For 108 Minutes, Trump Gave a Tedious Mussolini Impersonation

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump puffed up his chest, thrust out his chin, presented his aged jowls to the TV cameras, and from the rostrum of the House Chamber gave his best Mussolini impression.

It didn’t matter what Trump was saying—whether it was a soliloquy about the heroism of the US men’s hockey team (aided and abetted by the dupes on that team showing up to lend their muscled imprimatur to his ugly vision), a meandering monologue about tariffs’ eventually rendering the income tax obsolete (they won’t), or a barely cogent rationale for what looks to be war with Iran—the Republican claque in the auditorium responded by shouting that endless yawp of nationalism: “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!”

The chant echoed around the august legislative chamber, ricocheting off Congress’s domed ceiling, filling every nook with the thumping rhythm of American fascism.

The president portrayed himself as the deliverer of law and order, though according to NPR Epstein-file reporting from earlier in the day, he had allegedly attempted to force a 13-year-old to pleasure him orally in the 1980s. Pam Bondi—the head of the Justice Department, which had apparently disappeared three FBI reports relating to this particular allegation—sat in the audience and applauded Trump at every turn. The president snarled, blustered, and sought to paint Democrats as in bed with “the illegals.” He asked all those who sided with US citizens over illegal aliens to stand and mocked the Democrats when, refusing to buy into this us-versus-them narrative, they kept sitting. He demanded that Congress impose onerous restrictions on the right to vote—presumably to secure a GOP victory come November. He oozed contempt for global institutions and multinational alliances. And again and again, that mindless chant would begin anew, reverberating around the chamber. “USA! USA! USA!” If you closed your eyes and just listened, you could be forgiven for hearing echoes of scenes from a Leni Riefenstahl movie. “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

This wasn’t democratic, discourse-based politics; rather, it was an attempted projection of dominance, albeit of a senescent, sundowning variety.

In truth, Trump’s speech was long and tedious, as is the wont of aging strongman leaders desperate to tout their past glories. It was, basically, a mediocre Greatest Hits recording on loop. At 108 minutes, his address shattered records for a State of the Union duration—and I’d wager he broke his own record for sheer mendacity. Afterward, Representative Raul Ruiz of California quipped that Trump ought to receive the Nobel Prize for fiction.

In that fictional utopia of Trumplandia, the country has no more economic problems; indeed, it has entered a “golden age.” (Recall that Trump is obsessed with gold; hence the gold trimmings in the White House, the gold picture frames, the gold bathroom faucets, the 15-foot Dear Leader gold statue gifted him by a cabal of crypto sycophants and slated to preside over this year’s G20 summit.) People are leaving food stamps by the millions not because the government is cutting access to the program but because they have suddenly become affluent. (Fact check: That’s preposterous.) “Somali pirates” intent on defrauding US taxpayers are being cut down to size in Minneapolis. “Angel moms” whose children were murdered by undocumented immigrants are seeing the government deliver on their behalf the sword of justice and vengeance to immigrant “monsters.” (I can’t recall another instance in which a national leader so shamelessly exploited the grief of bereft families to push a partisan agenda.)

In Trumplandia, the United States—despite having alienated virtually all its allies over the past year through a combination of economic blackmail, hostility to multilateral agreements and institutions, and territorial threats—is now more respected on the world stage than it has ever been. And the crises of tens of millions of Americans having no access to health insurance, a calamity worsened by Congress’s recent failure to extend ACA subsidies, has been solved by the creation of junk-quality “TrumpRx” accounts for cheaper prescription drugs.

In Trumplandia, the private donations of a few MAGA-affiliated philanthropists into “Trump accounts” for US-citizen children makes up for the assaults on the social safety net, the undermining of education spending, the tax giveaways to the country’s oligarchs, and the forced separation of hundreds of thousands of children from their deported parents.

In Trumplandia, the brave deregulators of MAGAworld have dismantled, once and for all, the “Green New Scam,” and have liberated fossil fuel producers so that they can again spew their toxins into the atmosphere from here to an increasingly hot eternity.

In Trumplandia, the president has ended most of the world’s wars—and those that he hasn’t, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza (despite a purported ceasefire) and the West Bank, are hardly worth footnotes. By my count, Trump didn’t mention either of those conflicts until more than 40 minutes into his rambling speech, and then only to heap praise on himself.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. There was, in this speech, enough banality to fill an oil tanker. Trump prattled on about the glory days when his father was young (a reminder: During those glory days, the young Fred Trump was arrested for his participation in a Ku Klux Klan riot). The KKKer’s son spent a full seven minutes praising the masculinity of the US hockey team. He boasted about the creation of government services, which deliver financial benefits to Americans, named after him—while coyly, repeatedly denying that he had had anything to do with their christening. He lingered on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, without any sense of understanding of the full complexity and diversity of US history. He created bizarre, fictional, dialogues between himself and overseas leaders about how magnificent American military strength is. He mused, repeatedly, about the “very unfortunate” Supreme Court decision on tariffs, but said there were many other ways to stop the world from “ripping off” Americans.

I’m sure that Trump’s repeated slurs against immigrants, his trashing of transgender Americans, his contempt for anything environmental or social justice–related did succeed in riling up the MAGA base. And I guess it’s possible that his base even ate up his paranoid rants about cunning poor people overseas relentlessly taking advantage of gullible rich people in the United States. But I can’t see how these bigoted 108 minutes made for compelling television for the great majority of Americans who don’t wake up each morning and immediately reach for their MAGA caps.

“USA! USA!” the GOP legislators brayed in response to the elderly il Duce impersonator in front of them. But the sound I heard, emanating from TV dens around the country, was “zzzzzzzzz.”