The grifter was stoked for his Saturday night lovefest. MAGA hordes – hundreds of thousands! maybe a million! – would flock to Tulsa and fill the bottomless hole in his empty soul. Before leaving Washington, he was already piling on the braggadocio: “The event in Oklahoma is unbelievable. The crowds are unbelievable. They haven’t seen anything like it…We’ve never had an empty seat, and we certainly won’t in Oklahoma.”

Campaign manager Brad Parscale boasted in advance about “the biggest rally signup of all time, by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing.”

Hmm…Does anyone remember when Geraldo Rivera did a live TV show about Al Capone’s secret vault? And he spent two hours trying to pry it open, promising us all kinds of goodies? And it turned out the vault was empty? Trump’s Tulsa show was that kind of amazing.

When I was a kid, I went to a lot of minor league hockey games. Those crowds were bigger.

That sea of empty blue seats was as beautiful as a sunrise. And outside the arena, where the Trump team was forced to dismantle the stage, because there was no reason for Trump to address the “overflow” crowd, because the underflow was so extreme that literally nobody showed up…what a smile that was. There’s hope for us yet.

The national polls have been brutal for Trump lately – Fox News shows him trailing Joe Biden by 12 points, and even Rasmussen (Trump’s favorite firm) says it’s 12 – but mere numbers are trumped by what we witnessed last night. Trump flew to one of the safest red states, which he won last time by 36 points…and he couldn’t even fill half the hall.

Yeah, I know, it’s only June. But the guy was not on his game last night, and I got the sense that the 120,000 dead and the 40 million jobless are taking their toll, and that their impact is irrevocable. Granted, Trump gave his maskless minions what they came for – the usual lies and hate – but he spent most of his time whining to the empty rafters about how everyone is soooo mean to him.

As a solid majority of Americans has finally realized, he’s manifestly unfit to lead in times of crisis; all he has left, in his goody bag, is his sick gift for airing personal grievances. He’s still bugged that he was caught on camera at West Point needing two hands to raise a glass, so this time he used one hand and the fans cheered (Trump’s bar is set so low that one-handed drinking is a sign of success). Indeed, he spent 16 minutes on the media’s West Point coverage, and blamed his ramp woes on his shoes. Specifically, his “leather bottom” soles.

This was supposed to be his re-election kickoff event, a chance to share his vision for a second term. But alas, his vision consisted of (1) the water and the shoes, (2) the big lie that Black Lives Matter protesters are violent thugs, (3) the racist quip that Covid is really “Kung-flu,” (4) the desire to slow down Covid testing, because “if you find more people, you find more cases,” (5) the big lie that Joe Biden “remains silent in his basement”, and (6) that he has nicer hair and nicer houses than the media. I heard not a single policy initiative. He said nothing that would resonate with any voter outside the cult.

Meanwhile, campaign manager Parscale, who could be the next purge victim, was scrambling to explain why Trump was such a lousy draw. (He’d already been punked by thousands of social media teens who’d requested tickets and didn’t show up.) Parscale came up with this fake excuse: “Radical protestors, fueled by a week of apocalyptic media coverage, interfered with supporters at the rally. They even blocked access to the metal detectors, preventing people from entering.” (There was zero actual evidence that any protesters interfered with anybody.) He also blamed the media for “bombarding” people with warnings that the rally could spread Covid, thus scaring them away. (Wait a sec. I thought MAGA fans always pride themselves on not believing the media.)

So much for the ballyhooed “Transition to Greatness.” And Trump came off like Jake LaMotta, the bloated washed-up boxer in Raging Bull who was reduced to telling tired jokes to an undersized audience. LaMotta, you may recall, wound up in a cell – punching the wall and screaming “I am not an animal!”

And what we saw last night, in that two-thirds deserted arena, was a badly wounded animal.