Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Greensboro, N.C., in March.Credit...Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Donald Trump himself.
It was Super Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, and the people — his people — were feeling good. They had arrived around sundown, disgorged from a small fleet of buses and ushered into the grand ballroom. Some of them were old hands at this place, they explained with great pleasure. Others, first-timers, gawked visibly at the chandeliers the size of jet turbines, the gilded molding and the grape-dangling cherubs, all that marble and mirror.
“It’s not quite Versailles,” a county party chairman mused aloud, “but it’s the closest thing we have here.”
Screens around the room were tuned to Fox News, relaying word of one state primary triumph after another, and the mood was expansive. Forgiato Blow, a self-described “MAGA rapper,” was showing off a heavy Cuban link chain, from which dangled a lemon-size bust of the man we had all come to see. His face was rendered in solid gold. His diamond eyes peered out from beneath the brim of a red cap, the cap, emblazoned with his once and future promise to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.
The man himself appeared at 10:14 p.m., strolling into the ballroom from somewhere in the private depths of the club. For a strange moment he stood there, alone and mostly unnoticed in the doorway, a ghost at his own party, before the music kicked in and he made his way to the stage.
He began with some thank-yous and superlatives, some reminiscences about his presidency and denunciations of the one that followed. Then he got down to business. “We’re going to win this election, because we have no choice,” Donald J. Trump told us. “If we lose this election, we’re not going to have a country left.” He said it in a tone he might have used to complain about the rain that had doused Palm Beach that weekend.
“We love you!” someone shouted.
“We love you, too — and we love our country,” Trump replied, momentarily upbeat, before souring again. “This is a magnificent place, a magnificent country. And it’s so sad to see how far it’s come and gone.”
Victory-night speeches are not complicated. You thank the voters and supporters, the brilliant campaign staff, the long-suffering spouse and children. You celebrate the triumphs so far, express measured confidence about the road ahead. But if Trump did most of this on that night of March 5, none of it seemed to hold his attention very long, sometimes not even for the duration of a sentence, before he caromed off the prepared material back into the darkness.
Trump during his Super Tuesday victory party at Mar-a-Lago.Credit...Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
By the time the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” came on, he was already gone.
As the guests were ushered back onto their buses, Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime consigliere and presidential-pardon recipient, materialized before a small gaggle of reporters and reiterated what the former president said. “This will be our last election,” he said, “unless we elect Donald Trump.”
I had been attending Trump’s speeches on and off for several months by this time, as I had in the last days of the 2016 campaign and then throughout and after his presidency. Watching him in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina this campaign season, it was clear that something had shifted.
Trump is among the world’s most obvious political creatures, but the sheer constancy of his public communications, their assaultiveness and density, has sometimes made it hard to see clearly their evolutions, to trace changes in the signal through the formidable noise. His demands on the world’s attention make it paradoxically easy not to pay attention to the particulars. Most Americans, in any case, made up their minds about him one way or another long ago. This has made Trump appear more static than he actually is — made it harder to see how the Trump presidency, which profoundly changed America, also changed Trump.
When I got home from Mar-a-Lago, I pulled up a video of him from Super Tuesday 2016, addressing his supporters in the same ballroom under similar circumstances. I was stunned by how different the man on the screen was from the one I had just seen. The Trump of 2016 had a spring in his step as he congratulated Ted Cruz on winning Texas, ribbed a vanquished Chris Christie, bantered and parried with the assembled reporters. His digressions into the many evils he sought to remedy were brief, and he seemed eager to get back to all he had accomplished, and all he would accomplish.
The longtime Trump associate Roger Stone at the Mar-a-Lago victory party on Super Tuesday.Credit...Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
Trump’s critics were right in 2016 to observe the grim novelty of his politics: their ideology of national pessimism, their open demagoguery and clear affinities with the far right, their blunt division of the country into us and them in a way that no major party’s presidential nominee had dared for decades. But Trump’s great accomplishment, one that was less visible from a distance but immediately apparent at his rallies, was the us that he conjured there: the way his supporters saw not only him but one another, and saw in themselves a movement.
That us is still there in Trump’s 2024 speeches. But it is not really the main character anymore. These speeches, and the events that surround them, are about them — what they have done to Trump, and what Trump intends to do in return.
“I keep telling people: ‘Watch the speeches,’” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign chief executive and, briefly, chief White House strategist, told me recently. “When you look at the content of what he’s putting out there, he couldn’t telegraph this any more clearly: what he stands for, and what he’s up against.”
Trump has always said what he means in his speeches. He is also constantly obscuring it, by instinct or design, contradicting his own statements or waving them off as jokes, scribbling over them with tangents and lies and just plain weirdness. One of the first things I noticed watching him last year, though, is that this is less true than it once was.
As with everything about Trump, what was once revolutionary has become institutionalized. The insult-comic riffs and winding tours through the headlines are more constrained and repetitive now, his performer’s instincts duller than they once were. The brutalist building blocks of the prepared speech, its stock-photo celebrations of national triumphs (“We stand on the shoulders of American heroes who crossed the ocean, settled the continent, tamed the wilderness, laid down the railroads, raised up those great beautiful skyscrapers … ”) and lamentations of national decline, now stand out in clearer relief.
They build to a rhetorical climax that is echoed from one speech to the next. In Claremont, N.H., in November, he said:
2024 is our final battle.
