Can you imagine having to share a prison cell with Donald Trump? I feel sorry for whoever ends up having to bunk with him. Dude doesn’t shut up.
On Saturday, while Sen. Bernie Sanders was launching his 2020 presidential campaign in Brooklyn by calling Trump “the most dangerous president in modern American history,” Trump was simultaneously addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, MD. Sanders’ speech lasted 37 minutes. Trump’s dragged on for over two hours, his longest speech ever.
I also have sympathy for Toronto Star correspondent Daniel Dale, who had to fact-check the entire thing on Twitter.
Dictators (and wannabe dictators like Trump) love to talk for hours and hours. Part of the reason is that they have a captive audience of their own making. In Trump’s case, it’s because he has his own MAGA cult. Such is the way of malignant narcissists. But I have some bad news for the president: He was about five hours and eight minutes shy of the longest speech by the late Cuban dictator and long-winded master Fidel Castro, who rambled on for more than seven hours at a Communist Party Congress in Havana in 1986. (Castro also held the Guinness Book of Records for the longest speech at the United Nations, in 1960, clocking in at four hours and 29 minutes, according to the Independent.)
And if Trump wants to beat the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, he’d have to talk for eight hours longer than he did Saturday at CPAC. Trump’s not even the best at being long-winded and unhinged. Other people even did that better. What a loser.
But the president’s profanity-laced, stream-of-consciousness diatribe will be useful for one thing: It’ll serve as a sort of Trump’s Greatest Hits of his all-time favorite lies and attacks on perceived enemies, something we can fondly look back on when Trump and his greasy-palmed gang of grifters are locked away on RICO charges, or obstruction, tax evasion, treason, or conspiracy charges, or whatever crimes that ultimately will end up putting them all behind bars. Trump didn’t leave any classic Trumpism unmentioned.
We can get Ken Burns to narrate the damn thing.
In the meantime, if you have the stomach and patience for it, you can watch the entire two-hour, Adderall-filled, MAGA rant here:
Or, read it play-by-play on Dale’s Twitter feed, which includes classic Trumpisms such as:
And:
And my personal favorite, in which Trump (and the audience) swears:
Here you can watch Trump bizarrely groping the U.S. flag (again):
Better yet, go read a book, pet your dog or cat, visit a park, eat some ice cream, smile at some babies, and turn off Trump.