Donald Trump does utterly disastrous Joe Rogan interview, then shows up hours late for his own rally after people have gone home
Even as Kamala Harris was holding a rally with Beyonce and Willie Nelson and more than 30,000 supporters, Donald Trump tried to hold a rally of his own. Or should we say that he tried not to hold a rally? Trump ended up arriving about three hours late for his own rally, after local media footage had shown thousands of people getting bored and going home. Trump took the stage looking like a sullen zombie.
The official excuse for Trump’s extreme tardiness was that his interview with Joe Rogan was running long. Really? Trump’s people are that bad at scheduling things and keeping things moving? The kicker is that once the Rogan interview was released, it was barely an hour long, meaning it couldn’t possibly have been the reason Trump took the stage three hours late.
The Rogan interview was a total bust for Trump. In fact it was so bad it probably cost him votes, even among Rogan’s anything-goes audience. Trump sounded like a confused dementia patient, at once frantically rambling and displaying no energy whatsoever. At one point Trump was so unconvincing in his claim that he won the 2020 election, even Rogan laughed out loud at him.
It’s enough to make you wonder what was going on. By the time Trump showed up for the Rogan interview, he surely already knew that he was about to get massively outdrawn by Kamala Harris in terms of rally crowd size. Is this why Trump was so sullen and depressed during the Rogan interview? Is that why Trump basically no-showed for his own rally? Did he intentionally show up after people had started going home, so he could tell himself that there had been 30,000 people there waiting for him before they left? Was Trump locked in the bathroom refusing to come out because he didn’t want to have to face a tiny crowd?
It’s tough to say precisely what happened tonight. But wow is this ever getting ugly for Donald Trump down the stretch. As much as Kamala Harris is ramping up to a perfect crescendo, Trump is unraveling in jarring fashion down the stretch.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report