President Donald Trump closed out his 2020 re-election campaign in much the same way he’s conducted his presidency: off-script, paranoid, repetitive, and catering to the slice of America that loves him unconditionally.
Amid a flurry of campaign rallies and desperate tweetstorms, Trump’s closing pitch to the voters who braved a pandemic and near-freezing temperatures over the past week was a mishmash of petty grievances with political rivals and celebrities, dated pop-culture references, attempts to relive the glory days of his 2016 campaign, disdain for public health guidelines, rambling comments about his appearance, obscure right-wing pet issues, and culture-war staples inscrutable to anyone but the most loyal Fox News viewers.
With the polls showing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in a nearly double-digit national lead and Trump once again needing to pull off an inside straight to eke out a slim Electoral College victory, the president has struggled to put together a comprehensive final message to convince Americans he deserves four more years in the White House.
Indeed, Trump has seemingly been determined to finish out the election on his own terms, disregarding public safety as coronavirus cases spike and resorting to his stand-up shtick at podiums across various battleground states.
As Biden’s closing argument largely centered on promising to tackle the raging coronavirus pandemic, reinvigorating a struggling economy, and bringing civility back to a deeply divided nation, Trump spent the final week of the campaign repeatedly and baselessly accused frontline doctors of falsely diagnosing patients with COVID-19 in order to turn a profit and mocked mask-wearing, bizarrely envisioning a scenario in which California residents were required to wear masks at all times, forcing them to slurp spaghetti and meat sauce through the mask.
He also grumbled that the virus has been getting too much media coverage as he held jam-packed events in coronavirus hotspots, likely resulting in spikes in COVID-19 cases and hundreds of deaths.
“Covid, Covid, Covid is the unified chant of the Fake News Lamestream Media,” Trump tweeted last week, setting the tone for his final pitch. “They will talk about nothing else until November 4th., when the Election will be (hopefully!) over. Then the talk will be how low the death rate is, plenty of hospital rooms, & many tests of young people.”
And in what was all but an inevitability, the president played to a rally crowd when they started a “Fire Fauci!” chant aimed at the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who has become a favorite punching bag of the MAGAsphere despite his overall popularity. “Don't tell anybody, but let me wait 'til a little bit after the election, please. I appreciate the advice,” Trump told the Sunday night audience in Florida after letting the chant die down.
The president, meanwhile, has referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci as an “idiot” and repeatedly criticized him as Fauci has warned that the pandemic will get worse this winter.
The president has also made plenty of time during the last week of the campaign to shout out his closest political allies and biggest boosters in the media—seemingly playing to a small subset of the American voting population that religiously consumes right-wing media.
The president stood silently onstage as the crowd watched videos of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson talking about Biden’s mental acuity, and during lulls in his speeches, he’s tried to rile up the crowd by simply rattling off the names of popular Fox News personalities who support him, garnering cheers from the audience.
At another rally on Friday, the president pointed out sycophantic Fox News host Laura Ingraham in the crowd. She was wearing a mask, Trump noticed, and so he proceeded to publicly tease her. “Is that a mask? No way! Are you wearing a mask?” Trump exclaimed to laughter. “I’ve never seen her in a mask, look at you! She’s being very politically correct, whoa!” (Perhaps ironically, Ingraham has been one of the loudest coronavirus skeptics at Fox and has repeatedly railed against the effectiveness of masks in stemming the spread of the virus.)
While the U.S. continued to set records for its rising number of COVID cases, Trump continued to use his presidential megaphone at the rallies to veer wildly off-script, vamping on various observations he’s had about everything from famous celebrities he’s met to the height and strength of his son Barron to his own physical appearance.
During multiple rallies on Sunday, for example, Trump talked about how cold the weather was, and how the wind was messing up his hair and preventing him from reading easily from a teleprompter.
Elsewhere, over the weekend, while making his final pitch to a crowd of Michigan voters, the president performed a ridiculous impression of famous Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti, the “greatest of all divas,” once refusing to perform due to discomfort. “I’m not a diva,” Trump boasted, reassuring the crowd that he would continue his speech through chilly weather. True to the president’s penchant for celebrity approval, he made sure to let supporters standing in 39-degree weather know that Pavarotti “liked me, for whatever reason. He was very terrible to other people, to me he was nice.”
The president didn’t take as kindly to another famed singer, however, singling out pop superstar Lady Gaga for hitting the campaign trail for Biden. Trump, who 10 years ago described the “Bad Romance” singer as “fantastic,” ominously told his fans on Monday that he “could tell you stories about Lady Gaga.” This came on the heels of the president and his campaign repeatedly painting the Grammy winner as an “anti-fracking activist” in a hamfisted attempt to appeal to Pennsylvania voters. Later in the same speech, Trump pivoted to attacking another pop icon who recently campaigned for Biden, telling the Pennsylvania crowd: “And Jon Bon Jovi, every time I see him, he kisses my ass.”
