LATROBE, Pa. — When fascism finally went mainstream in America, it came hawking a $60 made-in-China Bible and shadowed by a 50-foot American flag braced by construction cranes — and it opened with a story about Arnold Palmer’s private parts.
I’d driven nearly five hours into and under the Allegheny ridges of Western Pennsylvania — up and down slopes that got steeper each mile with the volume of Donald Trump flags and yard signs that proclaimed “I’m Voting for the Convict 2024″ — out of a sense that the decline and fall of American civilization has reached a depth that I needed to personally bear witness. It was a fever dream — maybe I could find words that have eluded everyone else.
Just six days earlier, Trump came to the Philly suburbs and turned a supposed town hall into a 39-minute dance party as his deeply confused crowd watched a once and wannabe future U.S. president sway awkwardly to Sinead O’Connor and Luciano Pavarotti or look utterly frozen in the bubble of his 78-year-old head. And yet when the alarm goes off the next morning, it’s still Groundhog Day in America, an election with a 50% chance of the music-trance guy winning. Something both incredibly momentous and weird is happening at the same time.
Now, the sun was nearly setting over the runway at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport. With the most consequential U.S. presidential election since 1860 just 17 days away, about 3,000 to 4,000 of the most die-hard MAGA Trump fans who weren’t exhausted by the campaign and the GOP candidate’s frequent visits to Steelers’ country had been waiting for hours on a sunbaked tarmac. They’d let out the obligatory whoop for the obligatory flyover of Trump Force One, and then finally the man tasked with bringing their country back was on the podium, filtered by bulletproof glass.
Donald Trump’s red meat of mass-deportation camps and R-rated attacks on his opponents would have to wait. Monday’s DJ was now Saturday night’s comedian, with his cult as captive audience. What started out as an obligatory shout-out to Latrobe’s famous native son — Palmer, the late great golfer who brought the sport to your TV screens in the 1960s — went on for five minutes, then 10, then 12. What started as a nice but meandering tale about Palmer’s working-class roots grew into a stone silence during long detours into stuff like types of golf club shafts as the tale grew increasingly instead about Trump — about how his own power and wealth allowed him to claim friendship with this great man.
You are standing in the twilight wondering if this could get any stranger when of course it did. The man who bragged in his first campaign that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him now wants America to know he can tell a penis joke with the cameras rolling and still get elected as the 47th president.
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So I came to Latrobe to try and write the 72-point headline that the Times editors can’t — “PHALLUS-JOKE MAN AND DANCING FOOL COULD LEAD THE FREE WORLD AGAIN” — and to scream at the top of my lungs from the bluffs overlooking this tiny airport that this would-be emperor telling the shower story is actually wearing no clothes. Who will shout that Trump’s “closing argument” is the melding of his increasingly public breakdown with how that might lead to an all-too-real domestic war of midnight raids and armored personnel carriers against the fiction of an “Occupied America”?
Ironically, Trump’s endless Arnold Palmer bit seemed part of an effort Saturday night to prove that the rambling candidate is not “exhausted,” something that his own aides reportedly said after several recent interviews were canceled. But the Republican nominee — kind of like Madonna’s “Sex” phase and shock photos when her 1980s were ending — also appeared to sense that he needs to get more and more outrageous to get attention, after numbing America to his Hitlerian language that immigrants “will cut your throat.”
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on Donald Trump’s Latrobe rally (10.20.2024)
Will Bunch wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer about Donald Trump’s fascist insultfest in Latrobe, PA in which he infamously obsessed about Arnold Palmer.
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