Opinion: Trump's Dance of Demise or Victory Hoedown?

In the future, when scholars look back on this time to pinpoint the moment in Donald Trump's third run for the White House, the moment that will be most perplexing, the moment when they will realize that something tripped the flux capacitor and everything went haywire, will be the impromptu dance party that was pitched as a campaign Q&A session.

What was billed as a town-hall-style event Monday in Oaks, Pennsylvania, turned into a good ol' hoedown, if a hoedown starred a suited man wearing orange bronzer doing a double-handed, off-beat two step in which he didn't actually move his feet.

"Let's not do any more questions," Trump said before tripping the light fantastic. "Let's just listen to music. Let's make into a music [sic]. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?"

And Trump wasn't wrong. No one wanted to hear questions, not when they had the sweet, sweet sounds of Rufus Wainwright's cover of "Hallelujah" and Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares to U" cued up and ready to go. Let me tell you, nothing gets the party started like O'Connor singing, "I went to the doctor and guess what he told me ..."

I have two small kids, so I'm fully schooled in the art of impromptu dance breaks. In fact, I'm a bit of a dance break leader in this house. I will call them out when I see that the kids are overwhelmed. I will cue up music on my phone and yell out "Dance break!" in the middle of a fight between them. So it's important to understand my qualifications when I say that this was no dance break that I've ever witnessed. This was a broken dance. This was the dance of a man who has lost his way. This was the fumble of a presidential candidate who has proven himself to be untouchable.

It would've been great if this were the dance of demise. You know, the dancing you do when there is nothing left to do but dance. But something tells me this is a victory dance, an end zone touchdown dance, a celebratory wiggle-shuffle of the victor, and we are the only ones who don't realize that the game is over and the tune he's playing is not for us.

Because this race shouldn't be close. The polls shouldn't be tight. The optics should be really clear at this point as the competition for who gets to have the nuclear codes is between a former district attorney, who served in the Senate and who understands the three parts of government and how they work, going against an orange-tinted run-over cheerleading boot. And then he danced. For nearly 40 minutes.

That's 40 minutes. Twenty minutes short of an hour. No dance party that doesn't include children and "the duck dance" should ever go on for 10 minutes longer than a half-hour.

And this wasn't a playful moment between the possible next president and his admirers, This was about as awkward as N.W.A's greatest hits coming over the speaker during your child's baptismal. Clearly Trump has lost his way. At one point, in the grossly uncomfortable display at chill normalness (you know, the thing folks do when they are trying to act chill but it's actually creepy), South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was moderating the event, joined Trump in doing rainbow hands (think simultaneously moving your hands in the arc of a rainbow) and just know that The Temptations have nothing to worry about.

"This is absolutely insane," Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief at MeidasTouch, tweeted. "Trump just froze up answering questions, said he wouldn't take anymore questions, then stood on stage for the next 30 minutes while music played. Will media cover this as something other than a seriously bizarre cognitive episode???"

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And I do think this is a fair question given the way President Joe Biden was treated during his mishaps on the campaign trail before he was forced to step down. Just imagine for a second that your boss called a meeting and in the middle of the meeting just said that the meeting was over and but forced everyone to stay and listen to his playlist that included such gems as "Ave Maria," which is a phenomenal song, but it's hardly the kind of song that gets the party started.

And so now we wait as everyone weighs in on the bizarre antics of a truly bizarre man who has been vile since he rode the Trump Tower escalator down to a thin press gathering to announce his first run for the White House way back in 2015. And it's been eye-opening that what may actually end his hopes for a second presidency wasn't recent reports that he sent " coronavirus testing devices to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the height of the pandemic" or the threat to deploy U.S. military against civilians — it will be the dance party.