The recent rally in Detroit where former President Donald Trump’s microphone went bad, leaving him to pace the stage for almost 20 minutes, is more important than you might think.
Sure, Democrats enjoyed a few laughs, but they usually do when Trump speaks (or, in this case, doesn’t speak). That won’t matter. And yes, a bad PA system can happen to anyone.
But a competent presidential campaign has multiple backups for eventualities. Not just for major rallies like this one, but even for minor or small gatherings.
This is not the bush league — this is a presidential campaign in its final weeks!
Why does it matter that it took almost 20 minutes to fix the broken sound system? Because it indicates that Trump’s campaign, like his four years in the White House, is amateur central.
Have we all forgotten? White House briefings that gave out inaccurate information, which then had to be corrected. Presidential speeches filled with errors that had to be fixed. I’m not talking about lies — I’m talking about big mistakes.
In one of his early pandemic speeches, Trump indicated that both goods and people would be prevented from coming to the U.S. from Europe. This caused two separate panics, because his administration was not actually cutting off goods, and because he didn’t make it clear that Americans would be allowed back in once the new policy was put in place.
Thus, importers frantically worried, and many Americans in Europe bought expensive plane tickets home, all because of a poorly edited speech. Normally, a presidential address is when the entire White House and parts of the cabinet are brought in to make sure no mistakes are made.
True, some of the Trump Era errors were minor — saying this country when he meant that country, or misspelling of names. This kind of stuff was very rare before Trump, and has gone back to being rare under President Biden.
I’ve been closely following presidential campaigns most of my life. I’ve never seen any candidate, not even back in the analog days of the 1980s, go without sound for 20 minutes. Both Republicans and Democrats always had supremely competent teams.
Trump is different. He hires loyalists for his campaign — slavishly devoted to him, but not very good at their jobs. His White House was a mix of a few competent true believers (Russell Vought, Stephen Miller), a large number of loyalists who were much less competent or didn’t know anything about policy (Ivanka Trump, Jacob Kushner, most of his press secretaries) and establishment Republicans trying desperately to keep him from destroying NATO or starting a war with North Korea (James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, etc.).
So when you see a candidate waiting 20 minutes for a microphone to be replaced — imagine, instead, that it is a crucial government policy that is being crafted, negotiated, lobbied and then implemented. If they can’t replace a mic in 20 minutes during a presidential campaign, should we trust them with the more important tasks of the presidency?
Trump has repeatedly pointed out how badly Vice President Kamala Harris did in the 2020 Democratic primaries. But I don’t remember Harris getting stuck for 20 minutes with no sound in that campaign, or in this one.
That’s because her team is at or near the standard for modern presidential campaigns. Her staff is loaded with professionals who think through how things could go wrong. They’ve made mistakes, but they not like this one.
After the sound was fixed, Trump tried to blame a contractor, swearing he wouldn’t pay them. It may well have been a contractor’s error that was responsible for the problem. But it’s on Trump’s campaign, and ultimately on Trump, for not being prepared for a mishap.
I’ve written previously about how when Americans pick a president, we are also picking the president’s staff. We’ve had some evidence over the last eight years about who tends to choose better people. Now we have more.
Jeremy D. Mayer is an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University, and coauthor of “The Changing Political South.”