With just three weeks to go until the presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign has taken a strange turn.
The Republican candidate for president has never been one to play by the political rules, but his recent performances have been particularly bizarre: he took to music on stage instead of answering questions, trashed people he also voted for tried to bring justice and spent valuable time campaigning. solidly blue states, to name a few.
Here are some of the puzzling things he’s been trying lately in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
His town hall became a forty-minute musical tribute
During a town hall in Pennsylvania Monday night, Trump abruptly said he was done answering questions and “just wanted to listen to music,” directing his staff to play “some real beauties.”
What followed was nearly 40 minutes of Trump singing along, swaying and lightly dancing on stage to a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” along with several hits by Sinead O’Connor, Elvis Presley, Guns N’ Roses and the villagers.
Even Trump seemed confused at times about what was happening. He noted after one of the first songs that “nobody’s leaving” and asked, “What’s going on?” The crowd seemed unsure if the event was over.
Donald Trump’s town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania took a very strange turn after two rally-goers had medical issues that caused the program to be halted. Trump decided to halt the town hall questions and told his staff to simply play music from his personal playlist. He stood on stage listening… pic.twitter.com/kkjixXNzsg
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 15, 2024
He has inexplicably discredited auto workers
Trump’s campaign has aggressively sought support from auto workers in Michigan, the capital of U.S. auto manufacturing. But he threw all that out the window Tuesday when he reduced their jobs to simply taking parts “out of a box,” saying the job was so easy a child could do it.
“They build everything in Germany, and then they assemble it here. They are getting away with murder,” Trump claimed during an appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago.
“They take them out of a box and put them together. We could make our kid do it,” he continued.
He rattled off Virginia when asked about Google
In another strange moment during his appearance in Chicago on Tuesday, Trump responded to a question about whether Google should be broken up by saying he has not yet “won over” the Justice Department, which has sued the state of Virginia over the takedown of people from the electoral lists.
When the interviewer then reminded Trump that the question was about Google, Trump said the tech company is “very bad for me.”
“I recently called the head of Google and said I’ve been getting a lot of good stories lately, but you’re not finding them in Google,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very rigged deal. I think Google is being manipulated, just like our government is being manipulated everywhere.”
He canceled a scheduled appearance on CNBC
Joe Kernen, one of the hosts of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” revealed on air Tuesday that Trump withdrew from an upcoming interview on the show.
Sources familiar with the original plans told The Daily Beast that the interview was supposed to take place later this week, until Trump abruptly canceled. A Trump spokesperson told CNN he canceled due to a scheduling conflict.
This is the second time this month that Trump has skipped a major interview. After canceling his appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” he posted several angry rants on social media, calling the century-old network “A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY” and demanding its broadcast license be revoked.
He plans rallies in solid blue states
While presidential candidates typically hold most of their rallies in swing states — a political necessity of the Electoral College — Trump has planned some of his latest election events in solid blue states like California, Colorado, Illinois and New York.
His decision to spend some time and resources in states where he has no chance of winning has baffled experts.
In fact, he has repeatedly insisted that he will flip his home state of New York, even though no major polls indicate that. A Republican hasn’t won the state in 40 years.
He also exaggerates the size of the crowds at his blue-state events. After holding a rally in California’s Coachella Valley on Saturday, Trump boasted of having 100,000 attendees. While the exact number of attendees is unclear, a permit for the event would limit attendance to 15,000.
