A reliable narrator in the ever-crazier world of Trump
The Star’s Washington reporter, Daniel Dale, has invented an art form. I don’t mean the one where he lists Trump’s lies — that’s informational math and it’s a grim business — but the tweets he threads as he covers Trump’s manic Republican rallies across the U.S.
The writer David Sedaris notes conversations overheard on streets and in airports, and weird debates with Americans, his readers, his dentist, a strange torqued reality. “You have what we in France call ‘good time teeth,’ Dr. Barras says. “Why would you want to change them?” “Um, because I can floss with the sash to my bathrobe?” And from there, an itemized conversation builds.
Dale does a version of this, but with everything that vents from Trump’s white lips extended in a sea of orange skin. He has covered so many rallies — Trump, hooked on veneration and an arena of MAGA hats, needs them badly — that his writerly style has evolved. He collects remarks like Trump’s greatest hits, like a cockle-picker collecting bivalves. Only the best will do.
Dale narrated Trump’s rally in Missoula, Mont., last Thursday, but safely from Washington, which is a relief. The thread is always surreal.
Trump on hangars: “‘I love these hangars. I love a hangar. There’s nothing like a hangar,’ Trump begins. He is in a hangar.”
Trump on military planes: “You have
F-35s, you have the F-18s, the SuperDupers — the Hornets. We have them all.” (I checked this one. There are no planes called Super Dupers). Dale on the number of men who spontaneously weep while grovelling before Trump. “The crying characters in Trump’s stories tend to share three characteristics: they are male, they are ‘tough’ or ‘strong,’ and they do not have names.”
Dale’s special “Combo Tears Alert and Sir Alert: Trump says that when he was walking in, ‘a big strong guy grabbed me, and he was almost crying, and it happens every time, and many times. And he said: Sir, Mr. President, thank you so much for saving our country.’ ”
Trump after a woman shouts I Love You: “It’s finally a woman! You know I get it from the men all the time.”
Trump on hair: “Well, the one thing that has been really great about this whole endeavour is they used to say ‘he wears a hairpiece, he wears a hairpiece.’ They don’t say that anymore.”
Dale interjects. “This is one of the very weirdest speeches I’ve ever heard Trump give.” Trump on Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte assaulting Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs in 2017: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of” — crowd cheers — “he’s my guy. I shouldn’t say this.”
Dale on assaulting reporters. “This is truly horrible. The president is gleefully applauding violence against a journalist amid an international controversy over the apparent murder of another journalist who lived in the U.S.”
Dale sums up. “Trump has concluded. That was comprehensively bonkers. By far the most significant part was his praise for a congressman’s assault on a journalist.”
This is the kind of reporting American journalists don’t know how to do. They report straightforwardly without context or comment or colour, a dullchecked thing a journalism robot might produce in the future. But Dale makes himself what is known in literature as a “reliable narrator,” the sane one, which is perhaps the only way to report successfully on a madman orchestrating more violent threats by the day.
Trump increasingly rouses crowds to violent chants against reporters, women, migrant families, you name it. And one day, in the most gun-loving nation on the planet, one of Trump’s overstimulated unwell fans is going to shoot someone, probably a journalist.
The U.S. tortures prisoners, moral line crossed. But the seizure, torture and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi killers in a foreign embassy was another line. I’m pleased to see that Americans are still shocked by imagining a man on a table, his fingers falling serially to the floor.
But not Trump or his people. Will it be a bullet, a knife or a bomb that kills a journalist? Will there be another newsroom massacre? When will Trump do a Putin? Will the Russian journalist Masha Gessen be poisoned in New York? Something is coming.