Donald Trump loves music. It does not love him back. But neither fact has ever been more obvious than this week, when he made his DJ debut. Even by his standards, it was a bizarre instant-classic trainwreck. At his Monday town hall event in Oaks, Pennsylvania, he quit taking questions from the crowd, and turned his campaign rally into a dance party. “Let’s not do any more questions,” Trump said. “Let’s just listen to music. Who the hell wants to hear questions?” Then he just stood there frozen in a 40-minute K-hole, waving his arms to the music, lurching side to side, eyes glazed over, shaky on his feet, dazed and confused. This man’s day-to-day neurological Chernobyl is no longer possible to hide.
It’s too soon to tell if Trump will make this a habit. Was this a one-time DJ disaster, or will he keep doing rallies where he flaps his elbows in slow motion, making a swing-state crowd listen to his personal playlist? A feeble man looking totally unaware of his surroundings, while the speakers blast “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “November Rain” and Elvis singing “I wish I was in the land of cotton?” Trying but forgetting how to do the “Y.M.C.A.” dance? A presidential candidate of seventy-eight whose frontal lobes are going out like a feta-cheese hood ornament in a monsoon, stumbling offstage to his final banger of the night, which is — of all songs — Barbara Streisand doing “Memory”?
But Trump should do this every night. To make it conceptually perfect, he should do an encore this weekend where he comes out and plays the entirety of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name.
This is a 40-minute mess that future historians will study frame-by-frame like the Zapruder film, to figure out how America went so wrong. If you’ve just seen isolated clips, you owe it to yourself to watch the whole pants-off dance-off disaster unfold. “Let’s make this a musical fest! Oh looky-look!,” he tells the baffled fans in their MAGA hats. “Turn it up louder!” he yells. “We want a little ACTION here! Turn it up louder!” He’s talking about Luciano Pavarotti singing “Ave Maria.”
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South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem stands next to DJ Looky-Look, clapping and singing, because hey, nothing’s wrong! It’s like seeing Dave Navarro onstage last month while Perry Farrell was forgetting the words to “Jane Says.” Except Navarro knew when it was time to call bullshit and leave, which is more than Noem can say. The governor of South Dakota has terror, despair, and vacant existential resignation in her eyes, the kind you might see in the eyes of a puppy about to be shot by the governor of South Dakota. She tries to show Trump how “Y.M.C.A.” goes, but he has trouble with it. Letters are hard! He gets all mushy hearing Rufus Wainwright sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” For irony fans, Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman sing “Time To Say Goodbye.”
Even weirder, Trump’s taste is for singers who openly despise him. Axl hates him. Sinead and Prince hated him. The Village People hate him. And does anyone on earth hate him more than Barbara? James Brown, he might have tried to explain why the song you rock at a rally is “I Got You (I Feel Good),” or “I Got the Feeling,” or “Papa Don’t Take No Mess,” or hell, “Living in America.” Not “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” the slow-slow-slow song you put on when your party guests won’t leave and it’s time to bore them out the door. Trump should have played “I’m a Greedy Man” — but too much energy for a man in his condition.
The video screen behind him displays a campaign slogan already used a century ago, by a guy named Mussolini. “Il Duce ha sempre ragione”? The translation here is “Trump Was Right About Everything.” Wait — “was”? His own campaign is already talking about Il Douche in the past tense? Well, maybe you think he’s right when he promises Jesus he won’t allow any more elections after he wins. Or when he declares the military should spend Election Day coming to get people who don’t vote for him (you know, “radical left lunatics”). But you can’t deny he’s fuzznucked in the head when he thinks the GNR song to fire up a rally crowd is “November Rain.”
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The New York Times typically soft-soaped this DJ set as an “improvisational gesture,” like they think he’s Ornette Coleman, but it’s no isolated episode, since his never-exactly-bulging bag of marbles has gotten visibly skinnier in recent weeks. He followed it the next night with his incoherent Bloomberg interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, unable to remember any question after the interviewer asked it, yet insisting, “You have got to be able to finish a thought because it is very important.” Last night in Michigan, another battleground state, his audio conked out for 17 minutes. So the candidate went down into the crowd and shook hands, right? No, he just paced onstage and frowned. The video screen said, “Technical difficulties. Complicated business.” Yeah, no kidding.
