Josh Radnor turns Trump's Tulsa ramp speech into plaintive ballad

Because there’s absolutely nothing else going on in the world right now, President Trump devoted a whole bunch of his Tulsa rally speech to how good he is at walking down inclines and that, yes, he can in fact drink water from a glass. This many years into his presidency, material like this is to be expected. And yet it still manages to be disappointing enough that people—like actor and musician Josh Radnor—have to figure out ways to process the state of things through comedy.

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Radnor, sitting down in front of a webcam, took inspiration from the part of Trump’s speech where he just rambled for a while about how tough it was to navigate a ramp during his visit to West Point last week. The Ballad Of The Ramp, like the speech it sets to music, goes on for what seems like forever. The guitar strums and strums the same chords as we hear how the president very carefully thought through the tactical requirements of descending a ramp that “was like an ice-skating rink” after getting tuckered out from having just “saluted almost 600 times,” giving a speech, and then sitting in the sun being “baked like a cake.”

Radnor looks sad as he relates all of this in Trump’s words, which is fair. Unless you’re a horrifyingly powerful megalomaniac, it’s tough to enjoy talking about slippery leather shoes and trending stories during a pandemic and institutional breakdown without feeling pretty bad about things.

If you, like Radnor, want to create further musical odes to this terrible moment in time, though, here’s a transcript of the speech. God knows what musical genre would be most appropriate for anyone wanting to go to work on Trump’s other Tulsa musings about subjects like reducing COVID testing, racist disease descriptions, “leftist radicals,” and “[restoring] peace and order to the streets.”

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