Trump Then Digresses

ormer President Donald J. Trump had trouble with his microphone during a campaign rally in Milwaukee.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

 

By Tim Balk

The New York Times

As posted 

 

Donald J. Trump has long sprinkled his speeches with baffling digressions — weighing the relative merits of death by electrocution or shark attack, or comparing immigrants to the “late, great Hannibal Lecter” — sometimes even turning them into recurring bits.

His penchant for peculiar statements was on full display at his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in September, when he falsely claimed that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.

But in the final stretch of the campaign, whether because of fatigue or something else entirely, Mr. Trump seems to be indulging in even more surreal, sometimes vulgar verbal detours. 

Here are some of his strangest digressions from the homestretch of the campaign.

 OCT. 1: SHOULDA BEEN A CONTENDER

‘He wasn’t acting’

 

Donald Trump speaks at a lectern with a campaign sign in front of it. An American flag is behind him.

Former President Donald J. Trump visited a manufacturer in Waunakee, Wisconsin.Credit...Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times

Mr. Trump’s affinity for the 1980s is no secret. But few might have predicted he would devote part of his remarks at a campaign stop a month before the election to grumbling that R. Lee Ermey’s performance as a vicious drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film “Full Metal Jacket” had deserved an Academy Award.

Without naming Mr. Ermey, Mr. Trump recalled that he had been a Marine drill instructor before becoming an actor, and said that he had made the war movie “one of the greatest.”

“He was supposed to get the Academy Award,” Mr. Trump said at an event in Waunakee, Wis. “He should have gotten it. Actually, honestly, he wasn’t acting. But he was unbelievable in that movie.”

OCT. 14: DANCE PARTY OF ONE

‘Let’s just listen to music’

 

Donald J. Trump cut questions short and started playing music after two medical emergencies in the crowd at his town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia.Credit...Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

When two medical emergencies brought a town-hall event near Philadelphia to a pause twice after just five questions, Mr. Trump declared he was no longer in any mood to talk politics or policy. 

“Let’s not do any more questions,” he said after swaying to an interlude of “Ave Maria.” “Let’s just listen to music.”

 For the  next 40 minutes or so,, he rocked from side to side, waved his arms like a conductor, pumped his fists and bobbed his head as a selection of pop and pop-classical songs played, including “Con Te Partirò,” “Hallelujah” and “Y.M.C.A.”

More than once, he demanded that aides crank up the volume.

“I want this to be a really important evening,” he said.

 OCT. 19: LOCKER-ROOM TALK

‘Arnold Palmer was all man’

 

Former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport near Latrobe, Pa.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Addressing a rally crowd in Latrobe, Pa., Mr. Trump spent more than 10 minutes discussing one of the city’s favorite sons: the golfing champion Arnold Palmer, who died in 2016. 

But it was a crude reference to Mr. Palmer’s genitalia that made headlines.

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women,” Mr. Trump said, adding, utterly unnecessarily, that he had deviated from his prepared remarks. “I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’” 

OCT. 23: ROCKET, MAN

‘They just put that thing down so beautifully’

Mr. Trump seemed captivated by SpaceX’s successful midair retrieval of a rocket booster on its descent on Oct. 13. It quickly wound up in his repertory of riffs, though as one that often seemed to go straight over the heads of his listeners.

During remarks at a rally outside Atlanta on Oct. 23, for example, Mr. Trump delivered a vivid but difficult-to-follow description of the SpaceX feat, which he said he had watched while on the phone with Elon Musk.

“All I know is I watched that rocket come down,” Mr. Trump began, comparing the experience to watching a “space-age” movie.

“I’m seeing this rocket — 20 stories tall, something like that, massive — and it used to be white, beautiful, polished white,” Mr. Trump said. “And now it’s all brown from that, like, a million-degree temperature coming down, pouring down, at 20,000 miles an hour. And it’s pouring. And I see that thing is steaming and crazy, and the fire’s all over the place.” 

Mr. Trump effused about the machinery involved, though listeners who hadn’t themselves seen the booster’s retrieval on the news may well have had trouble following him.

“And it lands — and then those two big, beautiful arms, they grab it,” Mr. Trump said. “I said, ‘What the hell was that?’ Nobody’s ever seen anything like that.”

 

OCT. 31: POSITIVE THINKING

‘Obama got less’

 

Former President Donald Trump participated in a fireside chat with Tucker Carlson on Thursday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

In a zigzagging answer during a conversation with Tucker Carlson, who asked him whether he ever contemplated quitting politics, Mr. Trump started by hailing the “power of positive thinking.”

He said he did not “like to look so much in the present” and he did not “like to look in the past,” instead preferring to look to the future. 

But he then pivoted to the past, casting his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election as a success, of sorts, because he had received “millions and millions more votes” than in his 2016 victory, when turnout was lower.

“Obama got less,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012, when far fewer Americans voted than in 2020. “Barack Hussein Obama.”

OCT. 31: AN ABRUPT TRANSITION

‘They throw you on an operating table’

Asked by Mr. Carlson minutes later about immigration into the United States, Mr. Trump offered a confounding response that began with a question of his own: “Why do they want men in women’s sports?”

“Why do they want to have transition — I call them transition operations by the thousands?” added Mr. Trump, seeming to strain to connect the question — or perhaps simply to pivot — to his attack on Biden administration policies that allow for prisoners and federal detainees to receive gender-affirming surgery while in the government’s custody. (The U.S. prison system also provided gender-affirming treatment under Mr. Trump.)

“If you just say, ‘Well, I’m thinking about it,’ they throw you onto an operating table,’” Mr. Trump said, vaguely. “And you say, why do they want to have that? Who wants that?” 

NOV. 1: THE NOT-SO-HOT MIC

‘A pretty stupid situation’

At a rally in Milwaukee on Friday, Mr. Trump said he was facing “a pretty stupid situation”: Some supporters in the arena were making it clear that they couldn’t hear him.

Raging at unnamed aides who he said were responsible, Mr. Trump removed his microphone from its holder, which he said was too low, to bring it closer to his mouth. But holding it was tiring, he said.

“I’m blowing out my left arm, now I’m going to blow out my right arm,” he told the crowd. “And I’m blowing out my damn throat, too.”

He played with the microphone stand as though he was trying to adjust it, then stooped and lurched forward twice with his mouth agape. Observers on social media, where short clips of the moment generated millions of views within hours, suggested that he was pantomiming oral sex.

Eventually, Mr. Trump swatted the stand, bending it on its side.