What the crowd heard in #AgentOrange's #EltonRecords speech

#AgentOrange, a.k.a. 45, a.k.a. Верный* (#VernyyBro), gave his #EltonRecords speech in Montana yesterday. The speech has been widely mocked on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter, and around water coolers from coast to coast. If you read his words dispassionately, they’re just this side of gibberish. But we focus on that fact at our peril, because his audience didn’t think it was gibberish at all. They truly believe that they know exactly what he meant.

Here’s my translation of what Cheeto’s audience heard, into proper #Presidential English. The actual quote follows below.

So, our Trump campaign rallies have broken attendance records at many, many venues. We break those records, not for an Elton John concert or a hockey or basketball game, but for an event where the main attraction is just me standing at a podium, speaking unscripted in front of a group of people who believe that I am super smart and doing a super duper job of MAGA. Don’t worry about the obvious fact that I am beyond sloppy in my choice of words, taking for granted a broad and deep shared understanding with my target audience. To those Liberals with their San Francisco Values, I sound like a fool and a jackass who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, rhetorically speaking, but you understand that that’s a good thing. If those so-called Elites, the people with fancy education who are careful what they say, think that I’m a buffoon, I can sneak things right under their (and your) noses while all of you are distracted by the outrage-du-jour. You, my audience, my base, know that I’m smart, just like Trump University was a great educational opportunity and Trump real estate was and still is a great investment. Don’t pay attention to what I say, watch what I do, and put all of your faith in your belief that I will do whatever specific thing it is that you imagine that I promised you personally, while politically I run circles around the people who to you look like the people who have criticized your sloppy words or poor command of facts, your whole life.

The actual quote from #SoCalledPresident Donald J. Trump:

[some stuff about Elton John and breaking records] So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain is attached to the mouth. Right? The brain – more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.

We’re clearly not getting anywhere pointing out to Trump’s faithful that he’s sloppy in his extemporaneous thinking; they believe that he knows what he means even if it doesn’t perfectly match what he says, and they don’t care about the discrepancies. What we need to show them is that the “organ” Trump is missing is none other than his own brain, to show them that he really doesn’t understand what he’s doing rather than merely that he follows his gut and speaks without double-checking (or even checking) his words. Agent Orange is pretty stupid, pridefully ignorant, and manifestly unwise in terms of anyone’s interests but his own — but he’s nowhere near as dumb as he looks.

* as in “Верный Слуга,” Russian for “Faithful Servant”