Matt Taibbi Shares His Experiences at Trump Rallies

You know that was, why not buy Greenland? Why not buy Greenland? Yeah, when that came out of the world, what's wrong with that? We bought Alaska. Well we leased it Alaska. Sort of. Yeah, we were supposed to give it back but we didn't. It seems like Greenland would be a good place to scoop up, especially as things get warmer. Right? Yeah, exactly. The fucking tweet that he made when he put the Trump Tower, I promise not to do this, and have a giant Trump Tower in the middle of Greenland. I was laughing my ass off. Like, love or hate, that is hilarious. His trolling skills are very good. Top notch. They're fantastic. Oh, he knows how to fuck with people. When he starts calling people crazy or gives them a nickname, like, it's so good because like, it sticks. It sticks. Oh, yeah. I mean, part of me wants to see a Trump-Biden race next year just for that reason. It's just because the abuse will be unbelievable. I mean, not that I'm encouraging that necessarily, but just as a spectacle it's going to be unbelievable. You can tell that he is salivating at the idea of Biden as an opponent. Biden to me is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going for a long hike in the woods. It is not going to work out. It's not going to make it. Yeah, no, he's... He's so faded. He has these moments on the campaign trail where he'll be speaking and these guys do the same speech over and over again so they can kind of do it on cruise control. But every now and then he'll stop in the middle of it and this look of terror comes over. Like, where am I? What town am I in? He confused. He thought he was in Vermont when he was in New Hampshire. I'm sorry. Yeah, he got those states confused. He's like, what's not to love about Vermont? He was in New Hampshire. That can happen obviously, but it happens to him a lot. But he's clearly old. He's not much older than Trump, but he needs to get on the same pills. Yeah, yeah, actually that would be interesting. We should get a GoFundMe to buy speed. You imagine if they just filled him up with steroids and just jacked him up with amphetamines and had him going after Trump. Because I really think he needs something like that. Whatever he's doing on the natch, it's not working. Right, yeah, yeah. He's too tired. He needs a little bit of enhancement. It's not going to work. If he gets the nomination, the Democrats are fucked. I don't see him withstanding the barrage that Trump is going to throw at him. Trump's going to take him out like Tyson took out Marvis Frazier. He's just going to bomb on him. That was a bad fight. But it's going to be that kind of fight. He's just going to bomb on him. He doesn't have a chance. He can't stand with that guy. He's also too impressed with himself. Yes, he's too used to people deferring to him. He thinks the things he says make sense and are cool and are profound when they're just bland. He's just serving bad meatloaf. And he's like, ta-da. And you're like, no, this is bad meatloaf. Yeah, that's how he got to be vice president, by being just bland enough to get whatever constituency Obama was trying to get. But you saw that exchange when he called Trump an existential threat earlier this year and Trump basically, he just went off on him. Joe's a dummy. He's not the guy he used to be. That's going to be every day, every minute of every day. And then other people are going to chime in because they love it. People love piling on. And his fans, oh my God. He's the asshole king where people never had a representative before. There's a lot of assholes out there like, where's my guy? And then finally, bam, look at this. There he is. The asshole made it to the White House. Holy shit, I can be an asshole now. The president's an asshole. He wants me to be an asshole. Lock her up. Lock her up. Yeah, lock her up. Yeah, totally. Do they call that? I mean, that's going to wear on a guy. I mean, have you been to one of Trump's rallies? No chance. I can't. I have to wear a rubber nose and fucking... I've covered them. What's it like? They're unbelievable. First of all, the t-shirts are amazing. You know, like Trump 2020, fuck your feelings. You know what I mean? Trump is the punisher. You know, it's like the punisher skull with the thing. It's amazing. In the crowds, it's like totally out of idiocracy. Is there a fucking punisher skull with a Trump wig on it? Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness, I might have to get one of those. I mean, he's... There's... Oh, the t-shirts. The arm. Did we have one? Jamie, that was such a loud laugh. Jamie, that was such a loud laugh. Oh my God, what a... It's a red, white and blue American flag skull punisher style with a Trump wig on it. So I saw that. I need that shirt. I saw... It wasn't the one, red, white and blue one. It was the one with the black. And I saw that on like an eight year old kid. Oh my God. It was like a mother with her little kids and the Trump punisher skull, but... Do they sell that shirt on Amazon? Can you find out the shirt? I'm sure it's being sold everywhere. It is now. Oh my God. These are stickers and these are being sold over. I know. Whoa. Oh God, these fucking people. I mean, the merch is... He's the most t-shirtable president in history. I mean, Trump 2020, grab him by the pussy again. Oh boy. I mean, they like embrace that shit. The trolling aspect of all of it is like the fun part for his crowds. What they get off on is how freaked out, quote unquote, liberal audiences are by their appearance, their attitude and everything. And they lean into it, you know what I mean? Which is interesting because that kind of like group camaraderie thing that you don't really find that on the campaign trail, the democratic side. It's different. I mean, it's a different vibe entirely, but yeah, it's crazy. Well it's dumb. And that's the thing that he sort of like captured is this place where you can be dumb. Like, it's fun to be dumb and say grab her by the pussy. Like everybody knows that's kind of a dumb thing to say publicly. Of course. But you could say it there because he said it. Yay. You know, build that wall, build that wall. Yay. Like it's like it's this chance to like shut off any possibility of getting over like 70 RPM. Like we're going to cut this bitch off at 70. There's no high function here. We're going to cut it off at 70 and just let it rip. Right. Yeah, totally, totally. And it's funny, the way you say that they all, everybody knows it's a dumb thing to say, right? So like I would talk to people at the crowds and you know, I'll talk to like a 65 year old grandmother. And you say, do you agree with everything that Trump says? And like almost to the last, they all say, well, I wish he hadn't said this particular thing, but they're all there chanting. You know what I mean? Like they're all into it and the crowds are, they're so huge. Like I was in Cincinnati and I was late to one of his events and I made the mistake that I couldn't drive in because they blocked off all the bridges. If you've ever been there, right? You know, I was in the Kentucky side. So I had to walk like three miles away and like walk over a bridge and I thought I was going to be the only person there. And it was like something out of a sci-fi movie. It was just like a line of MAGA hats, like extending over a bridge all the way into Kentucky, like a mile down a road. I mean, they had to turn away thousands of people to get into this event. It was, it's incredible. How many people did it see? It was like 17 or 18,000. It was the, you know, the, um, I forget what the, what arena that is. It's the, it's the indoor one. Look at the size of those places. He's the only one that can pull those kinds of crowds. Period. Oh yeah. There's no, no one, no one can do that. You know, Bernie and Warren have had big crowds. Bernie had a, he had a 25,000 person crowd in Queens a couple of weeks ago. You'll see crowds that big, but Trump's crowds are just dating back to 2016. They're just consistently huge everywhere. And again, this gets back to what I was saying before, all the reporters saw this and they all saw that Hillary was having real trouble getting four and 5,000 people into her events. And so we all, you know, we were all talking to each other like, that's gotta be a thing that's going to play a role in the election eventually, but nobody kind of brought it up or they, they explained it away. Well, I think they felt like if you discussed it and brought it up that somehow or another you were contributing to Trump being, to Trump winning. Right. But that's a, that's a fallacious way to look at it because covering up the reality of the situation, I think created a false sense of security for Democrats. Sure. And they thought they were going to win by a landslide. Yeah. That's what everybody was saying, but it wasn't true. I mean, there were serious red flags throughout the campaign for Hillary and people I think were too afraid to bring up a lot of this stuff because they didn't want to be seen as helping Trump, but that's not what the business is about. We're not supposed to be, you know, helping people. Facts don't have, you know, political indications. We're just supposed to tell you what we see.