http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/donnie-does-dallas-trump/On his Facebook page,
https://www.facebook.com/MattWalshBlog/posts/1040241006009009?fref=nf the conservative Christian blogger Matt Walsh transcribed the first three minutes of Donald Trump’s appearance in Dallas Monday night. Here it goes:
“Wow. Amazing. Amazing, thank you. So exciting. Do you notice what’s missing tonight? Teleprompters! [APPLAUSE] No teleprompters. We don’t want teleprompters. That would be so much easier: we read a speech for 45 minutes, everybody falls asleep listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier. So, you know, I have a little debate coming up on Wednesday. [APPLAUSE] I hear my… let’s call them opponents. Can I call them opponents? We’re allowed to do that, right? You know, New York was very nice to you people last night, you know that, right? [LAUGHTER] Did they hand you that game? [APPLAUSE] They handed it! I said, I am going to have the friendliest audience — sit down — I am going to have the friendliest audience. So I wasn’t sure, was I happy or was I sad? But Jerry Jones is a great guy, and he deserves everything he gets, frankly. [APPLAUSE] And you know, another great guy is Mark Cuban. [APPLAUSE] And I think, you know, he’s been talking about maybe doing this himself. And I think he’d do a great job. We don’t have the exact same feelings about where we’re going, but that’s OK. But Mark was great. You know, he called me, like, literally a few days ago, and he said, “you know if you want to use the arena” — which by the way is a beautiful arena [APPLAUSE] this a great arena — and Dirk is a fantastic player [APPLAUSE] he’s just a wonderful player — and the Mavericks have been fantastic and it’s just a great team — but he said, “you know if you want to use the arena.” And I said, “Mark, when?” He said “how ’bout Monday night?” It’s like, that was like in four days. And you had a big holiday in between. And he said, “they really like you in Dallas, they really like you in Texas, maybe you can get a lot of people.” [APPLAUSE] Because we were coming here, and we thought maybe we’d get a thousand people, but we never get a thousand anymore, it’s always, like, the same thing. You know, we went to Alabama. We started off with a 500 person ballroom. And after about 2 minutes — look at all these guys — paparazzi, look at this [LAUGHTER] we’ve got everybody here. We started off, by the way, with a 500 person ballroom, and after about 2 minutes the hotel called up begging for mercy. “We can’t do it!” They were inundated, so we went to convention center, and that was 10,000 and that was wiped out in about an hour. So we went to a stadium, we had 31 thousand people, which is by far the largest, they say, like, ever, for an early primary, and that’s probably true.[APPLAUSE]”
Walsh adds:
Incoherent, rambling, pointless, self-aggrandizing, namedropping, utterly devoid of anything resembling a substantive thought. This is Donald Trump.
He might be the next president.
This is America.
Pray for our country tonight, everyone. Pray for our country.
Yeah, his speech in Mobile was the same kind of thing.
Look at the new ABCNews/Washington Post poll results. Story here, and graphic here. Among likely Republican voters, Trump is polling 33 percent, Ben Carson is at 20. More:
After Trump and Carson, there is a significant falloff in support for the other candidates. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who began the year as the nominal GOP front-runner, stands at 8 percent, his lowest ever in Post-ABC surveys of the 2016 field. Next, at 7 percent each, are Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. No one else registered above 5 percent.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie either tied or registered their lowest levels of support in Post-ABC polls of the 2016 race dating to the beginning of 2014.
Think of it: more than half of likely Republican presidential primary voters prefer two men who have never held political office in their lives to any of the veteran politicians. Senators, governors, or, in Jeb Bush’s case, a former governor — nothing. More:
The new poll found Trump to be the favorite of 33 percent of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. That is a jump of nine percentage points since mid-July and a 29-point increase since late May, just before Trump announced his candidacy. He does well with most groups of GOP voters, but his strongest support comes from those who do not have a college degree and those with incomes below $50,000.
That, my dears, is what you call a populist. A billionaire populist.
Five months away from the New Hampshire primary, this is what the GOP field looks like. Fifteen thousand people showed up in Dallas to hear Trump speak. And all the other candidates (Ben Carson aside) couldn’t fill up the men’s rooms at the downtown arena.
We live in interesting times.
I have faith that Trump is going to melt down at some point. I’ve been telling myself that for a while, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I still believe it’s bound to. When that happens, though, how will Republicans find any enthusiasm for the crew they have left to choose from? Many political observers have said this is the best crop of Republican presidential hopefuls in many cycles, and I guess they’re right. But once the Donald has left the building, it’s still going to feel like Mom took all the Oreo DoubleStufs away, and all you have left are stale Hydrox.
