'Tough' or 'crazy'? Trump's show and rhetoric popular with GOP. What about everyone else?

Executing a general. Children sexually mutilated. Wind mills that kill large marine mammals. Topping a 1950s-era deportation plan named after an ethnic slur.

In Iowa's Corn Belt, across New Hampshire villages and at a West Palm Beach convention center, former President Donald Trump has ratcheted up the tenor and tone of his campaign rhetoric. His rapid-fire social media salvos and nearly two-hour stump speeches are a smorgasbord of reflections, dystopian predictions, boasts, pointed "routines" told with the veneer of comedy and the quintessential dosages of grievance.

Blunt talk is precisely what the Make American Great Again diehards gather to hear.

Before Trump spoke at the Palm Beach County Convention Center to the fan group Club 47 USA, one attendee said he expected to hear no-holds barred talk from the former president, especially on immigration and border security.

"He's an eagle," said Michael Baust, an architectural designer from Boynton Beach. "He's a tough guy and not part of the swamp."

What is lauded as 'tough' by Trump fans is derided as 'crazy' by critics — as he leads GOP polls by wide margins

Tough, sure, but others say too much of what is said by the former president sounds unhinged.

Case in point they say was a Trump social media post suggesting retired Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley is guilty of treason and should be put to death. Then there are his assertions that electric-generating windmills are leading to "hundreds" of whale deaths, a claim debunked by federal marine regulators. And his invoking Nazi phrasing in stating that immigrants entering the United States are "poisoning the blood of our country."

"The crazy is coming in fast and hot here," said Rick Wilson, a founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project. "His supporters love it, but it's given the rest of America a really good picture of someone who is mentally pretty unstable."

Nonetheless, just about every poll of Republican voters conducted since the start of 2023 shows Trump holding double-digit leads over his primary rivals, and many have him either tied or topping President Joe Biden. Call it what you will, said Tim Malloy, a pollster with Quinnipiac University, but the former president is atop the GOP polls.

"Nothing that he has said or has been saying, no indictments, none of the furor around Donald Trump has hurt him in the polls," Malloy said. "I never use the word bullet-proof and I never use the word Teflon, but at the moment he's untouched by anything he has been saying or the huge legal problems he has. At the moment."

Polarizing, maybe, and sprinkled with profanities, yes, but Trump's rallies are a show for the MAGA faithful

The polarizing talk aside, today's Trump rallies are again proving an entertaining lure for his base — close to 4,000 filled the convention center for his West Palm Beach speech and they stood, cheered and chanted throughout. He is likely to draw even more at a Hialeah rally he has scheduled to compete against the GOP debate in Miami on Nov. 8.

Trump's performances are a cross between Wrestlemania and political Rocky Horror Picture Show, filled with bravado, punctuated with R-rated language, highlighted with reflexive audience participation and interspersed with what he acknowledges are "routines."

The list of hits with the MAGA crowd include a soliloquy in which the Biden administration begs for help from Iran — "Please, please Mr. Ayatollah, sir" Trump says — and a "way, no way, way, no way" back-and-forth discussion he says took place with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after Trump asserts he warned Moscow not to take action against Ukraine.

Trump even admits that former first lady Melania Trump has asked him not to do a specific "routine" — dealing with transgender athletes — because, he says she told him, it's not presidential.

"I have a problem. I have a wife who hates this routine," Trump said as people yell "Do it!" from the crowd. "I say, 'Darling, you're a great first lady, but people love this routine.'"

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He vents over the four sets of criminal charges saying Al Capone was only indicted once. He calls the cases filed against him this year and scheduled for trial in 2024, "bulls---," prompting the crowd to chant the vulgar word.

When he delves into policy, his proposals tend be generalized and vague. In education reforms, he has called for the "direct election of principals by parents" and cutting all funding for schools with mask and vaccine mandates but doesn't specify whether only on COVID or also inoculation for small pox, measles and polio.

Derision of Biden is woven throughout the speeches.

In one skit ridiculing the octogenarian president three years older than he is, Trump walks away from the microphone and stands facing a curtain with his back to a guffawing crowd. Claiming the president is disoriented and needs medications he muses White House aides are frantically saying: "Get him off the stage. That sh-- is wearing off, man.'"

The bitter mocking overlooks that Trump, at 77, has also uttered his own gaffes and memory lapses.

