“Let’s make it into music”: Trump dances

Donald Trump, it is said time and again, is not a good speaker. Even Trump critics who acknowledge his phenomenal success agree on this point. Michael Wolff, author of four books on Trump to date, calls him “[m]agical”.¹ However, Wolff claims to have tracked down Trump’s magic using a method that he describes as, “Follow the trail of loose lips saying dumb shit”.² Worth considering. Apparently, language critique does not help us to understand Trump. On the other hand, according to the thesis pursued here along the lines of some pre-modern and pre-psychological traditions,³ his dance provides insight.

On October 15, 2024, Donald Trump attends a town hall event in the swing state of Pennsylvania during the election campaign. Trump arrives an hour later than announced, the audience has been waiting for hours in the fall sun and is dehydrated. Trump is on stage for just over half an hour, talking about natural gas, when a man collapses. Paramedics make their way through the crowd, people sing “God Bless America”, Trump waits. As he continues and answers a question about the “deportation of criminals”, the next person collapses. Trump reacts by saying: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right? Isn’t that beautiful though? It’s beautiful.”⁴

The Washington Post described what followed as a “bizarre town hall episode”: Trump bobbed and swayed to his campaign playlist for thirty-nine minutes. He danced to nine tracks, shook hands with people on stage and jabbed his index finger at the audience. Kristi Noem, who later became US Secretary of Homeland Security, stands next to Trump, nodding to the beat and clapping along.⁵ Three weeks later, Trump was elected President of the United States for a second time.

This scene brought the “Trump dance” worldwide attention. It has since become a dictionary entry: “The dance is performed by rocking the hips in a side-to-side motion while performing alternating, subdued fist pumps”.⁶ However, this is not Trump’s first public dance. “It’s hard to say exactly how the move originated; over the past decade, no small number of Trump campaign events have harnessed the galvanizing power of impromptu dance”,⁷ according to the New York Times.

Stage dance is a late phenomenon in Trump’s career. However, it is not a “withdrawal from appearance”, as Goethe and Adorno described it, an artistic or aesthetic tendency of old age.⁸ On the contrary, Trump’s dance is precisely a stepping into appearance, namely into an appearance that, unlike language, does not symbolically refer to something absent that is not itself and that lies beneath or behind it, but which only refers to itself, indeed, is entirely itself—and supposedly beautiful as well (“It’s beautiful”).⁹

Notes

1. ¹Michael Wolff: Landslide. The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, London 2021, p. 290.
2. ²Michael Wolff: All Or Nothing. How Trump Recaptured America, New York 2025, p. 47. On Trump’s “speaking style” Michael Wolff: Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House, London 2018, pp. 135-137 and 320. Motto on p. 9; ibid., p. 150.
3. ³Cf. on this Wolfgang Fach: “Dump Trump”. Das Repertoire der (Un)Möglichkeiten, in: Merkur 852 (May 2020), pp. 75-82.
4. ⁴Transcript: www.rev.com/transcripts/trump-town-hall-in-pennsylvania
   (6/6/2025).
5. ⁵www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/14/trump-music-sways-town-hall/; Short version of the scene:www.youtube.com/shorts/pf3km6WDCyw (6/6/2025).
6. ⁶https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_dance (6/6/2025).
7. ⁷www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/magazine/trump-dance.html (6/6/2025).
8. ⁸“Alter: stufenweises Zurücktreten aus der Erscheinung.” Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden, ed. by Erich Trunz, vol. 12: Schriften zur Kunst, München 1981, p. 470 (Maximen und Reflexionen, no. 748); Theodor W. Adorno: Spätstil Beethovens, in: id.: Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, Frankfurt a.M. 2/1994, pp. 180-184, p. 182f.—Cf. fundamentally Sandro Zanetti: Avantgardismus der Greise? Spätwerke und ihre Poetik, Paderborn 2012.
9. ⁹On dance as an “apparition”, see Susanne Foellmer: Am Rand der Körper. Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im zeitgenössischen Tanz, Bielefeld 2009, pp. 35-47. Foellmer draws on Edmund Husserl and Dieter Mersch: Körper zeigen, in: Erika Fischer-Lichte, Christian Horn, Matthias Warstat (eds.): Theatralität, vol. 2: Verkörperung, Tübingen, Basel 2001, pp. 75-89.