This is an elegant night in an elegant place and we’re going to keep it elegant…
So said our former president, Donald J. Trump, who announced his 2024 run for president this week from the Grand Ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Left: The stage was set for Donald Trump’s big announcement to run for President at the Grand Ballroom. Right: Guests await Donald Trump to take the stage, cell phones ready. Credit: Yahoo Sports | Kimberly Leonard-Insider (November 15, 2022)
By now the world has heard (notwithstanding the media stationed there to sort of maybe cover/not-cover the event) that Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, after months of teasing another run for president – his third – officially announced his bid to become the 47th president to a crowd of hundreds of friends and loyal supporters.
He spoke for just over an hour from the stage of the Grand Ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate, a venue familiar for its many campaign events held there during the 2015 primaries notably the night he declared victory on Super Tuesday after winning the Florida primary.
PALM BEACH, FL – MARCH 13, 2016 – Six years ago the Grand Ballroom was the site of his Super Tuesday victory speech after winning the Florida primary. All photos appear in The Elegant Trump (2020) Credit: Brooks Kraft / Getty Images.
Pundits like Steve Bannon are saying it was the best speech Trump has ever given. Trump billed his remarks as ‘America’s Comeback.’ We ‘start now’ bellowed Trump! ‘We were at the pinnacle of power under my administration, we were doing great, we were thriving’ adding ‘there’s never been a movement like this in our history; no wars and I kept my promises.’
“But we can become one great glorious nation again,” he said and in dulcet tones by the way.
Then he started to rattle off the problems our nation faces thanks to the failed policies of the Biden administration under the rubric of the catch phrase ‘we are a nation in decline’…our southern border is being invaded, we’re begging other countries for energy, missiles are being fired into Poland, and we have a president who falls asleep at a global conference.’
And there were fresh passionate pleas from him: “Decline is not a fate we will accept or embrace.” And, “Our platform is one of greatness and glory for our nation.”
Trump gave us an artful blend of new policy ideas (he wants same day voting, paper ballots, and no mail-ins) combined with reliable bits from rallies he’s honed over years of campaigning. The crowd was enthusiastically cheering at every turn chanting USA, USA, USA.
Steve Bannon called his remarks “focused and tough” and said it was one of the best speeches he’s ever given. John Fredericks of Real America’s Voice said ‘It was presidential and just perfect.” Grant Stinchfield thought it was ‘sincere’ and that ‘the president sounded frustrated.’
He rattled off his wins from the midterms, “We had 232 wins and 22 losses! But you don’t hear the fake news talking about this…”
Then he caught himself as he was about to launch into one of his standard diatribes about the ‘fake news media!’ and instead he said:
“But I won’t do that tonight because this is an elegant night in an elegant place and we’re going to keep it elegant tonight…”
I nearly fell off my chair!
Trump said the word ‘elegant’ not once, not twice, but three times in the same sentence. Admittedly, I felt validated. I hung an entire 55,000-word book on the premise – as unlikely as any premise for a book could possibly be – that Donald J. Trump is in fact elegant and does in fact care very much about aesthetics.
I think I did a pretty good job of persuading readers that there was at least more to Donald Trump than meets the eye. To my mind, Trump is no Noel Coward (that’s never been his aim), but he is not and was never the vulgarian the media has tried so desperately to convince us of.
Who are the vulgarians of our culture? I’m not even sure I would name any as it might be too insulting to them as well, but certainly some comedians come to mind like Jackie Gleeson or Lou Costello of Abbott and Costello. Howard Stern is a vulgarian; so is Maury Povitch. Rappers are vulgarians. Who else? Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Lady Gaga are vulgarian.
This reminds me of a TikTok video someone sent me where the presenter was declaring everything that isn’t posh, ‘a la poubelle‘. French for trash, the Gstaad Guy lays down the rules in a hilarious vid to a female friend on how to judge whether say a beau is ‘a la poubelle,’ “He might have to be banished to le poubelle if, for instance, ‘he doesn’t send you flowers larger than your sofa, he’s a la poubelle.’ Listen:
Maybe we should all just say, “Trump isn’t vulgar, he’s a la poubelle.”
By the way, Gstaad Guy is hawking Palais Constance his own wine label and he’s a thing on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.
Billions of articles have been written with some mention of Donald Trump (a lot of it is done for keywords) since he came down that escalator seven years ago. It seems as if every single article opens with at least one derogatory word. Left-wing press publishes screeds that lay him out from beginning to end while right-wing press uses what I call the ‘Trump is good, but…’ construction. You all know what I’m talking about. It’s rendered untold damage.
This construct was so tiresome, so absurd, so unfair, and such bad journalism that I decided to investigate Donald Trump, the man, myself.
Having lived in the same city throughout the years Trump was coming up, I knew about the ‘brash New York City real estate developer.’ I knew his buildings. I knew The Plaza Hotel and The Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower with its soaring Brecchia Perniche marble atrium. I knew he and his first wife, Ivanka, were a so-called power couple. I knew The New York Post and other New York metro area media covered their every move obsessively. By the time he was 30, Trump had been featured on over 40 magazine covers but Donald Trump was one celebrity among a multitude living on an island of famous and important people. None of whom I socialized with by the way.
I took Donald Trump for granted back then, but even so I had some sense that he was not a buffoon. Architecture is an interest of mine and I liked his buildings. So I researched the work he did from the beginning and followed that thread. I found that Donald Trump – far from being la poubelle – cares deeply about beauty and aesthetics. If you listen closely to his words, he uses the word ‘beauty’ almost as much as he does the word ‘great.’
And, he uses the word beauty in the context of introducing a new proposal such as building the wall. He kept saying about the wall, “You’ll see we’re going to do something very beautiful.” And, even as he teased this announcement, he said, “You’re going to like it very much; it’s beautiful.”
Michael Knowles Calls Trump’s Style Fly
Michael Knowles took note of this trait too. He dedicated a whole show to this topic. It’s featured in my book (end of shameless self-promotion). Called “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” find the video here. Knowles likens Trump’s dedication to aesthetics as being in the same vein as great conservative thinkers Edmund Burke (who wrote the classic, “The Sublime and the Beautiful”) and G. K. Chesterton (a prolific writer perhaps best known for apologetics on Christianity including “Orthodoxy,” “Heretics,” and “Everlasting Man.”)
Newsflash: Donald Trump is a real person.”
Donald Trump did indeed set up an elegant event in an elegant place the other night. And, he spoke eloquently, if not elegantly, in a new voice (a topic for a separate article) about both the dire problems we face as a nation with the threat of nuclear war clearly weighing him as well as once again offering us hope that we can solve the big issues threatening the survival of America together.
This insight and others about his character has allowed me to not fall prey to the dehumanization of Donald Trump whether from prosaic propaganda to quotidian lawfare to weaponizing the alphabet agencies to go after him as we saw in the raid of his very beautiful Mar-a-Lago in August. If nothing else, Trump’s continued public display of his home and private club Mar-a-Lago tells us he is no victim.
With his latest foray into a campaign for president, we already see that the forces arrayed against him – there from the day of his first launch speech in 2015 – are even more determined to destroy him and the political movement he started.
America’s Comeback starts now!
I wish him God speed!
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Full transcript of the president’s speech from 11/15/22 below: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/former-president-trump-announces-2024-presidential-bid-transcript
Yahoo Sports covered the event and it was relatively free of snark. Click:
