Donald Trump’s presence in national politics has always been predicated heavily on nostalgia. His campaign theme is “Make America great again,” after all, a call for voters to restore the nation to a bygone era, one unsullied by the complexities of modern life, such as diversity and cities.
Some element of Trump’s presentation is familiar to anyone who has a relative over the age of, say, 50: He thinks things were better when he was young, and he wants to cram America into a big time machine and have all of us travel back a few decades. This isn’t feasible, obviously, so he resigns himself to overhauling the current America to look like the old one, like Jimmy Stewart getting to work in “Vertigo.”
Trump would appreciate that reference, because Trump’s pop-culture touchstones are generally also decades-old. That was made very apparent on Monday night when, for inexplicable reasons, he converted a campaign rally in Oaks, Pa., into a sort of danceless dance party.
“Let’s make this a musical fest,” he declared after multiple attendees got a bit wobbly in the overheated event space. When the first such interruption occurred, the audience began singing “God Bless America” for some reason, prompting Trump to ask his audiovisual people to play “Ave Maria” over the loudspeaker.
This was the first moment where things got weird. The version of that song — according to this Washington Post columnist’s deployment of Shazam on Tuesday morning — was one created by a musical artist named “Rachel Conwell.” She has released about 100 albums in the past two years, most featuring public-domain music and AI-generated cover art. Conwell has published those songs in various languages, with albums aimed at ASMR (Google it), getting babies to sleep or having dogs chill out.
I suspect Conwell might not really exist. Regardless, Trump didn’t like her instrumental version, complaining that “they gave me the ‘Ave Maria’ with no voice.”
A bit later, once the “musical fest” got underway, they played the version he liked, the one by Luciano Pavarotti recorded in the mid-1970s. Then came another operatic bop, “Time to Say Goodbye” by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman. But why simply describe the playlist when you can actually play the playlist?
What was odd about the musical fest — beyond Trump spending nearly 40 precious minutes standing on a stage listening to music instead of talking to voters — was that it was not really fun, danceable music, as such. Trump prides himself (we hear from reporting) on cobbling together playlists for the customers at his private clubs. But there’s a big difference between what works for diners at Mar-a-Lago and for keeping a large crowd engaged and energized.
James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” is an energetic (if problematic) track, as was his old favorite, “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People. (Here, too, the subtext might not entirely align with Trump’s politics, but I digress.) But then came Rufus Wainwright’s beautiful, melancholic “Hallelujah” — made famous by its incongruous appearance in the animated film “Shrek” — and then Sinéad O’Connor’s similarly heartfelt “Nothing Compares 2 U.” (Trump is perhaps hoping his Catholic supporters forget the controversy that once swirled around her.)
Then came a song that I am surprised has not been mentioned more in coverage of the event: “Dixie,” as sung by Elvis Presley. Yes, it was part of the hip-swinging singer’s cover of “American Trilogy,” a three-song medley. But it was still “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy! Played at a presidential campaign event in the year 2024! Without anyone commenting on it!
By this point in the show (such as it was), the crowd was restless. Trump had at one point even wondered into the microphone why no one was leaving, as though his understanding of “musical fests” was that people left as the music was playing. He finally stepped offstage as “Memory,” from the 1983 Broadway cast recording of songs from “Cats,” was playing over the loudspeaker.
You have perhaps noticed that these songs are mostly old. Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” was one of two released this century. The other, which came on right after the Elvis-“Dixie” medley, was “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a song by singer-songwriter Oliver Anthony that was quickly looped into the partisan culture wars last year. Every other song was released before 2001.
On average, the songs came out 36 years ago, just after the median American was born. On average, they came out when Trump was about 40. Take out Wainwright and Oliver’s tracks, and they came out when Trump was about 34, which sounds about right.
It appears that someone on Trump’s team attempted at some point to redirect his attention to the ostensible reason he was at that venue in Pennsylvania: to campaign. The Post’s Jabin Botsford captured an image of the teleprompter urging Trump to get back to taking questions.
But Trump didn’t. He has a room full of people who had invested time and/or money to be near him, and, as he does at Mar-a-Lago, he took advantage of the opportunity to play some of his favorite music for them. What were they going to do, not vote for him?
What his campaign team realized, even if he didn’t, was that the point of the event was also the people not in the room, some of whom might have wanted to know more about Trump than what his musical influences were.
Too bad for them.