This is the only way to really understand it.

For anyone who has devoted the better part of the last decade to trying to make sense of Donald J. Trump's words, there is something immensely satisfying about the news that, as of this week, there is nothing left to analyze. There is only dancing, and perhaps you can only observe it but never understand it. At a town hall meeting in Oaks, Pennsylvania this past weekend, the former president, finally tired of his words, his language, and the audience's questions and answers, decided to just turn up the music and, well, dance along for, well, 39 minutes a playlist of your choice.

Ever since he raced down the escalator at Trump Tower and started babbling about rapists and Mexicans, we've all been half-crazy, trying to decide whether to take Donald Trump literally but not seriously, or seriously but not literally , or finally as the New York Times Now he strangely characterizes the whole thing as the communication of a man prone to “improvisational deviations” from the script of a normal campaign stop (or, increasingly, from reality itself). But the real point is that after eight years of the media's dedication to trying to pin language on the donkey, it is finally and conclusively clear that Trump's words don't matter. Maybe the only thing that matters is the dance.

I won't link here to the two dozen articles I've written in the years since 2016 in which I've tried to impose consistent meanings on the free-floating Trump issues because, like the rest of the press, I once mistakenly believed that politics, policy, law, and elected office somehow correlated with language and words with shared public meaning. I wasted at least an entire year trying to figure out the legal and enforceable meaning of his various speech acts. Dumb. As the Times further reported last weekend, many Trump supporters seem to like him just fine Because They actually don't believe anything he says. The slippery incoherence is a feature, not a bug. And their pollsters noted: “In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 41 percent of likely voters agreed with the assessment that 'people offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.'” The character flaw now lies in those who seek to understand and believe him, and not in his inscrutability. And with these lights, the Dada of a dance evening instead of a town hall makes perfect sense.

We in the press have been talking in recent weeks about the media's widespread tendency to “sanitize” Donald Trump – a criticism that suggests the corporate media can't resist making the former president seem normal simply because we This is how candidates have always reported on politics and because it is the only way to understand electoral politics. But with the Pennsylvania incident, we may have slipped imperceptibly past sane-washing and straight into dance-washing, where the press doesn't even have to try to translate crazy speeches and social media posts into readable ideas, because there's a lot It's easier to just watch him dance. Perhaps we have finally been forced to abandon the reportage's gnawing need to translate Trump's words into promises and commitments and have sat back comfortably to simply appreciate the former president's indescribable power and punches and rapturous delight in show tunes.

If we were still in 2016, the American public might notice that one of the two candidates for commander in chief on the list has completely abandoned the commitment to saying the words to win the office. The American public might even be outraged by a candidate who has grown bored answering questions but wants us to watch him dance. But until 2024, this change will be experienced primarily as a relief. Why spend energy deconstructing which parts of Trump's promises to expel immigrants and jail his critics are programmatic and which parts are just smoke? Now everything is smoke. It's the Studio 54 choice.

If anyone with three weeks left until November 5th wonders why this presidential race is so unbearably close, he can surely remind them that we have landed in the era of failed democracy, where language is optional , in which millions of voters say no. People who no longer believe in politics or the media or even in the stability of language itself still find it reassuring to see their preferred candidate moving back and forth to tunes whose words we Strangely enough, I know them all by heart. Whatever else has broken down, the immutability of “It’s Fun to Stay at the YMCA” is the one thing we can all still rely on. Words that mean nothing other than the fact that the words themselves are final failed.