Melancholy music. A tone of hopeless wandering. Despair.
Readers who are disgusted by Donald Trump tend to underestimate him.
Music is a form of body language.
Trump rallies experimented last summer with turning on a musical underscore for the final minutes of a Trump rally. Rally-goers responded by holding up the index finger of an outstretched arm -- a salute. It was a Q-Anon gesture. It appeared reminiscent of a crowd at a 1940 Hitler speech or perhaps religious devotees of a Jim Jones or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Oregonians had direct exposure to cultists in the early 1980s when a religious group attempted to take over the government in the town of Antelope in tiny Wasco County, using among other things, mass poisoning of the town's citizens to suppress the vote.
Trump has grown bolder. His campaign returned to playing a musical underscore to Trump's voice in the closing minutes of his speeches. Here are 38 seconds of it, from a CSPAN clip:
Transcript:
Russia and China are holding summits to carve up the world, and perhaps most importantly we are a nation that is no longer respected or listened to on the world stage. No respect. They think we are run by fools. We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke. and we are a nation that is hostile to liberty, freedom, and faith. We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin. . . .
Trump is a skilled performer in front of an audience. His 2016 rally on a spring evening in Boca Raton drove that home to me. He arrived in a helicopter which circled overhead. Upbeat music pounded out of giant speakers. A huge flag. A speech crescendoing in "win and win and win and win." And then the music theme to the movie The American President.
In my March 15, 2016postI warned that Trump understood stagecraft. I warned that he was formidable and might win, something widely thought laughable at the time.
Trump's message is simple and clear and Hillary is complicated and boring. The problems and solutions posited by Trump are memorable--build the wall; foreigners take advantage of us; don't take lobbyist money; America for Americans; win win win win. Hillary lists policies and disadvantaged groups and legislative solutions that will be slow and difficult. Trump is a better salesman and showman. He made the grandest of Grand Entrances. All hail the great man. It was show biz great theater and it worked, because it was very good show biz and very good theater.
I saw it coming.
The musical underscore he is using is easy to mock. It is over-the-top exaggerated. It is too much. The Spotify app immediately links the music to Richard Feelgood's site where he has musical clips with different moods. This one is titled Wwg1wga, which stands for "Where We Go One We Go All." Surely the Q-Anon tie is a mistake. Right? Isn't this too much?
I remember getting coaching in a drama class I took in high school. Gesture big, the teacher said. You are on stage. An opera singer needs to project all the way to the people in the back rows. Be unmistakable.
Trump gestures big. Trump isn't just saying America is a cesspool of ruin. This is operatic. He is performing it. Words, tone, setting, staging, and music. He has a message: America is a cesspool and he will fix it.
Biden, like Hillary, is competent, complicated, and compared to Trump, unexciting. If people are restless for change -- and I think they are -- this bodes ill. Trump is crazy and vile, but he knows how to project his message.
OMG this clip is from my home town. Heartbreaking, but then who am I to criticize? I live in Jackson County where the official opinion of the local Republican Party is all in on "the Big Lie."
Campaigning is theater. Governing is mostly not. Voting for people is not the same as embracing an ideology. When the two become one we have demagogues and worse. Trump has, by intent, a loyal personal following. Biden, an effective governor, does not. When the Democrats get back to blending theater with policy, as Trump has done, they'll stand a better chance when the votes are counted.