He has confused the country far-right leader Viktor Orban governs — it's Hungary and not Turkey as he said earlier this week. On Sunday, he reportedly confused the Iowa site of his speech, Sioux City, with South Dakota's Sioux Falls. He says the U.S. Capitol "looks like sh--" and is in need of "polishing" and new limestone, awkwardly omitting the violent vandalism and ransacking of the building by his own followers on Jan. 6, 2021.

He further relates how the United States didn't suffer a terrorist attack during his administration without acknowledging domestic terror incidents such as the El Paso mass shooting by a white nationalist and an antisemitic assault against a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Trump does not mention those.

"We didn't have an attack for four years," Trump said of his time in the White House. "About two days after I left, I said, 'How good did we do?' We did great."

Trump's rhetoric gets pushback and fact-checked. But does GOP base care?

While his far-right views are wildly popular with the now-dubbed MAGA electorate, it's unclear how much they are embraced by the general public. The FiveThirtyEight's survey of polls show he remains consistently unpopular with the U.S. public at large.

On immigration, for example, the results are mixed.

A poll released Oct. 17 by Quinnipiac suggests Trump's signature issue, a border wall, is now embraced by a majority, 52%. But Quinnipiac pollster Malloy cautions that 31% of those polled also said they supported accepting immigrants while another 37% said they welcomed immigrants although they expressed concern about their communities' ability to handle them.

"That's 60-something percent of people who at least have their eyes open to the fact these are human beings and this is a crisis and you just don't shut your door on them," Malloy said. "I still think there is empathy. That's still a welcoming gesture."

The 2020 election claims have been a significant, unwavering bond between Trump and his base even as those unfounded claims unravel.

David Becker, executive director of non-partisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted that three lawyers associated with Trump's 2020 disinformation campaign pleaded guilty in the Georgia case and issued confessions admitting to and apologizing for misleading the public.

He said Trump's statement in Derry, New Hampshire, telling supporters "you don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting" were indecipherable.

"I'm not quite sure what the point of that is," said Becker, who has held regular briefings in the past three years to refute Trump's assertions about the 2020 vote count. "Candidates need voters to show up and vote for them. I didn't think I needed to say that. But you apparently do."

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Trump touts his own self-molded brand as one of the world's "tough guys" able to go mano-a-mano with the "monsters, villains, dictators and dictators," including U.S. enemies like the terror group Hezbollah and North Korea's Kim Jong Un that Trump says are "very smart."

"You know I actually got along with the tough guys the best," he said. "The weak people I didn't get along with. It's sort of a weird deal."

A number of the anecdotes Trump tells from the stage trumpet what he says is his deal-making prowess. In them, he arm twists the president of Mexico to send troops to the border, the French to drop plans to "tax" U.S. products and the World Health Organization to cut the annual U.S. financial commitment.

He touts how his real estate knowledge served to get an Israel embassy built with Jerusalem stone at a fraction of the estimated cost. He says he would have struck other deals with Iran and Palestinian leaders and "would have done something" with Venezuela, but offers no insight on what would have been agreed to.

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Trump also related a fact disputed three years ago by U.S. military officials that dealt with Tehran's firing of missiles at U.S. troops at the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq that in reprisal for the January 2020 drone strike that killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. Trump says the missiles "didn't hit" the base but in fact the Pentagon had disclosed in February 2020 that U.S. personnel at the installation suffered brain injuries.

Trump's boasting over his foreign policy savvy clashes with the viewpoints of people who served in his White House. In an interview last year, Trump's third national security adviser, John Bolton, told The Palm Beach Post that the former president was not one to think "through a policy" or consider "the pluses and minuses, the risks and costs involved" in an action.

"That's just not what he does," Bolton said.

Top military officials who served in the Trump administration have recently called him a "wannabe dictator" and a threat to democracy adding that they have called him “dangerous,” “unfit,” and lacking any “idea what America stands for.”

Those include recently retired Gen. Milley, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, ex-White House Chief of Staff and Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly as well as the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen.

And his second attorney general, Bill Barr, said Friday that Trump's "verbal skills are limited" in answering a query about whether Trump was "losing it" in his comments on social media and from the podium.

"If you get him away from 'very, very,' you know the adjectives ... they're unfamiliar to him and they spill out, and they go too far," Barr said during a talk at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.

