Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
I have to admit, I did not think Trumpapalooza could get any funnier after writing about it the first time.
The price of admission originally climbed as high as $20,000 before dropping all the way down to free. Not $20,000 to $10,000. Not $10,000 to 50 bucks and a complimentary Trump steak. All the way to zero. The Republican National Committee eventually started distributing general-admission tickets through a public lottery, turning its inaugural midterm convention into the political equivalent of a mattress store claiming it had been ordered by the court to liquidate everything before midnight. House members were originally expected to pay $25,000 for convention packages, but the party quietly waived the fee for its most vulnerable incumbents. Apparently nothing communicates overwhelming demand quite like removing the price tag and begging the people who work there to please come inside.
And I am not even claiming Trump suddenly lost all his supporters and nobody wanted to see him. Plenty of those people still love that man. But seriously, how many times can you listen to him complain that the 2020 election was stolen before the experience starts feeling less like a political rally and more like getting cornered by the same uncle at every family reunion? You know the uncle. He has been telling one story since 1987, still adds fifteen minutes to it every year, and somehow the fish gets bigger even though nobody was fishing. At this point, Trump’s supporters could deliver the speech themselves. The election was stolen, everyone is treating him unfairly, the polls are fake unless he likes them, and a large man approached him with tears in his eyes and called him “Sir.” Even people who enjoy the song eventually stop paying concert prices to hear the artist perform the same verse for the nine-hundredth time.
As the program began in Dallas on September 9, the arena floor filled while large portions of the lower bowl remained vacant and the upper sections sat nearly empty, despite Trump’s declaration that the event was sold out. Then the “L” fell off the word “Dallas” on the podium. The podium still worked; the spelling simply resigned midway through the convention. It was the most honest departure of the evening. None of this prevented organizers from selling the gathering as a historic triumph, because modern Republican spectacle no longer requires demonstrable success. It requires a camera angle narrow enough to conceal the evidence and a press corps willing to debate whether the empty seats were expressing enthusiasm differently.
Speaking of expensive objects whose advertised value exceeds their demonstrated usefulness: the plane. I wrote in July about the four-hundred-million-dollar “palace in the sky” that Qatar handed Trump and that Trump handed straight back to American taxpayers in the form of a nine-figure retrofit bill. Trump argued that rejecting it would have been an act of stupidity. “I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane,’” he told reporters, treating the word free as though national-security retrofits, communications systems, maintenance, and taxpayer-funded modifications were being performed by three volunteers from Habitat for Humanity.
The comedy acquired another layer when security concerns during Trump’s trip to Turkey reportedly prompted officials to move him secretly from the Qatari aircraft onto another military plane. Trump had spent months presenting the jet as the bargain of the century, only for the government to use it as an airborne decoy when the threat became serious. It was the presidential equivalent of buying a gold-plated panic room and hiding in the neighbor’s garage. Talk about the magnificent free plane was cheap. Entrusting the president’s safety to it during an active threat apparently required a second opinion.
Then came September 9.
