The New Yorker's Susan Glasser recently has been binge watching Trump rallies and has come away horrified by the way the president is trying to gin up supporters for the 2018 midterms.
Glasser writes that what really stands out from the rallies is not the multiple falsehoods that President Donald Trump tells every night, but rather his message to supporters that they will be swallowed whole by dark forces unless they cling to him.
"What the President of the United States is actually saying is extraordinary," she writes. "It’s the hate, and the sense of actual menace that the President is trying to convey to his supporters. Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster."
Glasser also found herself appalled at the way that other politicians who appear at Trump rallies try to outdo themselves in writing sycophantic speeches that praise the president's supposed "strength" in the face of adversity.
"In Erie on Wednesday, a Republican congressman, Michael Kelly, gave the most sycophantic speech of the ones I listened to this month," she writes. "Trump, he yelled to the crowd, is 'the strongest President we have seen in our lifetime... I am so grateful that an American citizen came out of nowhere to take the reins and reform and retake this nation.'"