TOI Correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump has spent an extraordinary amount of campaign time discussing the physique of other public figures, including their butts, legs, and other physical attributes. While the Republican Party supremo may be preoccupied with posteriors and treating his MAGA masses to jokes about asses, GOP candidates have a rather more pressing anatomical question: does Trump still have legs to carry them over the line in the midterms elections?Indeed, the MAGA boss is getting huffy about the physical toll and relentless schedule of the campaign trail and is now approaching it with the enthusiasm of a man who has just been informed that his prison sentence has been extended. “I thought this was going to be my last one. I thought I could relax. Twenty-eight days in a row of this crap is a lot. My voice is operating at about 49.2%,” he grumbled at a rally in Florida on Friday, complaining, “So on Sunday, while you’re all watching football, I’ll be traveling in a very beautiful airplane to Iowa, to Kansas. “It takes a peculiar sense of self-deprecation to describe one’s own rallies as “crap,” but this is Trump. At another rally last month, he offered an astonishingly candid description of his relationship with his followers, saying, “I could say the stupidest thing, and y’all would just laugh and clap.” The question political pundits are trying to figure out is at what point does his MAGA faithful wake up to being told the rallies they flock to are “crap,” and they are possibly stupid. Right now, there is little evidence they have abandoned their leader in large numbers, although there are signs the sheen is wearing off.At a Trump rally in South Carolina last week, a man approached by Fox News was asked the perfectly innocuous question: Why are you here? “Well, in the late 70s, I was a little too young to go to South America for the Jonestown Massacre. But this is as close as I’ll ever get…There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front,” he said. The reference was to the 1978 incident in Guyana, when more than 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones died in a mass murder-suicide episode unparalleled in modern history. The reporter, who had assumed the man, a former Republican, was a Trump supporter, bolted in embarrassment to find someone else to interview.Invoking the Jim Jones cult was an unusually savage description of MAGA faithful, but it also captured a question increasingly confronting Republicans as America heads to polling stations on Tuesday: Is Trump’s political movement still an electoral coalition, or has it become a congregation whose members would applaud even if the pastor preaches violence?Yet this is the peculiar political chemistry of MAGA; Trump knows his audience, and his audience knows him. Their relationship is not necessarily built on policy consistency, intellectual coherence or even conventional political expectations; It is built on identity, grievance, resentment and an enduring conviction that Trump, however outrageous, is fighting their battles despite stories of grift and corruption Washington is now awash with.There is also a generational divide that is becoming increasingly visible. At rallies and in interviews, parents and children sometimes find themselves on opposite sides of the Trump phenomenon. Younger family members challenge the president’s rhetoric and politics, while their parents remain devoted supporters. Trump has repeatedly turned this domestic disagreement into a campaign punchline, telling younger people, in effect, that their parents vote for him. It is a useful reminder that MAGA is not simply a political preference; For many, it has become an identity, strong enough to survive Thanksgiving dinner, family arguments, and interventions by offsprings armed with a smartphone and fact-check.The generational friction has also become lucrative entertainment for many liberal podcasters and social-media influencers who have discovered that interviewing committed Trump supporters, asking seemingly straightforward questions, and allowing the answers to speak for themselves can generate enormous online engagement. The format is simple: find a MAGA dope, ask about a policy, a political contradiction or an extraordinary presidential statement, and let the conversation unfold. The audience is invited to laugh, cringe or marvel because interviewee often appears oblivious to the fact that the exchange is being consumed as comedy rather than political persuasion.Vivek Ramaswamy, the Indian-American Republican gubernatorial hopeful in Ohio, recently discovered how easily these encounters can be weaponised. During an interaction, a man confronted him with a question about why a pedophile appeared in one of his campaign advertisements. Ramaswamy initially looked bewildered, attempted to respond and eventually walked away as the exchange circulated online. Whether it is a carefully staged prank or an opportunistic ambush, the point is that Republican politicians are increasingly encountering an opposition that understands the economics of viral embarrassment.And Trump himself continues to supply the material. The president’s own rallies have become an increasingly unpredictable mixture of political campaigning, stand-up comedy, grievance therapy — and occasionally, an anatomy lecture even as his party’s ass is on line come November 3.
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