But that’s why people are so fascinated with this Pennsylvania DJ session. It’s not just another chapter in his real-time cognitive collapse over the past months. It’s his obsession with using pop music to prove he’s a regular guy — to prove he’s a real American. The music started after people in the crowd passed out from heat exhaustion, which hurt his feelings. (“Would anyone else like to faint? Just raise your hand.”) In the lull, the audience started singing “God Bless America,” whereupon he demanded “Ave Maria” instead. Has any other politician in U.S. history tried to shut up a crowd singing “God Bless America”? He promised “some real beauties.”
No President has ever been so obsessed with pop music and rock culture — not Clinton, not Carter, not Obama. This is the groupie-in-chief who couldn’t wait to get selfies in the Oval Office with supporters like Mike Love and Kanye West. He desperately craves validation from the stars, yet despite a few well-publicized exceptions, these musicians detest him, and always have, long before he went into politics. When the Rolling Stones played Atlantic City in 1989, they refused to go on after they learned the casino boss was at the show. Keith Richards pulled out a knife, slammed it on the table, and said, “One of us is leaving the building — either him or us.” Trump backed down and left; a 1991 biography called him “the only person who ever lost money promoting the Rolling Stones.”
President Stan’s love for pop music has always been a one-sided affair. When Keith puts you on the negative guest list, baby, you’re out of time. But he’s kept playing their songs at his campaign rallies, especially “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” even after the Stones sent him cease-and-desist orders. “This could be the last time Trump uses any Jagger/Richards songs on his campaigns,” the band’s rep said in an official statement. Dude, the Stones do not and never will respect you. Get off their cloud already.
It’s one thing to be mocked and insulted in public by the Stones. But when you reach the point where even the Village People are embarrassed you like them, it’s time to say goodbye. For some reason, Trump has always been fixated on the Village People. In the 2020 campaign, they tried to prevent him from playing “Macho Man” and “Y.M.C.A.,” but he couldn’t get through a campaign rally without busting out those beloved Seventies disco anthems about the joys of cruising the gym to bang random construction workers. Felipe Rojas, the group’s Indian Chief (yes, he’s Lakota) even posted a video where he sees Trump doing the “Y.M.C.A.” dance, gives a battle cry, and beats him to the ground.
Nothing is more American than our music, which is why he never looks more pitifully un-American than when he tries to relate to it. He always strives to force himself into the story of U.S. music, but it never works, because Elvis and “Y.M.C.A.” and James Brown are authentic American classics and Trump isn’t, which drives him nuts. His DJ playlist had Elvis doing “An American Trilogy,” his Civil War medley of “Dixieland,” “All My Trials,” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The King used to bring down the house with this one in the Seventies. In his 1975 classic on American music, Mystery Train, Greil Marcus described it perfectly: Elvis “signifies that his persona, and the culture he has made out of blues, Las Vegas, gospel music, Hollywood, schmaltz, Mississippi, and rock & roll, can contain any America you want to conjure up. It is rather Lincolnesque; Elvis recognizes that the Civil War has never ended, and so he will perform The Union.”
But Trump has no Elvis in him, much less Abe, no glory-glory or hallelujah, and he looks like a clown standing onstage while Elvis sings. He just makes it too concise and too clear that he doesn’t get America, a country he wants to rule even though he doesn’t like the place and regards most of us who live here as “the enemy within.” He boasts about his stamina, cancels campaign events due to exhaustion, slurs his words in incoherent speeches. In the tradition of Nixon and Reagan, authoritarian right-wing presidents who secretly spent much of the work day napping, he wants to sleep his way to the top. But these days he’s snoozing while his mouth is moving, incapable of completing a sentence or remembering where he began it. At his Pennsylvania rally, he urged his supporters to get out and vote on January 5th.
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His Pennsylvania DJ party gets weirder as it goes on. He promises the crowd that “Y.M.C.A.” will be the last song, but then then he forgets he said it. The November rain in his head falls a little harder. More songs play. Everybody onstage squirms, waiting for a sign that somebody functional will take charge and step in to make it stop. Noem tries to get his attention, but he doesn’t notice she’s there anymore. He’s long past trying to dance or clap or mouth words; he can barely force his eyes open. He just smiles and sways, lost on his own stage, in a world of his own, high in the sky with Pennsylvania under him.
At the end, his nice handlers finally come out to gently lead him offstage, while Streisand hits those high notes in “Memory.” But honestly, that title is the last word Trump should be kicking around in public these days. What’s going on inside the candidate’s head? Technical difficulties. Complicated business. Time to say goodbye.
