When Donald Trump’s microphone stopped working for about 15 minutes during a presidential campaign speech in downtown Detroit on Friday night, you had to wonder what the Republican candidate might have said or done in that precious but lost quarter-hour.
He might have praised the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, the way he did Saturday night in a Pennsylvania speech that went beyond cringy.
He might have insulted the Motor City again, the way he did in the previous week at the Detroit Economic Club, when Trump said the election of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris would make the whole nation as bleak and desolate as Detroit.
Or, Disco Donnie might have dee-jayed another record hop, as he did earlier last week at a “town hall” near Philadelphia.
After two audience members fainted, Trump dropped the question-and-answer format and played music from the stage for 30 minutes, bopping and swaying his big body to tunes that included the gay anthem “YMCA.” Like old Arnie, Big Donnie is “all man.”
After the sound returned at Huntington Place Friday, the most stunning reaction by the former president was not that he threatened to stiff the technicians on the bill. He does this all the time with campaign contractors and lawyers. He did brag about his personal volume.
“I’m blowin’ out my voice,” he said. “I’ll scream like hell into the mic.”
No, what seemed out of character for Trump — after he wandered around the stage with his back to the audience and to the camera — is that he blamed nobody for a conspiracy of high-tech sabotage to shut his big mouth.
He didn’t blame criminal terrorist immigrants of color from foreign prisons and lunatic asylums for swimming across the international border of the Detroit River from Canada to pull plugs under what used to be called Cobo Hall.
Nor did Trump accuse left-wing-liberal-progressive-socialist-communist-Marxist-Democrats and their misguided local union supporters of robbing him of his First Amendment rights by flipping a power switch in the same building where Trump’s thugs tried to riot after falsely accusing Joe Biden of stealing the 2020 election.
Indeed, when he resumed his prepared, rambling, and sometimes incoherent speech, Trump even managed to avoid the creepy joke — ostensibly about Biden — that he passed off as humor on the previous night in New York at the Al Smith dinner. Oh, but he must have been tempted.
“Right now, we have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have the mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the audience at the Catholic charity event on Thursday. “There’s a person that has nothing going. No intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”
Heh-heh-heh. Note how Trump “humor” is never self-deprecating and always has a targeted victim as the butt of the joke. All the better if that victim is a progressive woman of color. He also joked to the Catholic gathering that some men might vote for Harris, but their wives and mistresses will vote for Trump.
He would know, because Trump knows dames. He famously once bragged about grabbing women by their genitals as a means of introduction, like a handshake. Note also the curious verb Trump used last week on a podcast to describe a Hollywood movie producer accused of sex crimes.
“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlonged,” Trump told right-wing bully Dan Bongino. The word “schlong” is defined as “a rude word for penis.”
To use it in this context is to imply that Weinstein is a victim, kind of like the late Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein. Trump, who vows to crack down on sex education in public schools, was found liable in a civil trial by a jury this year for sex abuse.
His 34 felony convictions involve a different matter — a hush money payment to a porn star. No wonder “evangelicals” love Trump, who also sells Bibles.
In the warmup acts to Trump’s appearance on Detroit’s riverfront, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers warned the audience of males in female locker rooms, which is Republican code for homophobia and opposition to the progress of the LGBTQ+ movement.
Once Trump took the stage, he ridiculed Harris for the pronunciation of her first name (“I don’t give a damn if I don’t pronounce it right”).
And he promised “the largest deportation program in American history.” (Psst! Mr. President! Sir! Might this include Michigan’s many Arabs and Muslims or Spanish-speaking people?)
One word never heard Friday from the podium in Detroit was “abortion,” an issue with a strong undercurrent in every election since 2022, when Trump’s kangaroo Supreme Court of religious fundamentalists abolished a woman’s right to choose reproductive health care.
On the “Right Side Broadcasting Network” — which streamed online every minute of the Detroit rally — viewers were urged in commercial breaks to buy the red, white, and blue “Trump Combat Knife” for only $150 from something called “PatriotAddict Deals.” Makes a great gift!
Back on the scene at the old Cobo, the young fellow co-anchoring the show gushed into his working microphone that Trump is “a man of true masculinity.” Perhaps the kid over-stated his case, but it sure is true that his large, loud, orange-faced, yellow-haired demagogue is one big schmuck.
