Trump is losing his audience
We all know how important crowd size is to Donald Trump. That’s why liberals and Democrats enjoy sharing video clips on social media of his campaign rallies in which there appear to be lots of empty seats. But I think liberals and Democrats are missing the forest for the trees. Crowd size is not as important as crowd interest. The question isn’t whether they’re coming. It’s whether they’re staying. They aren’t.
About 7,000-8,000 people attended Trump’s rally on Friday in eastern Pennsylvania, according to Mary Wheeler. Another reporter at the venue (for the New York Post) said it can hold around 10,000. About an hour into Trump’s speechifying, however, attendees started heading for the exits, according to USA Today reporter Zac Anderson. “Looks like people are starting to trickle out of the Wilkes-Barre Trump rally as he goes past the hour mark. There appears to be more empty seats.”
Why aren’t they staying?
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former Trump White House spokeswoman who’s now co-host of “The View,” suggested a reason. “One I keep hearing from voters is simply exhaustion,” she wrote Monday (my italics). “The ‘Trump Show’ appealed to many who were frustrated with the Washington status quo and were willing to try something totally different. Trump is running for a third time – and a fourth time if you count his soft-run in 2012. Many voters who liked his policies on the economy, border, etc., are fatigued over the drama that comes with Trump.”
Griffin wasn’t talking about crowd sizes and she wasn’t talking about Trump voters. She was speaking more generally about the kind of voters Trump needs to win the election, but isn’t currently attracting. US Senator Lindsey Graham echoed that same sentiment over the weekend. To appeal to these so-called independent voters, especially suburban white women, Graham urged the former president to stop with the name-calling, the outbursts and otherwise incendiary rhetoric. Trump the policymaker can win the election, he told “Meet the Press.” But “Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not.”
However, Trump voters and indie voters have a lot in common when you consider the other meaning of the word exhaustion. Not only are people exhausted in the sense that they are tired. They are exhausted in the sense that they are bored. Their interest appears depleted. They came for “The Trump Show” Friday. They left after it got boring.
I don’t want to make too much of this, and I don’t have hard data at hand, but this suggests double trouble. Not only is Trump failing to attract the attention of people who might support him, he’s failing to keep the attention of people who do. Some voters aren’t listening, and perhaps never will. However, those who are listening aren’t listening for long. Lindsey Graham is right to warn against alienating indie voters. But he may be wrong to assume Trump voters are in the bag.
But “The Trump Show” isn’t boring because it’s familiar and tedious, as Alyssa Farah Griffin suggested. I think it’s boring because it doesn’t make any sense. It’s like he fired the show’s original creators, but forgot to hire new writers. The result is that he’s nearly always improvising, and the result of that is that he’s nearly always incoherent. Most people aren’t going to try making sense of his incoherence, though. When they get bored, they simply drift away.
This is important to say. The conventional wisdom among Republicans, former Republicans and the reporters who reflect their views is that Trump must stop playing the role of showman to win over indie voters, especially white women. He must stop saying things like he’s much better looking than Kamala Harris. (Yes, he said that.) They say he needs to stick to policy. “Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” Charlie Dent, a former GOP congressman, told The Financial Times. “The focus is still all about maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m sceptical that the maga base will be large enough to win.”
But the conventional wisdom among Republicans seems misguided. He’s already stopped playing that role of showman. Indeed, he may no longer be capable of playing it again. Something is very wrong with him. He’s habitually incoherent. His press conferences usually devolve into a word salad so impenetrable it’s like a foreign language. Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien has said he’s not well. Point is: A showman never loses his audience. But Donald Trump appears to be losing his.
Crowd interest, more than crowd size, is worth our attention, because it tells us rally goers are seeing something that the rest of us are not. I suspect what they are seeing, though perhaps without knowing it, is that Trump can’t communicate anymore. He talks and he talks, to be sure, but it’s not talking that makes any kind of sense. It’s gibberish, and gibberish never persuaded anyone to do anything. It can’t even persuade Trump voters to stay in their seats. Too many people are spending too much time parsing the meaning of this or that remark. Rally goers aren’t bothering, though. They are telling us the truth.
The story of “The Trump Show” is no longer spectacular.
It’s gibberish now.
And gibberish is boring.