Il Duce and Ol' Douchey

Did you catch Donald Trump's big Victory Tour speech from Cincinnati Thursday night? Don't worry if you didn't actually watch it on teevee -- if you saw any of his rallies during the presidential campaign, you've seen it already, although it had fewer slams at Hillary Clinton. For nostalgia's sake, Trump did at least give the crowd a chance to chant "Lock her up!" when he reminisced about how much fun it was to run against her before he won the presidency in a "landslide." He kept using that word. We do not think he knows what it means.

For the masochists among you, here is the speech in its full horror:

For all the talk of Trump becoming more "presidential" during his transition, this was Trump in full campaign hair on fire mode, complete with baldface lies, mocking a protester, calling the press dishonest, and exaggerating what an incredible win he had. Except there's no campaign, and now that he's president, he actually had to put up with a much smaller crowd than he'd have liked, since the Secret Service and law enforcement shut down several bridges, leading to gridlock that left the arena only partly full.

Donald Trump Bribes Carrier Into Still Moving Some Jobs To Mexico You may be shocked to learn that this is not the job creation Trump promised.

Trump started with a brief lie, bragging about how he had "saved" jobs at the Carrier air conditioning plan in Indianapolis, which is actually sending more jobs to Mexico than it's keeping, and which was only persuaded to keep some 800 jobs in Indy by Mike Pence's promise of some $7 million in incentives to keep the jobs that are staying. In essence, Indiana taxpayers will be paying the "saved" workers' salaries, which sounds a hell of a lot like socialism, and is the exact opposite of what Trump had promised: that he would use the threat of tariffs to keep companies from offshoring jobs. Not that anyone cared, because in the Trump presidency, there are no longer any such thing as facts, just whatever Donald Trump thinks at any given moment.

Much of the rest of the speech was a recitation of two paired narratives: How Trump won all the states he wasn't supposed to win, and how the dishonest media lied and lied about how he never had a chance of winning, when in fact he won in a "landslide," which may come to be the most frequently abused word of Trump's Sore Winner Victory Tour. Trump, who hadn't been on a campaign stage since the end of the campaign, clearly reveled in mocking the terrible horrible biased press, including a slam at ABC's Martha Raddatz: “How about when a major anchor, who hosted a debate, started crying when she realized that we won? How about that? [...] Tears. ‘No, tell me this isn’t true.'” Stupid baby media ladies, such pussies -- not that he wouldn't grab 'em.

If you want to go all truth-squad on Trump -- which frankly, should be mandatory for just about everything he says -- Raddatz never sobbed or said the words "No, tell me this isn’t true." In plain old reality, after noting Trump's total lack of a strategy for Syria, she did appear to get a bit emotional when recalling what Tim Kaine, who has a son in the Marine Corps, said when asked if he would trust Trump as Commander in Chief:

He was asked, by John Dickerson, "So if Donald Trump is democratically elected, and your son is serving as a Marine, you wouldn't trust his life under that Commander in Chief?" And Kaine said, "I wouldn't." That's a pretty extraordinary thing to say, if you have a son in the Marine Corps, and you don't trust the Commander in Chief. The people in the military defend the Constitution.

Feh, facts don't matter; she did have a catch in her voice, so she was a biased crybaby who can't stand that Hillary lost. (Could she have been moved by the patriotism of a professional military that will continue to defend the Constitution, even under a president who doesn't seem to know what's in it? Oh, don't be ridiculous!) ABC News issued a statement defending Raddatz, saying, “This is ridiculous and untrue [...] Martha is tough and fair and not intimidated by anyone.” As Trump re-tells the story, expect it to become a tale of Raddatz bursting into tears, sobbing with her head on the anchor desk, and having to be sedated.

Even Trump's attempts at accepting the congratulations of a former opponent were treated as an in-your-face to the losers: When Trump mentioned Ohio Governor John Kasich's call to congratulate him on winning, the crowd booed, but at least refrained from calling for Kasich to be ritually disemboweled. See? Trump really is bringing America together. For some reason, Kasich didn't attend the rally.

So meet the New Trump: He's the same as the Old Trump. Only now he has the nuclear codes. To his credit, during the Two Minutes' Hate directed at the reporters covering the rally, he at least didn't urge the crowd to lynch any journalists. That admirable restraint was pretty damned presidential.

Trump's content-free Victory Tour rallies are expected to continue from now until the end of his term, so get ready to hear him retell the story of the night he won by increasingly larger landslides over and over again, with other lies mixed in as the situation warrants.

[WaPo / Cincinnati Inquirer / Heavy]