Trump held two bizarre rallies last week. I mean more bizarre than usual. It introduced a whole new level of “weird” to Trump’s usual erratic behavior.
The first was a town hall in Michigan where Trump was scheduled to take questions from his supporters.There were a couple of heat-related episodes in the audience that became surrealistic as Trump stopped and began to do color commentary on the first responders. Then it went bonkers after the emergencies were over when he ditched taking questions and instead stood on stage directing the “DJ” to play music for the next 39 minutes while he “conducted” and “danced” and told his supporters to vote on January 6th. Then he just left the stage and a puzzled audience wondering WTF they’d just witnessed.
Was he regretting the town hall format after he was burned with embarrassing questions in his Florida Univision town hall a few days earlier?
The second was a rally in Pennsylvania a few days later where he just shuffled aimlessly around the stage for sixteen minutes after his mic mysteriously went dead.
This was the more suspicious of the two event clusterfucks. I’ve been around microphones for most of my adult life. I know pro sound. Mics don’t just suddenly go dead like that. Neither do pre-amps. There’s inevitably some crackling noise or distortion a second of two before a component fails. But even more suspicious is that no sound engineer rushed to the stage to replace the mic or check the XLR connections. Even my high school band carried a spare mic because they’re delicate to transport. I spoke with my pro sound engineer friend yesterday who saw this video. He said the mic was definitely cut, or “turned off” in lay speak. Why? Who the hell knows? The bottom line, it should have been fixed in less that two minutes.
Whoa.
My first impression was “Sundown Syndrome“. It started to put context on the two MoCA cognitive damage tests his doctors made him take.
But then I thought, “Hey, what if Trump’s internal polling shows him with a high probability of losing on Nov 5?” What if this is Trump doing a Vincent “The Chin” Gigante to set up an insanity defense for the three heavyweight criminal trials he’ll be facing almost immediately after the election if he loses?
If you don’t know about “The Chin”, he was boss of the Genovese crime family in NYC from 1981 to the early 2000s. He performed elaborate acts of mental illness on the street when he knew the feds were watching. But then he snuck away at night to his upper east side apartment where he conducted the day’s business. His road show made him the only godfather to escape the Mafia Commission trials in the 80s.
I used to see Gigante wearing slippers and a bathrobe, talking to mailboxes and accosting pedestrians with strange questions on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. I thought he was just another crazy old coot from the neighborhood. I was walking home from the 6th Avenue subway when he sidled up to me and asked, “Are you home for Christmas?” When I didn’t answer, he asked again but more loudly. There was a malevolence in his eyes that told me he was dangerous to fuck with so I just said, “Yes, I am. Merry Christmas!” It was August.
What I didn’t know was that the Genovese hangout was on that block: the Triangle Social Club. He was probably keeping tabs on who showed up for work. The feds eventually exposed his ruse and sent him away to prison for the rest of his life. But his scam kept him out of court for years because prosecutors didn’t want to burn their evidence and witnesses only to see Gigante sent to a mental hospital for being incompetent to stand trial.
Trump may be a stupid motherfucker but he knows about Gigante because he did extensive work with the Genovese family, particularly “Fat Tony” Salerno and his crooked concrete company, S & A, during the building of Trump Tower and Trump Parc. Salerno was Gigante’s underboss.