Too far? Nazi phrasing on immigration, lauding 1950s 'Operation Wetback' and a play on the n-word?

Few issues elicit more scorn from Trump than the crossing of America's southern border with Mexico by people seeking refuge or a better in life in America and the criminal charges filed against him.

Trump has turned America's long-standing creed welcoming the world's "huddled masses," as chiseled onto the base of the Statue of Liberty, on its head. He has again repurposed a 1963 song "The Snake" into an allegory for the way he insists the nation is being betrayed for its kindness and charity to the foreigners it has taken in.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, agents apprehended 4.2 million people along the U.S.-Mexico border in the two complete fiscal years of the Biden administration. But in Trump's telling, the number of people who have entered the country is 15 million, many of which are "terrorists." He warns that the "same people that attacked Israel" are descending on the United States from "prisons," "mental institutions" and "insane asylums" which will lead to the "killing, raping, torturing and maiming" innocent Americans.

He has reiterated support for travel bans and he's added "ideological screening" of all immigrants to bar entry to, and remove residency from, those he calls "dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots and maniacs." He also promises a replay of the Eisenhower administration's "Operation Wetback," a mission named after an insulting word for Mexicans.

The early 1950s military-style round-up of people may have deported as many as 1.3 million, including individuals legally in the country. Trump boasts he "will begin the largest domestic deportation in American history, larger than Eisenhower's."

Trump equally rages about the nearly 100 felony charges he faces in jurisdictions from Florida to New York.

The former president has posted wording on social media some interpret as thinly camouflaged racist attacks in using the term "riggers." Critics say it's a play on the n-word noting that three of those prosecutors — Fani Willis in Georgia as as well as Alvin Bragg and Letitia James in New York — are Black.

Trump uses it to describe prosecutors bringing cases against him he said amount to "election interference," comparing himself to Nelson Mandela, with the singular aim of preventing his White House comeback campaign. Trump says he rejects the concept of "weaponized law enforcement" and seeking the arrest of an opposing Democrat, even though he called for the jailing of 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and pressed Ukrainian officials in 2019 to open a corruption probe against Joe Biden, which led to his first impeachment.

In language that has sparked fears of violence, he has told supporters that "I am your retribution" for grievances and that they, not he, are the real targets of what he disparages as "weaponized" law enforcement.

"They're not after me; they're after you," he has said. "I'm just standing in the way."

All agree: Stakes are very high for 2024 'final battle' election

Jokes and laughs aside, Trump's fans and critics agree on one thing: The stakes are high as the calendar lurches toward next year's primaries.

MAGA adherents echo Trump's clarion call that 2024 is their "final battle" to save the country from a cohort of "radical left, communists, Marxists and fascists" — recited in the same order that Trump rattles it off from the podium.

"He is the strongest man, to be able to do what he is doing and to withstand every thing he has to face," said Sandy Powell, a Port St. Lucie shop owner who attended Trump's speech at the county convention center on Oct. 11. "I will back him forever."

Becker, the elections expert, said he fears how the rhetoric will inflame passions, saying the "most perilous point in time" will be between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Having the losing candidate "spread lies" but in a more organized way, he said, would sow chaos and violence far greater than witnessed after the 2020 election.

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"It's an incredibly troubling scenario," Becker said. "I think it can be avoided. It requires that people on both sides of the aisle reject these lies and they acknowledge that our elections are secure. Not just in your state but everywhere."

Wilson, at the Lincoln Project, is concerned too many conservative-leaning voters aren't watching or reading Trump's speeches and social media posts. A Trump candidacy, to this electorate, may conjure thoughts of pre-COVID America in which they may have been uncomfortable with the then-president's Twitter talk but were willing to look the other way for a marketplace with no inflation and a bullish stock market padding their 401ks.

The Lincoln Project, he said, will make the case that electing the 2023 version of Trump risks a presidency in which there will be no institutional guardrails and will be more dangerous, autocratic and authoritarian.

"There won't be anyone to say, 'No Donald, we can't do that.' He will always get his way in a second term," Wilson said. "And his way may not be legal, or constitutional or appropriate. But if he is sent there again, he will be viewed as a guy who has essentially triumphed over the law and justice and all the principles of the Constitution and democracy and they will let him do whatever he wants to do."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump still tops GOP voter polls despite 'crazy' campaign rhetoric