| Antonia Hitchens
Contributing writer  Photograph by David Swanson / Reuters Early this morning, in Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles, a crowd gathered outside of the Trump National Golf Club to welcome the former President. (Trump bought the club in 2002, after the previous owners went bankrupt when the eighteenth hole slid into the ocean.) Several Tesla Cybertrucks were parked in the nearby lot, bearing American flags and Trump signs. Secret Service snipers set up their crosshairs on the golf course, their guns pointing past the steep face over the Pacific. Just feet away, groundskeepers mowed the grass on the course; one who was shearing a palm tree was asked to move—otherwise he would be in the frame of the press conference. Nobody was certain what the morning’s remarks would be about. Would Trump insist, again, to the crowd of reporters gathered, that he had won this week’s debate? A journalist mulled the question he planned to ask. Maybe about tariffs? Or: “The Vice-President has been mocking you for ‘concepts. . . .’ ” (In Trump’s subpar debate performance, he had said, defensively, that he had “concepts of a plan” regarding health care.) The former President’s arrival was delayed almost ninety minutes, and a few locals came to join the crowd. One woman said she had been a Democrat until recently. “I’ve seen Trump out-working-class the Democratic Party—that’s Hollywood and the coastal élites,” she explained. “We want bread-and-butter issues. We want gas stoves.” When Trump finally walked out from behind a hedge to take the stage, she yelled “California for Trump!” It turns out that Trump was thinking about landslides, which have lately been so bad in the area that gas and electricity have been turned off indefinitely in some homes. “About two miles up the road, they’re having some problems with slides, into a thing called the Pacific Ocean,” he said. He brought the mayor of Palos Verdes up to speak about the issue. Trump later claimed, “The government is not doing much.” He went on to praise the golf club. “I have the ocean . . . People get married literally on a nightly basis overlooking the Pacific.” He added, “I don’t like doing this, other than I know you all will have the nicest view you can ever have.” Before launching into complaints about the debate (one of the moderators, David Muir, was a “foolish fool” whose hair is “not as good as it was five years ago”), and his usual remarks about America in decline, he said, of the sliding hills, “The mountain is moving, and it can be stopped.” | 
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