On Tuesday, he went to the site of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Trump had called upon his supporters to protest his expected arrest (that never happened) by the DA and Klepper found that the crowd was estimated by the police to be between three and six people. But while the numbers may be far less than the crowd that Klepper met at Trump rallies, their looniness was undiminished.
The intrepid comedian once again enters MAGAworld when he goes to a recent event in South Carolina where Trump had an event. It was not the kind of big rally that Trump used to have but the people who came seemed to be of the same type, willing to share the weirdest ideas.
He puts his life on the line among the massless maskless hordes attending a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania to bring us a flavor of the nuttiness he encounters.
During the 2016 election, the very funny Jordan Klepper produced some excellent pieces for The daily Show talking to Trump supporters at his rallies. He then left the show but is back as a correspondent to once again cover Trump’s 2020 election campaign rallies. Below is a montage of him talking to Trump supporters at his rallies from the 2016 campaign and this year. Klepper is clean-shaven in 2016 and bearded now.
There can be no doubt that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is an awful person and that there are people who once voted for him who are quite disgusted now. The real question is how many such people there are and whether they will eventually end up voting for him anyway, will vote for Biden, will not vote at all, or will vote for a third party candidate.
The conventional wisdom is that those who have voted for SSAT in the past, especially in 2020 when no reasonable person could have had any doubt about how awful he was, had drunk so much of the Kool-Aid that they would go back to him. Jordan Klepper’s interviews with some supporters of Nikki Haley seem to support that gloomy view. There were those who spoke of SSAT in the harshest possible terms, even calling him an existential threat to democracy. But when Klepper pushed them to state what they would do if finally faced with the choice of voting for Joe Biden or SSAT, they hemmed and hawed before finally saying that they would vote for SSAT. So much for these people being ‘never Trumpers’.
The cognitive dissonance is strong in these people.
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I mentioned recently my puzzlement that Trump’s MAGA followers still talk to Jordan Klepper even though his clips make them look ridiculous. In an interview, he answers that question, saying it it is not hard at all to find people willing to talk, even if they know of him and his work.
But at a Donald Trump rally in June, he looked genuinely flabbergasted when a couple of young women seemingly had no knowledge of what happened on January 6, 2021 (see clip below).
“There’s definitely a surprise to be found at every Trump event,” Klepper tells Deadline. “I wish I could say that we went to these places, and we were fishing for people, but that’s not the case, we only talk to anybody who would like to talk to us. More often than not, people want to come in and talk to us. But the fact that they had never heard of January 6, even the terminology around insurrection was new to them was frankly shocking to me. I knew there was a rock a lot of people lived underneath, I just had no idea it was so encompassing.”
…One of the more curious elements of Klepper’s segments is why so many right-wing folk are willing to talk with him, given that he is essentially making fun of them. But he likens it to being a heel in wrestling, that Trump supporters see this as entertainment.
“I probably took 50 or 60 selfies with people who were excited to just see somebody involved in the narrative surrounding this Trump World,” he says. “There are even politicians at CPAC who would come up and ask if they could set up a time [to talk]. You become like a villain in the Trump universe. It’s always that the rallies are like a sporting event. There’s ideology, there’s pomp and circumstance, it is fun, it’s entertainment and that also speaks to why people talk to me.”
Still seems a bit strange to me. Maybe it is because I at least try not to look like an idiot, even if I do not always succeed.
It is quite fascinating to see how quickly Trump’s followers latch on to authoritarian leaders around the world who pursue bigoted anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant policies, all wrapped up in the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism and with a religious garnish. Their latest hero is president Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has been in power for 12 years and just won re-election.
Hungary’s authoritarian leader and longtime Russian ally, Viktor Orban, clinched a fourth consecutive term in power on Sunday, after a landslide election win that he touted as a rebuke of liberalism, the European Union and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Orban’s Fidesz party strengthened their position in Parliament despite forecasts predicting a tight race. It won 53% of the vote with almost all ballots counted, enough for a commanding lead over a united coalition of opposition parties.
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As part of his ongoing series of videos where he talks to those who are part of the anti-vax, right-wing, QAnon, Trump-supporting movement, he went to Ottawa in Canada and finds that the people who are blockading the city center say pretty much the same things that people who attend the Trump rallies in the US say, which is mostly nonsense veiled in rhetoric of freedom.