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.
Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler are two comedians who call themselves ‘The Good Liars‘ and pull political pranks such as attending a rally for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and then yelling “boring” and saying that they “came here to be entertained” before they were escorted out. In the clip below, they do something similar to what Jordan Klepper does, and that is attend an SSAT rally in Greensboro, North Carolina and talk to the people waiting in line to get in.
The convoluted ‘reasoning’ of SSAT supporters is a source of endless fascination. Listen (first at the 4:58 mark and then again later) to the guy who insists that he has no problem with gay people existing (how generous of him!) but objects to how the gay community is forcing their lifestyle on everyone. When pressed by Selvig as to specifics as to how the presence of gay people adversely affects him, he of course could not say, but then finally resorts to saying that nowadays gay people are everywhere in the media, even in cartoon shows, and hence he feels oppressed.
I wished that Selvig had asked him whether, by that same logic, the much greater prevalence of heterosexual people in the media meant that heterosexuals were forcing their lifestyles on everyone else and oppressing them.
In another case, the duo interviewed school book banners and got them to confront the fact that the Bible is full of the kinds of things that they claim to deplore in books.
There’s a lot of talk about banning books in schools, but we were surprised these republicans wanted to ban the Bible. pic.twitter.com/gq4b89x2PO
— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) February 1, 2022
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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