.”
The room of bejewelled, permatanned partygoers was silent. At this point Trump was like the dinner guest who insists on talking about how sausages are made and what dying animals sound like. And he still wasn’t done, riffing on energy independence and how you turn tar into oil. Boring as well as sad.
Maybe his handlers had got to him. Donald, don’t set everyone’s hair on fire. We have to pivot to the general! So it was he did not dwell on his big lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him. But he did grumble about the “weaponisation” of government against a political opponent.
“It happens in third world countries,” he said. “And in some ways, we’re a third world country. We live in a third world country with no borders … We need a fair and free press. The press has not been fair nor has it been free … The press used to police our country. Now nobody has confidence in them.”
The grim list kept coming: the deadly coronavirus pandemic, the loss of American soldiers in Afghanistan. And Trump naturally could not resist circling back for another bite at the border – no matter that he was the one who ordered Republicans to torpedo bipartisan legislation that might have begun to fix the crisis.
“We have millions of people invading our country,” he asserted. “This is an invasion. This is the worst invasion probably.” For good measure, he tossed out an uncheckable fact. “The number today could be 15 million people. And they’re coming from rough places and dangerous places.”
There were polite ripples of applause but not much chanting from a crowd that included men in leather Bikers for Trump vests; a young man sporting a Maga hat and dark suit, white shirt and red bow tie; a woman with an eye patch and Moms 4 Liberty T-shirt; a young boy in a suit with a Stars and Stripes tie; and a tattooed white rapper with a Mayor of Magaville cap and thick golden chain with a giant medallion resembling Trump’s head.
Two days from now, the audience will be somewhat different for Biden’s State of the Union address in Washington. Trump delivered his own version on Tuesday night: the state of the union is bleak. Perhaps that was fitting for a nation digesting the reality that it really will have to do Biden v Trump all over again.
