Camp David for tasteless dipshits.......

Donald Trump is washed

Drew Magary is bored by Donald Trump

Drew Magary

I learned my lesson from the 2016 election, and you have as well. I’m not gonna write off Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential chances. I’m not gonna treat his return campaign, which he formally announced last night, as a gag. I’m not gonna play the fartsniffer politico and be like, “Well I’m not even gonna cover this because it’s just so unserious.” Even the New York Post pulled a version of that little stunt this morning, which was both amusing but also not something I care to replicate. That would not only be foolish, it would be (political ad voiceover voice) dangerous. Trump is still painfully relevant to the Republican Party, and therefore worth taking seriously even if you lack the stamina to do so anymore.

That said, Donald Trump is fucking washed. 

He’s so washed, he’s now brighter than his own dental work. I saw it for myself last night when I watched him give a speech at Mar-a-Lago — Camp David for tasteless dips—ts — that was over an hour long but which he couldn’t get through quickly enough. For the vast majority of this speech, Trump didn’t even bother to look away from the prompter. He read off the copy so fast it was like he had an appointment with a sex worker he had to keep. That’s right: we got Prompter Trump. Low Energy Trump.

I was treated to a few greatest hits during this standard fiasco: “a beautiful thing,” “the Hispanic,” “like you’ve never seen before,” “we call it the China Virus,” etc. But none of Trump’s bulls—t last night had that tangy, Miracle Whip zip that forces everyone to pay attention to him and then despise themselves for doing so. This was not appointment television. This was like a s—ty company meeting that you go out of your way to blow off.

I’ll spare you all the lies that Trump told to the audience last night because the internet only has infinite space to list them, because other journalists have already debunked a few choice ones, and because I don’t need to be told Donald Trump is lying to know he’s lying. Lying is what he does. If Trump told me he needed a drink of water, I’d immediately believe that water was an imaginary compound conceived by talking dragons. Lying is the central tenet of Trump’s newfound commitment to election denialism, and voters rejected that ethos unanimously two weeks ago, so much so that only Arizona gubernatorial reject Kari Lake — a miserable lady who dresses up just to drink white wine in the back of an airplane — is still clinging to its potential. The rest of us are pretty goddamn tired of it all.

And so, by all appearances, is Donald Trump himself. Trump is still, like Dan Snyder, the subject of multiple investigations/lawsuits and an inviting target for dozens more. There’s a very good chance that Trump is running in 2024 only as a last-ditch effort to evade formal prosecution, or it could simply be because he’s another bored rich asshole who doesn’t know what to do with himself. All I know is that last night’s announcement had all the magic of Michael Jordan un-retiring a second time to play for the Washington Wizards.

It was the first time I’ve seen Trump talk since he egged on a loose battalion of brain-dead hooligans to storm the Capitol, and about the only thing better about him this time around was his choice of bronzer. He clung to the prompter like it was a banister. He told everyone at Mar-a-Lago that they were in great trouble, presumably because of the buffet of room-temperature Big Macs and average Caesar salad surely awaiting them for dinner. He tried pulling a Bernie Sanders by saying, “This will not be my campaign; this will be our campaign.” Which … why would I want that from Donald Trump? I don’t come to this man for UNITY. I come to watch him declare everyone around him — from entire races of people to Melissa Rivers for some reason — as The Enemy.

Sure enough, after five cursory minutes of promising everyone that he would bring people together in a way that no ordinary politician ever could, Trump finally got around to bitching about all of the haters and losers: the far left, China, Democratic mayors, American cities in general, the dreaded MS-13 (which I’m not even certain exists anymore), “illegal alien criminals,” “Barack Hussein Obama,” and all of the other very bad people. He also praised China for their drug policy, so much as it can be called one. “If you get caught dealing drugs in China,” he mused with great admiration, “you have an immediate and quick trial, and by the end of the day, you are executed. That’s a terrible thing, but they have no drug problem.”

That’s the Trump I pay for. I’m here for a speech that’s 100% coda: a single sentence that runs on to the horizon, punctuated by moments of silence as the rusty gears of the man’s brain grind violently against one another while he concocts stupid-and-yet-somehow-highly-original nicknames for his nemeses, and mood shifts more erratic than that of a stray dog on cocaine. That’s the good s—t. Inject that right into my veins and then tell me that my insurance won’t cover it.

And while I got a little of that Trump last night (on street gangs: “They like using knives, because a knife is more painful,” LOL OK Joker), what I mostly got was an hour of torpid horseshit. No election denialism. No high praise for our beautiful Capitol rioters. No bragging that he could have fucked Rue McClanahan but chose not to. No reducing Larry Hogan to zero percent in any 2024 poll by christening him “Large Larry.” No extended roasts of Ron DeSantis, going on about how the Florida governor is, “a very short princess … I call him Princess Ronnie … who likes Disney World as a child or a gay would …” None of that signature Trump magic that we’ve all grown so … well, I guess “accustomed to” would be the accurate phrasing there. All of it left me more bored than angry. This Donald Trump can’t afford to bore people, but holy s—t is he ever doing just that.

Perhaps that’s why so many of Trump’s donors are fleeing. Perhaps that’s why the political media has sprinted to christen DeSantis as a rising star, even though his attempted soft ethnic cleansing of his home state’s non-hetero population should earn him far more derisive labels. Perhaps that’s why Ivanka is bailing on the campaign, which is a shame because I love it when everyone tells Ivanka Trump that she’s a piece of shit. Perhaps that’s why so many of Trump’s hand-picked candidates this election cycle got drubbed. None of this is novel anymore, which means that Trump is just like the rest of them now. And he can’t be as powerful as he once was if the veil is off and his pure commonness is laid bare for all to see. 

Trump can still win in 2024, of course. We’ve all seen it before. But to do so, he’s gonna have to be more Trump than he was last night. And even then, voters are now fully immune to him. I felt nothing at all watching Trump last night. Not rage. Not hopelessness. Not amusement. Just nothing. I’m over him, and judging by recent events, so is everyone else. He might as well already be dead.