We know that Donald Trump is an insecure narcissist and wants desperately to project the image that he is massively loved by everyone. We also know that he is an inveterate liar. These things come together when he lies about the crowds at his rallies and at his inauguration. On Wednesday he kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign at a rally in Florida. Suspiciously, he held it in an arena that only seats 25,000 people, a decent size but not huge and that was likely because he loves to boast that he gets sellout crowds at his rallies and that there is massive overflow. And sure enough, the Trump people claimed that they had issued over 100,000 tickets and had to arrange for a screen outside so that the huge overflow crowd could see their hero.
But Stephen Colbert sent ‘Jim Anchorton’ and ‘Jill Newslady’, two ‘reporters’ from ‘Real News Tonight’ to see for themselves and they found that there were plenty of empty seats inside the arena and hardly anybody outside watching the giant TV screen. What is even funnier is that at the last minute the credentials of Colbert’s ‘reporters’ were cancelled. So what did they do? They went online and got tickets for this allegedly over-subscribed event and simply walked in!
Colbert gave a summary of Trump’s speech where Trump seemed to be still campaigning against Hillary Clinton. What his reporters saw of the crowd was hilarious and starts at the 8:00 minute mark.
Colbert said that his people would give a fuller report the next day.
If Trump cannot get a big crowd for his re-election kick off, that is a bad sign and should cause some concern for his. If he cannot fill up a relatively small arena for a major event like his re-election kick-off, does that mean his fanatical fan base is losing some of its enthusiasm? He could obviously see for himself the empty seats in the arena. I bet that he will deny the video evidence of the disappointing crowd while lambasting his advance people for not filling up the arena and causing the embarrassment.
I was checking something in his speech on the full Fox feed on YouTube, and then went down to take a look at the comments. Truly frightening. Stuff like, “Drain that swamp. You are our forever leader. We owe you our lives. Bless you President Trump bless your beautiful wife Melania. So lucky and blessed to have you in our lives.” and “I don’t care what anyone says. President Donald Trump is my father, mother, sister, brother, uncle, and cousin. He’s everything because he is family.”
Nothing will ever get through to these people.
I did get a kick out of DJ making fun of Biden for promising to cure cancer, while the audience duly laughed (as anyone should). Then Cheeto gets up and says he’ll cure cancer and AIDS and all the diseases and go to Mars, and everyone cheers. The seem immune to cognitive dissonance. Or maybe they just can’t hold a thought in their heads any longer than their Dear Leader can. smh
@ 1 ridana
They seem immune to cognitive dissonance.
They are. Some people are so able to compartmentalize their thoughts that they see absolutely no contradiction in espousing diametrically opposed ideas. One simply calls out the “correct” idea/thoughts/feelings as appropriate. Bob Altemeyer in his work on authoritarianism discusses this quite a bit. It’s scary.
I first ran into this in high school. After an hour in History class discussing the causes and operations of the French and Russian Revolutions, complete with some good secondary documentation, the entire class walked next door to English.
I was totally shocked to hear one student completely contradict our conclusions from the History class and not even notice the slightest inconsistency. This was about 10 minutes after we had left the History class. I was a bit shaken.
Unfortunately these are the type that make perfect
victimssupporters for someone like Trump.You call his diminutive crowd size “disappointing.” I call it Progress,” “encouraging,” or “a hopeful sign.”