The American apocalypse is coming, and the only person who can prevent it is Donald Trump — so he said on Saturday before a packed audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
"Our country is being destroyed. The only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me. It’s true," Trump said hours before the polls were set to close in the South Carolina primary.
Saturday's speech, like many he's delivered this political cycle, was loaded with lines seemingly intended to strike fear: if voters don’t select him, the economy will fail, infrastructure will collapse, gangs will roll into the suburbs ("when they talk about suburban women, they’re going to love me so much," Trump said. "They’re going to say, oh, I wish we had that guy back,") law enforcement will hunt down conservatives and people of faith, Antifa and Hamas will rise to terrorize the streets, and China will dominate America.
Trump made all of these claims, in a series, within the first eight minutes of his address.
The rest of his 90 minute set bounced from jokes (his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, is hard to impress, he jested; flying on a military plane made him so nervous he thought about giving himself a medal for bravery) to hagiography (he called himself a "proud political dissident" facing greater recrimination than Al Capone) to migrant issues (immigrants to America make home-grown criminals look downright polite, he charged — "even our bad criminals, they never had fistfights with a cop, you know, they do things and talk and shout").
He appeared to lose the thread a few times, though. During one lengthy stretch, as he wandered from ruminations on immigration to complaints about President Joe Biden "set[ting] fire to not only our system of government but to hundreds of years of Western legal tradition," Trump declared that his first, most urgent action as president would be immigration: "sealing of the border; stopping the invasion; drill, baby, drill; send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home," he said, his catchphrases slipping in and out of order.
Trump also stumbled at one point when talking about his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"I talked to Putin a lot, I got along with him. Well, although he did announce the other day that he'd much rather see Biden as president. And I agree with him," he said, before taking credit for ending the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — an end better attributed to sanctions against Russia for the Ukrainian invasion.
At one point, Trump began a story about his 2019 border security negotiations with Mexico, in which he threatened to impose escalating tariffs.
It concluded about half an hour later, after he digressed into his defeat of ISIS, a lengthy story about his plane descending into Iraq, criticism for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, praising police, and an anecdote about the rambling aptitude of his uncle, engineer and physicist John Trump.
Of course, he counted congenital aptitude for circuitous speech as a point of pride, at one point saying that a "really smart person can go through various stories, come back and conclude everything."
"By the way, isn’t this better than reading off a frickin’ teleprompter," he said, 50 minutes into his speech and shortly after another digression into his preference for emphasizing the "Hussein" of former President Barack Obama’s middle name.
Notably, Trump sought to distance himself from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the strongman dictator that he has praised throughout his candidacies and presidency, saying that he would have prevented the attack on Ukraine had he been in office, and that he would strike a deal between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin.
He did, however, shout out other populist leaders from around the globe, including far-right Spanish politician Santiago Abascal, who was accused of attempting to incite violence against Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Brazilian federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro (the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is now under investigation for allegedly plotting a coup against his successor) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
He alleged that Orban said Trump’s presidency scared enemies — "he said China was afraid, Russia was afraid, they were all afraid of Trump, bring him back and it’ll all go back" — later adding that "Putin would say, if you’re being nice, I hate like hell to think of what you’d be if you were not nice."
Trump left the stage after about an hour and a half, apologizing for not reading his speech off the teleprompter and insisting that he must make his way to South Carolina for the state’s primary, striking a brighter tone than he did earlier in the speech, when he insisted that the presidential election was "our last chance."
"At the ballot boxes in November, it’s you and the people you have to be, and we’ll deliver a reckoning like they haven’t even imagined before," Trump said. "November 5, it will be our new liberation day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day."