The rally on Sunday was nominally about Trump, and dutifully circled the spent and degrading bulk of the man that pins this rancid movement in orbit. But, as with so much contemporary conservative politics in its current amphetamized Influencer Era, it wound up being as much or more about the multiply aggrieved individuals in Trump's orbit who took their turns onstage trying to do what Trump does. These were shitty roast comics and disgraced ex-mayors and disgraced ex-wrestlers and disgraced TV psychiatrists and radio hosts, disgraced scions of similarly disgraced American political families and Trump's weedy sniffling adult sons and Tucker Carlson and the various free-riding kooks and replacement-level elected masochists and aspiring genocidaires aiming to sneak into power by hiding their hideous chittering forms behind Trump's luxurious width. All of them aired their specific individual grievances—the people and institutions and various vulnerable minority populations they hated, the things they thought should happen to them—before asserting that only Donald Trump would make those offenses stop.

This is not really a group of people that do well with the concept of unison for reasons having to do with (sort of) ideology and (more urgently) their own appetites and issues and awful personalities. The main idea, all throughout, was that Trump would hurt and humiliate the people that the speakers wanted hurt. There was, as there always is, something uncanny about the performance of all of it, not in the standard stilted artifice of American politics—those fusty old norms were nowhere in evidence here—but in the ways that all these individuated and bespoke grievances had warped the people getting up there, one after another, to express and embody them. They looked and sounded wrong, unnatural; they leered and cackled and boomed, they were shiny or dusty or poreless, and they whistled like teapots full of boiling vinegar—not like a chorus, not at all, or not anymore than a bunch of blaring car alarms might be said to be harmonizing.
...
Trump remains at the center of all this, as he is that vengeance's expediter and dumb scowling face, but there is also the sense of him receding. He's receding because he has been degrading in plain sight for nearly a decade and can't deliver the sort of performances that he used to, but also because the movement around him—that coalition of crabs in a barrel all posting and posturing and praying over him and busily trying to get over on each other, selling him and selling him and selling him to anyone they think might buy—has by now very nearly outgrown him. It still needs Trump because it hasn't replaced him; none of these other vile washouts and goofs and TV casualties and clammy eliminationist tryhards are as famous or charismatic as Trump even in his current diminishment. But the fantasy shot through this otherwise incoherent closing argument was both plain enough to see and obviously, luridly metastatic.

That idea was, is, and will continue to be hurting people; the change, maybe, is that Trump is now the hammer doing the smashing, and no longer the strong hand swinging it. It is the dream of this movement, of all the people on stage and the people looking up at them, of the rich grotesques funding it and the servile cadres of eggheads, meatheads, and buttheads eager to do their dirty work, to drop the annihilating weight of Trump on their neighbors and coworkers and families, to push a button with Trump's face on it and turn their own long rosters of enemies into mist. What binds all these people to Trump has always been the desire to hurt people and get away with it in the way that he always has; they believe that they'll be able to do that so long as they stay behind him. A whole vile worldview and way of life depends upon that being true.

https://defector.com/theyre-saying-it