"We are making a mistake by pretending the words of the most powerful man in the world are meaningless. They have consequences. The torrent of Trump’s words is exhausting, contradictory, annoying,& more than occasionally amusing. The problem is that there are so many outrages, we are in danger of ignoring them, or dismissing them as mere spectacle. Tuning out the President is hardly the way to understand him. So I decided to watch all of Trump’s rallies in October, as he is stepping up his midterm campaigning. Watching hours of Trump at his rallies, it’s easy to sympathize with the desire to ignore them. But, it’s the hate, and the sense of actual menace that the President is trying to convey to his supporters, that Democrats aren’t just wrong, they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster.
At www.newyorker.com
