MANCHESTER, N.H. – It’s not as catchy as “Make America Great Again,” but President Donald J. Trump unveiled his real new reelection slogan at his rally here last night.
“Vote for me, you have no choice.”
He went back to the subject at the Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) Arena twice.
“This crowd is a lovefest,” he told the 12,000 happy deplorables, “I know that. But you have no choice but to vote for me. So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.”
In 1916 Woodrow Wilson’s reelection slogan was, He kept us out of war. (Not for long, but never mind.)
Now, 104 years later, Trump’s slogan is, He kept us out of the poorhouse. He kept us out of… Venezuela.
In fact, he even mentioned Venezuela, which seems appropriate when speaking about a field of candidates who would seem quite comfortable addressing one another as “Comrade.”
“You see what happened to Venezuela with socialism?” he asked. “They don’t have anything. No water, no food. They used to be one of the richest countries in the world 15 years ago. It’s very sad.”
You can’t say he’s not telling the truth, can you, comrade?
But the overarching theme last night was, You have no choice. Trump even trotted out a very important businessman, unnamed, who recently came to the White House. Perhaps it was what they call an apocryphal story, but it reinforced the point.
Trump said the guy, whom he’d known for years, showed you at the White House, and Trump did a double take, because, he said, neither of them had ever liked one another. The mogul agreed with the president’s assessment.
“’I haven’t liked you, but to be honest, I have no choice. I said, ‘You’re right.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ First time I’ve ever heard him say something that I agree with.”
Is this guy real? Well, at least as real as Barack Obama’s “composite girlfriend,” and much more so than Sen. Cory Booker’s imaginary drug-dealing friend T Bone.
It was Trump’s first visit to the SNHU Arena since Nov. 7, 2016 – Election Eve. That night the crowd was chanting, “Where’s Kelly? Where’s Kelly?”
Sen. Kelly Ayotte was MIA. She’d thrown Trump under the bus two weeks earlier at a pre-dawn Saturday morning press conference after the Access Hollywood tapes were released.
After stabbing Trump in the back she lost her reelection bid by fewer than 1000 votes. Trump was defeated by 2700. He still talks about New Hampshire’s since-changed same-day voter registration and “the buses from Massachusetts,” although the bigger problem was snowflake
out-of-state college students in the university towns – Hanover, Durham, Keene, Plymouth, etc.
His own loss still rankles POTUS, Ayotte’s even narrower defeat, not so much. Trust me on that one.
“New Hampshire was taken away from you,” he told the crowd. “Not your fault.”
The great thing about a Trump rally is that it’s a mix of new themes, new villains, mixed in with his greatest hits. Low-energy Jeb is gone, but now it’s Sleepy Joe and the rest of the sad-sack Democrat field. Last week they trekked out to Iowa.
“And our numbers are up in Iowa,” he said. “Wherever they go, our numbers go up.”
The crowds love hearing their favorite Trumpian words, like fake, as in fake polls, fake news and fake witch hunts, all of which were deployed last night, in addition to greatest – greatest movement, greatest slogan, etc.
One of my favorite moments in the 2016 campaign came in Worcester, when a grotesquely obese man stood up and began screaming. After a backhoe was brought in to remove him, Trump said what everyone at the DCU Center was thinking.
“Did you notice that he didn’t say anything until I mentioned food stamps?”
It happened again last night. Another whale of a protester went crazy after having tons of fun in the arena.
“That guy’s got a serious weight problem,” Trump said. “Go home, start exercising. Get him out of here please. Got a bigger problem than I do. Gotta bigger problem than all of us. Now he goes home and his mom says, ‘What the hell have you just done?’”
It’s the new and improved DJT. This time he admits he’s got his own problem, and he calls the heckler a basement-dwelling mama’s boy loser.
You gotta vote for him. You got no choice.
