Donald Trump’s visit to the Memphis area over the weekend, at the Landers Center in Southaven, may have served as many Democratic purposes as Republican ones.
The former president’s “American Freedom Tour” netted a few thousand butts in seats on Saturday to hear his familiar litany, at prices ranging from $45 to $3,995. As a payday, that’s not small change, and it followed by a day another well-attended bonanza for Trump in Nashville.
But Democrats in Memphis, a few miles north, got some profit from the occasion, as well. Among other things, they used the then-pending Trump visit on Saturday for an “anti-Trump GOTV Rally & Happy Hour” on Friday evening at the Poplar Avenue campaign headquarters of Democratic D.A. candidate Steve Mulroy.
After flashing some signs at the late-Friday drive-time traffic on Poplar, the group went inside and got together a counternarrative of sorts. The star of the occasion was 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, who compared published ads for the Trump event to poorly done commercials he used to see on local TV for slapped-together country music shows.
Despite reports that the Trump affair was sold out, Cohen jested to his listeners that they could get “two for one” on the $9 seats. As for the $3,995 tickets, he said, “You get to go and shake hands with the president, and then they give you some stuff to clean your hands.”
Referring to the ex-president as a “narcissistic sociopath,” Cohen reflected on allegations of illegal activity by Trump recently made public by the ongoing congressional January 6th investigative committee. “He is openly and notoriously committing criminal acts against our government, like no other person in our political history has ever done,” Cohen said.
The congressman recounted how he feared for his life on the occasion of open insurrection in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He told of how, barricaded in his office, he picked up a prized possession for potential self-defense — a souvenir baseball bat given to him once by former Chicago White Sox baseball great Minnie Miñoso.
“Ironically enough,” Cohen said, “Minnie’s son, Charlie, tweeted me, as did many other people during the event, and he asked, ‘How’s everybody in the office?’ I said, ‘Everybody’s okay,’ and told Charlie, ‘I’m sitting here with your father’s bat.’ He texted me back, and he said, ‘If he was there, he’d be there with you — ready to use the bat.’”
Host for the Friday evening affair, at which several Democratic candidates in the August election took speaking turns, was D.A. candidate Mulroy, who in his own remarks was at pains to connect the persona of Donald Trump with that of his own election opponent, incumbent Republican D.A. Amy Weirich.
Simultaneously with the Democratic rally, a new TV commercial on Mulroy’s behalf was getting airtime. Just as Mulroy did verbally to his audience, the commercial, entitled “Peas in the Pod,” yoked the images of Trump and Weirich, cast against a video of the January 6th mob in action.
A voice-over said, “Trump is bringing his mob to Memphis. Trump and D.A. Amy Weirich both break the rules and are out of control.” The ad continued: “On D.A. Amy Weirich’s watch, crime has jumped almost every year,” and a graph or two was shown by way of documentation. The soundtrack continued: “Now Shelby County has the worst violent crime anywhere. The worst president, the worst district attorney. We can do better with former federal prosecutor Steve Mulroy.”
Mulroy and Weirich are not playing beanbag with each other. Last week, after Mulroy had announced the results of a poll, which he said showed him with a 12-percentage-point lead, Weirich responded, “It sounds like Professor Mulroy is having trouble raising money and is cooking up bogus poll numbers to try and get donations. When your entire platform is built around freeing criminals from jail, it’s hard to raise money beyond the radical out-of-town Defund the Police activists.”
