For anyone who may have forgotten (or tried to forget), there was Donald Trump, that pied piper of the extreme right, again on full display for seventy-minutes in a town hall/campaign rally that CNN thoughtfully provided for him. Any American harboring illusions that the man had changed, even the teeniest bit, was disabused of that notion with the very first question.
Trump sat across from Kaitlan Collins, who like Hillary Clinton accepting the 2016 Democratic nomination, chose a white pants suit for the occasion. Then, with either false sincerity or genuine mental illness, he insisted yet again that he won in 2020 only to be done in by massive fraud that would have required hundreds if not thousands of conspirators to pull off, not one of whom has yet breathed a word about it. The crowd applauded. (The white suit did not seem to yield any better results for Collins than it had for Clinton.)
For the remainder of the event, Trump was, well, Trump, leaving all but his most fervent supporters wondering, also yet again, if he really believed his own fantasies or was he simply spewing out the vitriol his fans have come to demand, sort of like Frank Sinatra always needing to end a concert with “My Way.”