At the same battleground-state rally on Monday, the president found three other celebrities to whine about: Beyoncé (whose household name he mispronounced as “Beyonsee”), Jay-Z (whom he dinged for using the “f-word”), and Los Angeles Lakers megastar LeBron James, who led his team to the franchise’s 17th NBA championship this year and picked up another Finals MVP award in the process. Gloating that the COVID-impacted NBA Finals struggled in the ratings, Trump declared that he “didn’t watch one shot” of the series while the crowd launched into a chant of “LeBron James sucks.”
“What a crowd!” Trump beamed.
The president also joked that he thought he didn’t need to take a drug made by pharmaceutical company Regeneron because he is a “perfect physical specimen,” but he “decided to take it anyway” when he contracted COVID-19.
In effect, over the final week, Trump turned the dial up on his Borscht Belt stand-up comedy schtick, mostly serving up heaped helpings of red meat to his most rabid supporters. With nearly 100 million votes already cast and fewer and fewer undecided voters left, it would seem the president hoped to rev up his base and perhaps cheer himself up by playing a combination of his greatest hits and debuting new tracks.
During one of his final rallies of the week, Trump grew angry that a microphone didn’t seem to be loud enough. He repeatedly joked that he may not pay the bill for the rally, declared the microphone was the “worst mic” he’d ever used, and seemed to slightly mock an audio technician who came onstage to attempt to fix the microphone.
“I’ll give you the name of his company, never use that company,” Trump said. “Nah, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
While “Lock her up!” chants have always been a regular feature of Trump’s rallies—notably whenever he references his former opponent, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton—the president in the final week directed his supporters to aim their vitriol at both Biden and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was recently the target of a violent kidnapping plot by far-right extremists.
Trump, however, suggested the plan to snatch and potentially kill the governor—a plot that was foiled by federal agents—wasn’t that big a deal. “It was our people that helped her out with her problem,” he said at a Michigan rally last week. “We’ll have to see if it’s a problem, right? People are entitled to say maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t.”
In his closing pitches to the voting public, the president also cheered on the MAGA caravan that attempted to run a Biden-Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas this past weekend—causing his opponent’s campaign to cancel an event—by tweeting “I LOVE TEXAS!” And he took that show on the road, praising the intimidation tactics during a Michigan rally on Sunday, jokingly saying the Trump-flag emblazoned vehicles were merely “protecting” the Biden bus.
The president also sparked “Lock him up!” chants by repeatedly mentioning Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” a reference to Team Trump’s attempt at an October surprise. The president, however, has shown difficulty in deciphering the byzantine elements of the convoluted conspiracy surrounding the emails and materials supposedly obtained from the former vice president’s son, largely sticking with generalized accusations that Joe Biden has received millions of dollars from China. (There are no records of documents that show that the ex-veep was part of any Chinese business dealings.)
The lack of campaign traction for the Hunter Biden laptop story, meanwhile, has prompted Fox News to essentially abandon it in the final days of the election. Trump even seemed resigned to the fact that the controversy had fizzled out, lamenting during a Monday rally in North Carolina that “you can’t have a scandal if nobody writes about.”
Trump did want to let his supports know, however, that he felt he could physically beat up the former vice president, pantomiming a fistfight with Biden while telling rally-goers on Saturday that he’d knock down the Democratic nominee with a “slight slap.”
Trump also at times seemed bored or nostalgic for rosier times in his electoral prospects.
In the waning days of the 2020 campaign, he frequently reminisced about the 2016 election, re-enacting the cable-news channels announcing that he had won various states on election night. He repeatedly took shots at former political rivals including Hillary Clinton and—reaching deep into his back catalog—third-party challenger Evan McMullin. “He came in third. Even crooked Hillary beat that guy. Remember? Shaved his head. Nice shaved head, nice guy,” he snarked.
With the electoral map expanded and Trump being forced to campaign in states he comfortably won in 2016, the president also let it be known in his final campaign week that he was less than thrilled with having to show up at all.
“I shouldn’t even be here. They said I had Georgia made,” he sighed during his Sunday night rally in Rome, Georgia.
The end of each rally, of course, ended with the president dancing a little rumba to The Village People’s “YMCA,” something that has apparently become a big hit in MAGA world.
The good times, however, would end there for many rally attendees. On at least three separate occasions, thousands of the president’s most loyal supporters found themselves stranded for hours in near-freezing temperatures as they waited for shuttle buses to drive them miles back to their parking spots.
