RUTHFULLY YOURS

Before his bombastic concert-in-the-park performance in Mobile, Donald Trump had come across chiefly as an amusing amateur whose total lack of basic political knowledge and essential reasoning ability had rendered him unwilling to do interviews that he could not phone in from the confines of his office. In Alabama, he broke out, transforming himself in the process into something else altogether. One part Alan Ginsberg, one part Jim Morrison, and one part Roderick Spode, Trump strode onto the Southern stage as might a troubled rock star. This, his insolent upper lip told the camera, was show time.

Attempting manfully to keep up with the spectacle, C-SPAN warned viewers bloodlessly that its closed-captioning system sometimes made mistakes and was therefore not to be trusted. One had to wonder how anybody could have known either way. Words, you see, are for losers. For the overrated. For the establishment. Real candidates leer and emote and strut back and forth.

At times resembling a man who hoped to discover whether methamphetamine or LSD served as the best accompaniment to a mostly whisky diet, Trump stood throughout his pageant in a cocksure fighting pose, breaking his stance only to turn around and bathe in the adulation. When he spoke, he did so as might a half-awake stranger at an underground poetry slam. His thoughts were meandering, irrational, and wholly self-contradictory; his grasp of reality left much to be desired; his aim was to offer up a firework-laden piece of self-serving performance art, aimed squarely at the unserious and the easily led. “I know how Billy Graham felt,” Trump preached before he launched into his quasi-hallucinogenic diatribe. Superficially, perhaps he does. But Graham, recall, was preaching about an external God.

Topics came and went like shooting stars. In the course of just under an hour, Trump took an irony-free shot at the stupid, complaining in mock-sorrow that “we have dummies, we have dummies, we have dummies!”; he explained earnestly why he would no longer be eating Oreos; he grew randomly angry with cyclists, and with a retired thoroughbred racehorse called “Secretariat.” He proposed a 35 percent tariff on goods from Mexico, before incongruously knocking China for its unfair import duties; argued that the presidential election should be held earlier so that he could win it; and supposed that constitutional amendments can be ignored at will. If the mood fell flat, he took to listing countries that the audience was expected to dislike, and to badgering the crowd about the brilliance of his book, which he compared to the Bible. Goo Goo G’joob, Mr. Kite.