Photo: Gawker

At the Trump SoHo hotel on Wednesday, Donald Trump delivered a speech to a room full of friends, family, and the media, ostensibly about the “stakes” in the 2016 election, which degenerated quickly into conspiracy theories and declarations of fondness for “Americans. Americans. The people that we love. Americans.”

In the wake of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s firing and financial disclosures that revealed the campaign’s shoestring budget, the Trump campaign appears to be in disarray. Gawker’s application for media credentials was still pending when we arrived at Trump SoHo, only to be told by a Secret Service agent that the event had been closed to press.

Nevertheless, thanks to the generosity of campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, Gawker was able to slip into the event with a group of bellyaching reporters from BuzzFeed News, Rolling Stone, and Snapchat who had been told the same thing. (“This marks the first time in 2016 that BuzzFeed News has been given official access to cover a Trump campaign event by the Trump campaign,” BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins noted. We’ve all come such a long way.)

The speech itself was largely unremarkable. “We will never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who rigged it in the first place,” he said. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money.” That may very well be so! But even if it is, Trump is, by his own admission, one of those very insiders.

“Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency,” he claimed, betraying a deep lack of understanding of American history. Trump accused Clinton of using her position as Secretary of State to enrich herself and her family, and of covering up those corrupt dealings by deleting emails stored on her personal email server.

“While we may not know what is in those deleted emails, our enemies probably do,” he said. “So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be President of the United States.” This is troubling, indeed! Although, if Clinton’s corruption stems from her dealings with our enemies in the first place, wouldn’t they already have been able to blackmail her? Why would they need her emails?

Such details, of course, and issues of logical flow, are not what Trump speeches—even prepared Trump speeches—are about. “For the amount of money Hillary Clinton would like to spend on refugees, we could rebuild every inner city in America,” he said. What does this mean? It doesn’t matter.

“Americans are the people that tamed the West, that dug out the Panama Canal, that sent satellites across the solar system, that built the great dams, and so much more,” Trump said. “Something changed.” What changed? Doesn’t matter.

“We are going to make America rich again. We are going to make America safe again,” he concluded. “We are going to make America great again—great again for everyone.”

Later, on an uptown subway train headed back to campaign headquarters, a group of bubbling, besuited interns wearing “Trump” lapel pins laughed and shared their ages—most were in college. “I was born in 1998,” one said.

A group of male interns stood around a female intern and asked if her boyfriend was a Republican. “Well, if he’s voted, we can just look in the database,” one mused. “He’s not my boyfriend!” the young woman protested, laughing.