According to this piece in the New York Times, there were some people who waited twelve hours in the Deep Southern heat to see Donald Trump’s Friday night appearance at Ladd-Peebles Stadium, the home of the University of South Alabama Jaguars.
Just as an aside here, the jaguar is an interesting feline. Its jaws are so powerful that they can actually pierce turtle shells. And the jaguar has a killing technique that is unusual: “it bites directly through the skull of prey between the ears to deliver a fatal bite to the brain.”
This evidently explains a lot about the Trump gathering in Mobile.
Trump didn’t fill the 30,000 seat stadium, but he did attract at least one person who was willing to travel all the way from the Golden State to get a firsthand view of The Donald.
Although Mr. Trump has drawn criticism for unveiling few detailed policy proposals, many of his supporters said they were unbothered.
“When he gets in there, he’ll figure it out,” said Amanda Mancini, who said she had traveled from California to see Mr. Trump. “So we do have to trust him, but he has something that we can trust in. We can look at the Trump brand, we can look at what he’s done, and we can say that’s how he’s done everything.”
Hmmm.
Methinks that almost no one from the New York metropolitan area would look at the Trump brand and trust him to do anything but talk a lot of shit. Maybe his brand of bluster sells better the less time you’ve spent riding the train with abandoned copies of the New York Post. I don’t know.
Or maybe you just have to have a passing familiarity with the “classy” and “amazing” Trump casinos in Atlantic City.
Either way, you obviously have to have a short memory if you’ve forgotten that he ran around the country for a year accusing the president of being born in Kenya, which doesn’t even make any sense.
But for some of those in attendance on Friday night, the Birther thing is more of an asset than a flaw. For example, this landscaper has had it up to here with the competition from Kenyan Mexican immigrants.
Still, others said they had plenty of advice for the man they regularly identified in conversation as “Mr. Trump.”
“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,’ ” said Jim Sherota, 53, who works for a landscaping company. “That’d be one nice thing.”
Of course, Trump didn’t offer to set up the Mexican border as a human hunting ground with $25 permits and fifty bucks per pelt. I don’t think Mr. Sherota was disappointed though, and I am sure he’ll never give up the dream. Because, if there’s one thing you need to know about these Alabama folks, it’s this:
“When Alabama people believe in something, Alabama people go full force. We’re not a halfway state; it’s all or nothing,” said Tommy Hopper, 51, a petroleum cargo surveyor who lives near Mobile.
This is why they can actually fill Ladd-Peebles Stadium with 30,000 Alabamans to see a football program that was only established in 2009. Because they’re all or nothing, and football is all.
I was modestly comforted that the waiting audience didn’t grow so impatient as to begin roaring chants of “C.S.A.! C.S.A.!,” although that might have been more honest and forthright than that roaring chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” that actually occurred.
And the other nice thing is that Mr. Trump isn’t your standard run-of-the-mill politician who doesn’t have a clue. It’s so refreshing to listen to someone speak at a political rally without pandering to the crowd:
“As much as I love ‘The Art of the Deal,’ it’s not even close,” Mr. Trump said. “We take the Bible all the way.”
That’s just straight talk, folks, from a con-man-plus-Rotarian.
Donald Trump released that Art of the Deal book in 1987 when I was a senior in high school. I’m forty-five now, and I’m not telling everyone I can still hit a fastball or make a sophomore swoon. You know, I moved on. My knees ache and I’m losing my hair.
But it doesn’t matter. Trump’s got it all wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross: “the night was punctuated with plenty of forceful reminders, including roaring chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
“We take the Bible all the way,” Mr. Trump said.
Right in the political home base of Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
Yes, Senator Sessions was on that stage in Mobile with Donald Trump, and so I must remind you:
In 1986 (otherwise known as the year of Iran-Contra), President Ronald Reagan nominated Beauregard the Third to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. During the Judiciary Committee hearings on his nomination, it became clear that Sessions suffered from a common conservative fear: namely, mouth-rape.
Like so many of his Republican brethren, Sessions was terrified of having things “rammed down his throat” by the NAACP, ACLU, or some “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” guy who might decide to attack his home with a small arsenal.
When it became clear that Jefferson Beauregard the Third was not only named for the president of the Confederacy and one its more more effective generals, but actually held the same beliefs in common with those two gentlemen, the Judiciary Committee declined to send his nomination to the floor. Alabama Senator Howell Heflin decided that Sessions was simply too racist to serve on the bench in Alabama, and so Reagan had to go back to the drawing board.
But being too racist to serve as district judge is not the same thing as being too racist to serve in the U.S. Senate, and Sessions got his revenge. In fact, in a sign of the health of our country’s political discourse, Mr. Beauregard the Third actually spent more time talking in the Senate last year than Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The poster boy for “cracker” spent more time talking than either Sens. Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, who both waged long and delusional faux-filibusters for no coherent reason whatsoever.
Yes, the person who spent the most time speaking into the Senate chamber’s CSPAN cameras last year is a man who couldn’t serve in the judicial branch because of his racism. Nonetheless, he serves as the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts.
Because, GOP.
You’re welcome.
Sincerely,
Doremus Jessup
