Trump’s masterful ability to psych everyone out was on display again on Monday night, at the final campaign rally that he held before the midterm elections. He was in Ohio campaigning mainly on behalf of JD Vance. He named several other Ohio candidates – Jim Jordan, Mike DeWine, etc. – who look like they’ll be safely reelected. But Vance was the real beneficiary of the rally. Many of us tuned in, not because of Vance, but because of the rumors that started swirling on Monday afternoon: Trump was finally going to make the big announcement!

When I heard that, I tuned in and watched the rally on RSBN from start to finish. Trump is the most exciting “candidate” to watch even when he’s not on the ballot, and if he was going to pull the trigger and make his 2024 official, I wanted to see it.

I remember his announcement in 2015 fondly. I consider myself fairly “hard right” politically, and I had been working explicitly in politics for six years prior to that day in June. I was especially disillusioned with the GOP, because no candidate or politician on the right was willing to verbally espouse my views or support them. A few candidates here and there sort of danced around my views – Rand Paul comes to mind – but no one was really representing me in Washington.

My wife was a big fan of “Celebrity Apprentice.” She had made me watch a few episodes. I enjoyed watching Gary Busey’s aggressive amygdala hijack of Meat Loaf and the screaming fit that ensued in one episode. I knew who Trump was, obviously, and I had written campaign commercials for him in 2012 when he flirted with challenging Obama. So, we tuned in to see what he had to say in his announcement.

And wow!

Cruddy trade deals that America’s leaders had used to gut our manufacturing sectors. China was eating our lunch. America is a dumping ground for Mexico’s problems. $2 trillion wasted in Iraq. ISIS was taking over the Middle East. (Remember ISIS? Gee, I wonder what happened to those guys?) GDP was below zero because of Obama-Biden. Obamacare premiums were skyrocketing by 55% for some people.

From that 2015 speech:

“How stupid are our leaders? How stupid are these politicians to allow this to happen? How stupid are they?”

I watched the speech and thought, “Amen, brother! Preach it!” I boarded the Trump Train on that first day and I’ve never stepped off. Millions of additional Americans did the same, and we pulled off the unthinkable. We upended the establishment’s apple cart, and we prevented Crooked Hillary from obtaining an office that she had been lusting for since the early 1990s. Good times!

So, I tuned in Monday night because the rumors were swirling that Trump was finally going to make it official about 2024. My impressions from the rally:

Trump has an innate ability to make everyone around him feel special. Very few people have that sort of charisma. People who hate his politics hate him even more because of this. He’s so darned likeable. The reactions that liberal women have to Trump especially crack me up. They hate him SOOOOOO much that they would totally leave their husbands for him.

Trump is still hilarious. He’s laid back and having a good time at these rallies. He knows how to tease people and poke fun at them, so they know that he’s actually kidding. Talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop, he turned to Don, Jr. and Eric Trump and made the obvious joke that everyone was thinking: “I would NEVER speak to you again!”

And Trump is still a master at psyching everyone out. Fox News was standing by with staffers watching live in the background, just in case Trump made the big announcement. I assume the other networks were doing the same, and any reporter in the country who was not at work was tuned in Monday night, thinking, “Is he going to announce? Is he?!”

But he made it all the way to the end of the rally before telling everyone that he didn’t want to detract from Tuesday’s midterms. Instead, he’ll be making a big announcement from Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, November 15, 2022. He probably planted the rumors about the Monday rally, just so we’d all tune in. And it worked. He’s still got it! And here we go again!