{"id":644215,"date":"2026-10-28T22:36:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T22:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/644215\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T22:36:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T22:36:15","slug":"the-bottomless-depths-of-donald-trumps-midterm-rally-bigotry-us-midterm-elections-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/644215\/","title":{"rendered":"The bottomless depths of Donald Trump\u2019s midterm rally bigotry | US midterm elections 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barack Obama<\/a> versus Donald Trump<\/a>. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.<\/p>\n

Obama is back on the campaign trail for the midterms, still electrifying crowds,<\/a> earning shouts of \u201cWe love you!\u201d and skewering his successor. \u201cWhat\u2019s up with the gold?\u201d he asked a crowd in Detroit<\/a>. \u201cI mean, he\u2019s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.\u201d This has, predictably, set off a mini culture war<\/a> involving questions of elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s election to the White House 10 years ago next month<\/a> owed much to a racist backlash against America\u2019s first Black president as white Christians shifted from majority to minority. He had pushed conspiracy theories about Obama\u2019s birthplace and promised to build a border wall to keep out criminals and rapists.<\/p>\n

Indeed, election campaigns are a furnace in which pretence burns away and essential character is exposed. They certainly bring out the worst in Trump. This year\u2019s midterms effort<\/a>, in which he is averaging about a rally a day and fighting bad polls like a cornered animal, is a case in point.<\/p>\n

Has any president\u2019s closing message ever been so Islamophobic, misogynistic and racist, not to mention downright deranged and bizarre? It is like watching a man vomit up bigotry that has been poisoning his soul for decades. Just when you think Trump has hit rock bottom, he produces a jackhammer and starts tunnelling to a new nadir of nastiness.<\/p>\n

He still relishes calling Obama by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, with an emphases on Hussein. Now he has Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed<\/a>, who would become the first Muslim senator if elected, in his sights.<\/p>\n

In Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday, he called El-Sayed a \u201cjihadist\u201d who is \u201con the side of the terrorists\u201d and would \u201chave to go through a metal detector before he\u2019s allowed to go into the Senate\u201d. Trump repeatedly invoked the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, drawing a comparison between stopping El-Sayed from entering the Senate chamber and the passengers who fought back against the hijackers onboard United flight 93.<\/p>\n

There is no evidence for any of this. But Trump is on an Islamophobic tear. He has repeatedly attacked Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman of Minnesota, while his justice department banged on her door at 6am to investigate alleged fraud<\/a> in her family\u2019s immigration paperwork. Omar has said she is \u201cconfident in the fact that I didn\u2019t do anything wrong\u201d.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump after rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson\/AP<\/p>\n

One of Trump\u2019s standard punchlines now is the racist and false assertion that 98% of people from Somalia in the US don\u2019t work for a living. \u201cThey don\u2019t really have to work because they steal so much,\u201d he told one rally. \u201cThey all have a Mercedes-Benz.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told his overwhelmingly white fanbase: \u201cCan you believe, low IQ, and they live better than you do? I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on. Maybe they\u2019re not as low as we think.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another highly peculiar theme of Trump\u2019s rally blitz has been his obsession with the male physique<\/a>. He said of the Ohio senator Jon Husted: \u201cI looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs. I said, \u2018His ass, shit, it\u2019s like, it\u2019s like a pile of muscle.\u2019\u201d He also claimed to have \u201cfallen in love\u201d with Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator.<\/p>\n

The objectification is not limited to men. Back in Michigan, Trump turned his attention to the posterior of the rapper Nicki Minaj. \u201cI looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before: Nicki Minaj,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cThat\u2019s hard to miss. Stand up! That\u2019s hard to miss.\u201d<\/p>\n

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How is all of this resonating with Trump\u2019s supporters? I called Sharon Anderson<\/a>, who has been to 81 Trump rallies and was entirely untroubled by his comment. She said: \u201cIf a woman puts her ass out there for attention and somebody pays attention to it \u2013 Trump didn\u2019t try to rape her \u2013 what\u2019s the big deal?\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson, 70, who is from Etowah, Tennessee, and went to her first Trump rally in 2015, dismisses the notion that he is getting worse. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing this for 11 years. He\u2019s not changed a bit in my opinion. Now, a lot of what he says is reported and a lot of what he says isn\u2019t reported.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does she have any concerns about the president\u2019s mental health? \u201cAbsolutely not! Do you know anyone that could do what he does? He speaks an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes every rally. It\u2019s almost supernatural in my opinion,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Yet Trump, who is 80, has started making strange guttural sounds, somewhere between a burp and a hiccup<\/a>, in the middle of a sentence. And on Sunday he unleashed a 1,300-word rant on social media about his relationship with the comedian Bill Maher, branding him a \u201cCOMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER\u201d and telling him<\/a>: \u201cBill: Don\u2019t call anymore. It\u2019s useless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judging by the midterm polls that favour Democrats<\/a>, Obama might have the upper hand in this latest struggle between the two men. As power slips inexorably from Trump\u2019s grasp, as it must for all lame duck presidents, how much more desperate and extreme can he become? What new degradations await?<\/p>\n

His rantings and ravings are a grim omen as he enters the Apocalypse Now phase of his presidency. Like Col Kurtz, he is a god to a fanatical but shrinking band of followers. Like Col Kurtz, he may be on a final descent into madness. Two more years? The horror, the horror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barack Obama versus Donald Trump. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-644215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}