With you at my side — and you’ve been at my side from the beginning — we will demolish the deep state. We’ll expel, we’re going to expel, those horrible, horrible warmongers from our government. They want to fight everybody. They want to kill people all over the place. Places we’ve never heard about before. Places that want to be left alone.
The great silent majority is rising like never before. And under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. You’re going to be forgotten no longer. With your help, your love and your vote, we will put America first.
And today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.
The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.
Our threat is from within.
No major American presidential candidate has talked like this — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Trump himself. Before November 2020, his speeches, for all their boundary crossings, stopped short of the language of “vermin” and “enemies within.”
When I asked the political historian Federico Finchelstein what he made of the speech, he replied bluntly: “This is how fascists campaign.”
Trump at the March rally in Greensboro, N.C.Credit...Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
For roughly the entirety of Trump’s political career, his detractors have debated, exhaustively and exhaustingly, whether the “f” word is reasonably applied to him. Finchelstein, the chairman of the history department at the New School for Social Research, was for years among those who argued it was not. In his 2017 book, “From Fascism to Populism in History,” he contended that the most useful historical point of reference for the newly elected American president was the postwar populism of Juan Perón, the president of Finchelstein’s native Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s and again in the 1970s.
An alumnus of a military dictatorship who served as an attaché in Mussolini’s Italy, Perón admired the fascist regimes of interwar Europe. But he also understood that repeating them was both undesirable and probably impossible following the defeat of the Axis powers. If authoritarianism had a future, it was not in openly overturning democratic systems but in working inside them.
The result was what Finchelstein called a series of “authoritarian experiments in democracy.” Perón won elections fairly within a democratic system and never tried to overturn it, as Mussolini and Hitler did. At the same time, he often acted autocratically in office, exiling opponents, removing unfriendly judges from the bench and shuttering hostile newspapers.
Like the fascists, Perón redefined “the people” as an exclusive, not inclusive, category: an us defined against a them. Where he differed, crucially, was in claiming the mantle of democracy — and presenting himself as its perfection. In populism, the leader had arrived to beat back a threat to the will of the people that came from within the country’s democratic system — and that, absent the leader’s vigilant rule, would return to cause worse destruction. Perón’s enemies were not just Perón’s enemies; they were the enemies of democracy.
Before Trump, no American populist had enjoyed the stature and structural conditions necessary to succeed at populism’s essential act of mashing a democracy into the shape of his own face: of winning a presidential election. His 2017 Inaugural Address, which came to be known as his “American carnage” speech, was a Perónist speech, Finchelstein argued at the time. It presented Trump’s inauguration as a total break with American history. It announced the defeat of a threat that came from within the system and the perfection of American democracy, now contained within the form of Donald Trump.
The worldview the speech presented was unapologetically us against them, but like Perón’s, it was decidedly heavier on the us. “Jan. 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again,” Trump told his admirers on the National Mall. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.”
But populism, when it attains power, is unstable. In the leader’s story, they have a tendency to swell in number and significance as the impossible promises and prophecies the leader has offered us inevitably fail to materialize; us moves from a triumphant majority to an unjustly embattled one, surrounded on all sides by enemies. This was of course the story that Trump told, from his early grievances against the “deep state” through his first impeachment trial and then the 2020 election and beyond.
And populism is in a sense a retroactive label, because the true test of a government is how it ends. Some prominent historians of authoritarianism who resisted describing Trump as a fascist throughout his presidency publicly changed their minds after Jan. 6. Finchelstein was among them — almost. His current preferred term for Trump and like-minded figures like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and the title of his forthcoming book about them, is “wannabe fascists.”
The term implied directional movement more than classification. “Perón was a fascist who wanted to reformulate himself in democratic terms,” Finchelstein told me, “whereas Trump seems to be doing the opposite.”
But its equivocation also suggested the continuing difficulty of describing Trump. How do you think about a politician who openly veers into fascist tropes but, in four years in office, did not generally govern like one? Who — sworn testimony before the Jan. 6 committee clearly showed — did try by several means to overturn his electoral defeat, but in the end left the White House as his opponent was sworn into office?
On one level, the answer hinged on how the people — his people — heard what he said. His long pattern of self-contradiction and denial, of jokes that might or might not be jokes, meant that “he can talk in different layers to different people,” Finchelstein said. “There are people who take what he says literally. There are people who don’t take it literally. And people who ignore it as rhetoric. He’s talking to all these people.” The question was what they heard.
The first time I went to see Trump on the 2024 campaign trail was in Derry, N.H., in late October. A disorienting aspect of Trump’s new, harsher campaign rhetoric is that in every other way, his campaign is far more routine than his previous rally tours. The old pirate-ship energy and unpredictability that used to define these events, even during his presidency, has mostly dissipated, replaced by clean-cut staff members in personalized vests and windbreakers.
The crowds, too, are different. The serious Trump Train lifers, the parking-lot characters I met at rallies past, are still there, but in Derry, they were far outnumbered by the stock extras of New Hampshire in primary season: prim New England town-meeting types, wild-eyed libertarians, performatively uncommitted voters adding to their collection of candidate sightings.
The woman standing next to me had brought her daughter, who looked about 11. Somewhere on the far side of the crowd, some young men started a chant of “Let’s go Brandon,” a ubiquitous MAGA meme originating with a TV sports reporter’s mishearing of a crowd at a NASCAR race chanting “[expletive] Joe Biden!”
The girl asked her mother what it meant. “It was a name flub,” the mother said quickly. “Biden called someone Brandon by accident.”