Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: \u201cAs I was saying \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
The audience loved that. The rallygoers had waited in line for hours in the hot sun to get into the field, and this was their reward. They had made it through warm-up speeches by J. D. Vance, Lara Trump, and Scott Presler, the last of these being the founder of Gays for Trump and the March Against Sharia, who promised any Amish people watching that Trump would \u201cprotect your raw milk \u2026 protect your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.\u201d (One of the wonders of the MAGA movement is how it absorbs other political positions\u2014in this case, crunchiness<\/a> and pro-natalism<\/a>\u2014into one seamless mythology.) After that came the crowd\u2019s moment to rejoice in the defeat of, as Trump put it, \u201ca cold-blooded assassin [who] aimed to silence me and silence the greatest movement, MAGA, in the history of our country.\u201d An opera singer even performed \u201cAve Maria.\u201d<\/p>\n Famously, the Gettysburg address was just 271 words long. Trump\u2019s speech went on for 90 minutes. The contrast between the bits of the speech he read from the teleprompters, which covered \u201challowed places\u201d and monuments to valor, and the ad-libbed sections, which featured digressions about potholes and the Olympic boxing controversy, was stark. How can we say that America has an attention-span \u201ccrisis\u201d when people are volunteering to listen to this stuff?<\/p>\n [Charlie Warzel: Elon Musk has reached a new low<\/a>]<\/p>\n The real highlight of the show, however, was when the former president brought Elon Musk onstage. The billionaire had been posting excitedly all day about his endorsement of the former president\u2014yes, a man who prides himself, Cartman-like<\/a>, on refusing to cede to any outside authority was positively giddy about the chance to publicly swear fealty to Trump.<\/p>\n Musk used to claim that he was a disappointed Democrat, and that he wanted X to reflect the breadth of American opinion. \u201c\u200b\u200bFor Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,\u201d he posted<\/a> in April 2022, as he was in the middle of buying it. Three months later, he argued<\/a> that Trump was too old to run for president again: \u201cit\u2019s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.\u201d<\/p>\n The former president took that about as well as you would expect. \u201cWhen Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it\u2019s electric cars that don\u2019t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he\u2019d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, \u2018drop to your knees and beg,\u2019 and he would have done it,\u201d he posted<\/a> on Truth Social in July 2022.<\/p>\n Musk did not drop to his knees and beg in Butler, but he didn\u2019t have to\u2014he has already made his MAGA loyalism very clear on X. Yesterday he capered behind Trump. Honestly, credit to his 53-year-old knees for being so limber. He gamboled. He frolicked, frisky as a spring lamb, fertile as a spawning salmon, executing a series of small jumps behind the ex-president and exposing a few inches of pallid stomach as his OCCUPY MARS<\/span> T-shirt rode up. \u201cHe saved free speech,\u201d said Trump, who nonetheless looked slightly alarmed at Musk\u2019s exuberance. \u201cHe created so many different great things.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk took the mic and gestured to his MAGA hat\u2014black on black instead of the usual white on red. \u201cAs you can see,\u201d he told the crowd, \u201cI\u2019m not just MAGA. I\u2019m dark MAGA.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier in the proceedings, Vance had painted Trump as the victim of inflammatory rhetoric rather than one of its main proponents. Musk now tried a similar Uno reverse card, arguing that Trump was the only candidate who could be trusted \u201cto preserve the Constitution, to preserve democracy in America.\u201d He showed no awareness that Trump, the latest court filings suggest<\/a>, tried to intimidate his vice president out of certifying the 2020 election results and then reacted with callous indifference when a mob threatened Mike Pence\u2019s life as a result. (\u201cSo what?\u201d Trump is alleged<\/a> to have said.) In between repeatedly apologizing for repeating himself, Musk also managed to say that if Trump did not win, \u201cthis\u2019ll be the last election. That\u2019s my prediction.\u201d<\/p>\n