Trump’s Kitschy Nostalgia Is the Point

Video: PBS

There he was, just swaying under the lights, as Luciano Pavarotti’s voice rang out over the swelling strings of “Ave Maria.” Donald Trump, looking especially tired and listless, in the last days of his final campaign for the presidency, as likely to win as to lose, had chosen to end a town hall and play nine of his favorite songs. Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, with whom he was supposed to be hosting the event, smiled gamely, betraying only the slightest hint of panic around the eyes. Supporters at the foot of the stage held up their phones to capture the moment — a little taste of hyperreality to share with their grandkids.

Trumpism has always been a disorienting fusion of buffoonery and menace: too dangerous to be purely comic, not serious enough to live up to our fears. We expect our would-be tyrants to command a certain gravitas, to be earnest, play it straight. But Donald Trump almost never does. He’s always smirking, acting coy, camp, or just plain bizarre. The effect can be deflating, confusing, bathetic. Can a man this ridiculous really pose an existential threat to our democracy?

That question occurred to me once again while watching the surreal scene onstage in Oaks, Pennsylvania, last Monday. At the time, there were just three weeks left until the election, and Trump, before an audience in a must-win swing state, spent 39 minutes mostly silent, standing, rocking side to side, and occasionally dancing to his campaign playlist. The proceedings had started normally enough: Audience members asked reasonable questions about the economy; Trump responded with his usual shtick (“Drill, baby, drill”; the Democrats are letting “Hannibal Lecter” over the border). But after two people in the crowd had medical emergencies in quick succession — the room was apparently stifling — Trump decided to switch gears. “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music,” he said after “Ave Maria” finished. “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”

Pundits were quick to call the musical interlude inexplicable and to attribute the choice to Trump’s congenital weirdness and possible mental deterioration. They seemed to have hope that this was the type of moment that might wake up the electorate. But I didn’t find his performance particularly jarring. The sentiment he expressed — who the hell wants to keep doing this shit — brought to mind a wistful indiscretion from the grinding days of the 2020 campaign. “By the way, nice trucks,” Trump said to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which included a contingent of Truckers for Trump. “You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away? I’d love to just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this. I had such a good life. My life was great.”

Trump, we know, is a music lover. His dedication to Broadway, in particular, has always been endearing to me. (It identifies him as what he is: a wealthy 78-year-old New Yorker with queeny taste.) During his time in the White House, an aide was reportedly tasked with playing the president’s favorite show tunes when he became too agitated. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came on the scene in 2018, Trump kept comparing her to Eva Perón, which seemed odd; he hadn’t struck me as a student of Argentine history. But in fact he had seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical about Perón’s life, Evita, six times during its original run. It’s his favorite.

“Memory,” from Cats (also Lloyd Webber), closed out the town hall. Trump’s DJ set featured “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” with James Brown and Pavarotti, “Y.M.C.A.” (naturally), Rufus Wainwright’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Sinéad O’Connor’s cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Elvis’s “An American Trilogy,” and “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by country up-and-comer Oliver Anthony, who warmed MAGA hearts last summer with his plausible Tyler Childers impression and lyrics about overweight welfare recipients.

What unites these songs? Schlock and sentiment and melodrama. The songs that aren’t show tunes could be show tunes. They make you feel something, sometimes against your will. They’re evocative empty calories. Camp and kitsch. Unattached from Trump, they’re harmless. According to Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, the musical experience was a “total lovefest … Nobody wanted to leave and wanted to hear more songs from the famous DJT Spotify playlist!” And indeed, nobody seemed particularly disturbed by the proceedings (except, occasionally, Trump, who seemed to think the audience ought to be leaving). At one point, Trump called for a campaign aide named “Justin” to queue up “a couple really beauties and we’ll sit down and relax.” Then Justin played “Time to Say Goodbye,” by the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.

I like Andrea Bocelli. He’s my grandmother’s favorite singer. Recently, she had a minor medical procedure, and she and her surgeon both agreed that listening to Bocelli would help them relax. There’s nothing sinister about Andrea Bocelli. And it seems perfectly natural to hear him at a Trump rally. “Time to Say Goodbye” — originally, “Con Te Partirò” — was a megahit in the mid-’90s, but it’s easy to mistake it for an older song. (I’ve heard it played on classical-music radio.) In season two of The Sopranos, Carmela listens to Bocelli while imagining a life without Tony. “‘Con Te Partirò’ sounded like opera, but it wasn’t,” The Sopranos creator, David Chase, said. It evoked “nostalgia for the old country” in an ersatz, cornball way. “What that meant, for Carmela, was: ‘I want to be anywhere but here. I don’t want my life. I want a different life.’”

Nostalgia is unspecific in this way, unfixed, fickle and relative. (Grizabella sings, I can dream of the old days, life was beautiful then …) Young conservatives long to return to their childhoods: to the time of Sega Genesis or Game Boy Advance, to a time before social media. “Wokeness” is blamed for the fact that time passes, that we get older and grow up. On X, an image of a family eating at Pizza Hut is captioned “REMEMBER WHAT THEY TOOK FROM US.” The songs Trump loves evoke the past, but it’s an artificial, mutable past, provoking the most basic, primal questions: What is it that you miss? When did you have it? Wouldn’t you like to get it back? Movement conservatives used to want to “repeal the 20th century,” as Murray Rothbard put it; I sometimes think MAGA conservatives just want to repeal the 21st — to return to the end of history.

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music.” It’s an economical distillation of Trump’s appeal, one that — all these years later — can still be difficult for liberals to grasp. Most of his words aren’t important. Neither are the details or facts. The main thing is the music, the melodrama, the feelings of longing and betrayal that Trump, in all his self-sorry arrogance, evokes. The people who show up for Trump rallies want to hear the song. They want to feel the highs and lows together in the presence of their leader. Joy, maybe. Or indignation. Probably, hope. It’s important to remember, too, that the contempt liberals feel for Trump is part of the appeal. Some people like Trump the way other people like Cats: They don’t care if it’s not good. One person’s kitschy junk is another person’s treasure. It’s a mistake to assume schmaltz and menace can’t go hand in hand. Sometimes, the banality is the point.

If Trump is reelected, he won’t have the power to return his supporters to the womb, to give them back the wholeness, warmth, and certainty they remember. Instead, he’ll have the power to punish others on their behalf, and he will. They say politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. And Trump, at his most prosaic, is just a cruel and racist bully. If he doesn’t win, the show will go on: Another mawkish tale about betrayed and stolen dreams can begin. At least they’ll still have the music.

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