John Jefferson
Donald Trump made a real gaffe during his Pennsylvania rally on Monday when he tried (and failed) to quote William Shakespeare and reignited discussion about his crowd sizes by claiming he draws in more people than Winston Churchill did.
Ironically, the Republican started to set up the blunder by telling his Indiana crowd that Churchill was “this great speaker,” before swiftly comparing his and the famous UK leader’s crowd sizes – a topic he has focused on multiple occasions over the course of his campaign:
“I get much bigger crowds than him but nobody ever says I’m a great speaker.”
Last week he claimed to pull in crowds bigger than Elvis Presley did, and even made the same bizarre claim in August about Martin Luther King Jr’s crowd during the landmark March on Washington.
His apparent fixation on crowd sizes has been mocked by both social media and key political figures – most notably former president Barack Obama.
Trump then highlighted President Joe Biden’s unfortunate botches, naming one example in which a local news outlet asserted he confused Ohio for Iowa in March 2020.
But Trump proved he is also not immune to the same slip-ups by misquoting Shakespeare while attempting to attack Biden, saying he “never was smart, he wasn’t smart 40 years ago”.
Trying to use what he thought are the iconic Bard’s words to make his point, he asked the crowd, “Did you ever hear Shakespeare?”
“He was ‘hail and hearty and well met,’ but he wasn’t a smart person.”
Of vice-president Kamala Harris, he added, “But she is a very dumb person and we can’t do that.”
What the former president was actually quoting, and still managed to botch, is an idiom used to describe someone or their actions as very friendly and enthusiastic, and not always sincerely.
The correct phrase, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “hail-fellow-well-met,” and does not appear in a Shakespeare text.
With only 41 days left until the election on November 5, Trump was seemingly attempting to rally more voters to his cause in Pennsylvania on Monday.
But a poll has put Harris ahead of him by 5 points in the swing state – showing 49 per cent of voters are backing Harris and 44 per cent Trump.
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