After The Trump Rally

The president's humor is of the self-pitying variety, in which the joke is not only not funny it is a self-reflective complaint of mistreatment at the hands of all those he claims mean to do him harm. Thus he performs a profound counterintuitive psychological 'distancing', in which the purported tough guy steps away from his tough guy persona, having been wearing a mask, and is heard instead begging for understanding and some sort of electoral love. 

The president can neither take a joke nor tell one; when he does try to tell a joke there's no humor in it. He may be the most humorless man in American history. He is however a genius of self-pity, and this genius must not be underestimated, as it strikes a chord among his fellow countrymen who pity themselves and are to be pitied.

The crowd seems to made up of those in the mood to cheer the president as if saying, 'keep up the good work', and to laugh at his jokes which aren't funny. The production values consist of one disjointed moment after another--empty seats, stone-faced audience members, the use of unauthorized music, as in the case of the late Tom Petty's song, "I Won't Back Down", as the family of Tom Petty complained to the president's campaign manager the moment after it was played.

The tone--if a political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma held at an indoor stadium in the midst of an infectious pandemic can be said to have a tone--is one of lawsuits being filed right and left by those who've been wronged against those who've wronged them. The guilty, of course, aren't there to defend themselves.

Surprise! There's no mention of Hillary Clinton.

When I hear the name Hillary Clinton her face looks so long ago, though I can see it being carved at a future date into the side of a small hill on some remote windswept outpost in the USA, not accessible via a national highway but only by a picturesque two-lane backroad.