Disaster In Dallas. No one is buying it, Donnie.

by Rick Wilson - Sep 10

Donald Trump’s Castro-esque speech in Dallas last night was one for the Trumpian Ages.

It was not, of course, a masterpiece of rhetoric, persuasion, or leadership. It barely rose above his usual grunting call-and-response with the base. But it deserves a place in the archive as a specimen of end-stage dictator dementia, a final splatter of primate feces flung from the golden cage of the White House adult memory care center.

As I wrote last night at the new Lincoln Project Substack, Trump was the capstone speaker at the RNC 2026 Fyre Festival Trumpapalooza, as he will be tonight, and tomorrow night, and every night until the sun cools to a cinder. Trump eternal: the old lies joined by new lies, the shoutouts to the Front Row Joes, the ritual cursing of the Fake News.

And it was terrible.

I don’t mean that only as a Trump critic, though I yield that title to very few. I mean it as a guy who wrote speeches for a living and still believes the English language can rouse the better angels when someone bothers to try. Nobody tried. Two hours of a man free-associating through his grievances like a drunk uncle reading his Facebook feed to the Thanksgiving table

I don’t mean that clearly from an aesthetic perspective either, though Trump looked heavy, greasy, and his hair appeared green under the lights of the arena. His chin waddle dripped over his too-tight shirt collar, squaring his entire head so he look like a sort of lardy burgher.

The lies came in their usual formation, darkening the sun. He has won the presidency three times. Gas was $1.85 in Iowa before he started the Iran war and it will be practically free when he ends the Iran war, just after the election. Everything is going swimmingly. You’re so rich, America! Sure, Don.

Twenty trillion-bazillionty quadrillion dollars has poured into America on his watch, a number so imaginary his own White House website, usually a triumph of mendacity, only claims eleven billion. “Almost every item” is getting cheaper, which will come as news to anyone who has bought, well, anything this year.

And this was the “first-ever midterm convention of any party,” which is true unless you count the Democrats holding two of them in the 1970s with Jimmy Carter in the room.

Then the promises. The aforementioned gas prices will fall so low you’ll practically be paid to tank up the minute we win the war with Iran, now in its seventh month of not being won. The Strait of Hormuz should be renamed the Trump Strait.

Yep. He is at the naming-oceans-after-himself stage, which historically comes right before the naming-months stage. Happy 24 Fructidor, everyone! Of course he pitched renaming New Mexico as New America, which went over with tepid applause, which is to say even the crowd in Dallas wasn’t buying it.

Which brings us to the check.

Here is the deal, straight from the dais: if Republicans hold the House and the Senate, every adult citizen in America gets a $5,000 “Trump Dividend.” A dividend, because you are all shareholders in the glorious enterprise of Him.

Let’s do the arithmetic he didn’t. Roughly 245 million adult citizens times $5,000 is north of $1.2 trillion. That is more than the entire Pentagon budget, promised in one sentence, with no funding source, no legislation, no eligibility rules, and no date. JD Vance was on Fox within the hour explaining the wealthy probably wouldn’t get the full amount, so the promise lasted about as long as a Trump family marriage vow. It’s a shame that our struggling Mom and Pop billionaire class won’t get their cut, but I think they’ll get by.

Remember the $2,000 tariff dividend from last fall? How about those DOGE dividend checks? Check your mailbox. Have you received yours yet? The tariff check, the DOGE dividend, and this new Trump bribe are the same check: vaporware meant to trick his rube base into believing the economic damage he’s done to them will be fixed. If only they’ll come out and vote for the people that caused it in the first place.

He’s selling them a jubilee, and they’re standing in a bonfire ripping through their economic futures.

This is not a policy. It is a bribe offered by a man who doesn’t have the money, conditioned on an outcome he can’t deliver, to voters he assumes are too dim to notice.

It was also a sign of his desperation: you don’t offer to buy the votes if you think you already have them.

The rest was the greatest hits. Sleepy Joe. Dumocrats. Trans athletes. The Wall. The SAVE Act. All the culture war leftovers he’s been microwaving since 2015, were served to a crowd that would have cheered him reading a Denny’s menu.

Any normal American outside our political bubble watching the speech would’ve been stunned at how utterly disconnected it is from the realities in which they live.

That is the point every Republican in that building should have absorbed and didn’t. This was a base speech. Trump has one gear, and it’s the gear that plays to the shrinking third of the country who would follow him into a volcano.

But 2026 is a change election, and the change voters want is from him. He knows it, and said so from the stage. His fix was to ask America to “pretend I’m on the ballot. One more time.”

The problem for the MAGA GOP is that America intends to.

Watch the room. Ken Paxton, trailing James Talarico, stood there while the leader of his own party mocked his clothes and his voice. John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, was roundly booed. The capering maniacs, Tim Scott chief among them, fluffed Trump, bellowed about imaginary communists, and promised that without Trump, the Democrats would tear their hearts out of Republicans literally, if not politically.

Even for a partisan convention, it was painful, regional dinner theater-style acting, about as convincing as a Melania orgasm.

None of them were very good at this. Trump is sui generis, and their posturing is a cheap copy, painfully disconnected from American life.

Trump hand-picked every candidate on that stage, told them to speak only if their race was tight, and made them grin while he fed their electoral prospects into the Trump woodchipper. He forced them to get his terrible polling and roadkill-meets-Depends stink all over their electoral hopes. When he promised to campaign in their states before November, you could practically see their souls wither and die.

Trump on the ballot has always drawn out lower-propensity voters, but only when he’s on the ballot, and no matter how much wishcasting he engages in, his name will not be on a single ballot this year. Nowhere. Not one.

The Republican base is fractured and dispirited after 18 months of abject failures, and they’re angry at Republican elected officials more than Trump himself. Deep in their subconscious, they know why this is happening, but the rule of owning the libs and never admitting defeat is burned into their souls.

So does every Republican candidate.

Not one of them will say the check is fantasy, or the war is a mess, or the tariffs are a tax. They can’t. They have been hostages for a decade, and this November they will learn what hostages usually learn: the captor does not trade himself for you. He shoots you instead.

They were desperate for Trump to stop treating affordability as a punchline, desperate for the man who defines their party, and their fates to offer even a scintilla of empathy and connection to suffering Americans, including their own base voters.

Axios covered a story this week of how Trump aides, even the most senior and influential of them, have simply given up. No one is trying to make him do the right thing. No one is trying to make him do the smart thing. No one is even bothering to pretend anymore that they are led by anything but a decaying madman.

There is a fin de siècle smell to it now, the late Brezhnev phase of a regime. The speeches get longer as the crowds get older. The promises get bigger as the delivery gets smaller. We have a man who wants to rename the Strait of Hormuz after himself while promising cash he doesn’t have to voters who are quietly finished with him.

Empires end in a lot of ways.

Trump’s apparently ends with a two-hour speech to a crowd of desperate Republican candidates and officials who realized that he’s not locked in there with them.

They’re locked in there with him.