If you are a Trump campaign staffer and you had any access to the stage at his town hall near Philadelphia on October 15th, you shouldn’t have a job anymore. To be fair, three weeks out from the end of a campaign, you don’t have time to hire, so those staffers should be farmed out to… something… ground game in red states maybe. The thing you don’t do is let them anywhere near a place where the Republican candidate might actually be.
Two supporters fainted at that rally. Two people in the crowd required medical attention at that rally, and the common wisdom says there are two appropriate responses to an emergency situation as a VIP: you can use your status to coordinate emergency response or you can get off the stage and allow first responders to act. Those are the options for a good, responsible leader.
There is a third response; one that no sane, responsible person would choose: the fatuous idiot response. It’s the modern equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, a digital “let them eat cake” (yes, I know Marie Antoinette didn’t actually say that.) and Donald Trump chose that option in Philadelphia, during a medical emergency, he danced. In a moment of crisis, where he could have demonstrated leadership or at least a shred of humanity, he decided to try to entertain.
If I’m a messaging staffer for the DNC, I know my first action after seeing the footage from Philadelphia is to build a new ad. You have almost 40 minutes of Trump deciding to let the moment happen around him while he swans about the stage, blissfully unaffected by the misery around him. The ad writes itself.
To be fair, his MAGA followers won’t and don’t care, but to independent and undecided voters searching for a leader, the image of Trump abrogating responsibility, dancing while people at his rally require medical attention, dancing… not even having the decency to answer questions which is why he was holding the town hall in the first place is damning imagery.
I have said, many times in the past that Trump and Harris need to play the political equivalent of error-free ball to win the 2024 election. This is yet another instance, and possibly the worst example of Trump fundamentally failing to do so. Trump’s actions in Philadelphia force you to wonder if he actually wants to win the presidency at all.
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