Trump’s Speech Echoes Crazy Eddie Commercials

many times in the past decade, Donald Trump‘s public addresses have reminded me of old TV commercials for the electronics chain Crazy Eddie that I used to watch as a kid in suburban New Jersey-the rat-a-tat delivery, the breathless hype, the memorably absurdist slogans. (“His prices are INSAAAANE!”) But somehow this was never more the case than on Wednesday night, when the President spoke to the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, flanked by the soft glow of two Christmas trees and a portrait of George Washington.

The comparison isn’t exact, to be fair. Crazy Eddie’s legendary pitchman, Jerry Carroll, actually dressed up as Santa claus for the chain’s famous holiday ads, for which Crazy eddie presumably had to pay.Trump, in contrast, got free airtime from all of America’s major television networks for his Christmas commercial, which was delivered in the form of an eighteen-minute-and-thirty-three-second run-on sentence. That’s an awful lot of words to string together without much in the way of periods or common sense, though, by now, we all know there’s only one form of punctuation that trump has truly embraced: the exclamation point. “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast!” he declared on Wednesday night. “Boy, are we making progress!” “There’s never been anything like it!”

The centerpiece of the President’s speech was his proclamation of a no-strings-attached deal for 1.4 million members of the U.S. military to receive year-end bonus checks of $1,776 each, in honor of next year’s celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “A