President Donald Trump’s rally in Colorado Springs Thursday night threw into sharp relief the stakes of the 2020 presidential election, observers said after watching the president joke about remaining in office for 26 years, complain that the Oscar for best picture went to a South Korean film, goad his audience into booing teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, gin up xenophobia against undocumented immigrants, and more.
“We’re staring into the abyss,” tweeted Vox‘s Aaron Rupar, who highlighted many of the bizarre moments from the rally and expressed hope that the clips will give the public “a sense of the stakes of the 2020 election.”
“I don’t want to alarm anyone,” wrote the New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser as she watched the event, “but the president is now reading off ‘poll’ after ‘poll’ at his campaign rally to prove he won the debates in 2016. He is also complaining about Brad Pitt and that a South Korean movie won the Oscars and that he didn’t win TIME ‘Man of the Year.’” Continue reading.