'Can you imagine if I walked into the writer's room and pitched a character like Donald Trump?'

Last night, actor Bradley Whitford opened a rally featuring Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz and Barack Obama. He delivered one of the speeches of the campaign - funny, brutal, mobilising.

Dear subscriber,

I’ve just finished tidying the transcript, and Speakola might be first to have this one online, in its entirety. The man who played Josh Lyman in The West Wing is such a terrific orator, and has an incredible ability to vary pitch and volume, and to inject humour into pretty much everything he delivers. This commencement from twenty years ago begins with the same words, ‘What’s up Mad City!’ and it’s equally brilliant, if infinitely less important.

It’s been dispiriting bordering on terrifying to follow a US Presidential contest like this one, albeit from afar. The idea that the man who orchestrated January 6th, who was pilloried by both sides of politics for an insurrection against his country, and yet has managed to sweep that under the carpet, conquer an insipid and Machiavellian Republican party and now has a 50-50 shot at holding the nuclear codes again — that’s if he doesn’t already hold them in his stash of boxes outside one of the bathrooms in Mar a Lego — it’s sickening.

It often feels like speakers tiptoe around the horror of this moment, not quite calling out Trump for what he is, but Whitford swings for the bleachers in this one. And how amazing is the line:

‘So yeah, you may know me from 'The West Wing'', but apparently I'm working on a documentary right now called 'The Handmaid's Tale'.

Here is the full transcript. Please share. Below I’ll publish his incredible opening, describing the idea of pitching a Donald Trump character to the West Wing writers room.

And if you make it to the end of the piece, taking the one instant to click the heart really helps.

Hang in there, USA. Hopefully Whitford had it right with this phrase:

My dad, he's coming up a lot here. My dad had a phrase for guys like him. 'Donald Trump has a bright future behind him, '

Best wishes

Tony Wilson

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Bradley Whitford: 'Exhaustion and despair is what they want you to feel'', Madison City Walz rally - 2024

22 October 2024, Madison City, Wisconsin, USA

What’s up Mad City?

I'm so happy to be back in my hometown and I am thrilled to welcome Coach Waltz and, what's his name, President Obama to this city that I love so much. And by the way, yes, of course. Absolutely. I would've voted for Obama for a third time. There's no question about it.

Wow. So here we are. What a moment. As Josh Lyman would say, 'What in God's name is happening right now?' It turns out that the fakest thing about 'The West Wing' was not the veneers on my teeth. It was the fact that we had rational Republicans.

Can you imagine if I walked into the writer's room and pitched a character like Donald Trump? Like, 'Okay, guys, how about this guy we're running against? He's a 34 count convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who found some way to declare bankruptcy six times after his daddy gave him almost half a billion dollars.  He couldn't even run a casino! He brags about sexual assault. He mocks the disabled. He's a draft dodger who wraps himself in the flag and desecrates the service of our veterans who gave their lives for our country, calling them 'suckers and losers', a serial philander who claims to represent Christian values while spewing hatred and division to all, and spends a life violating all 10 commandments like he's playing some sort of twisted bingo game with the devil, a malignant narcissist with a pathological need to tell people how good looking he is, what a vision of manliness he is. As he stands before his cultish ssupporters slathered in more makeup and more hairspray than a drag queen, dancing incoherently to 'YMCA' and finding a way to weave his love for dictators into a bizarre admiration for Arnold Palmer's junk.'

It's bad writing. It would've been laughed out of the room and it would've been insulting to Republicans.But this ain't no stinking television show. The stakes have never been higher and the consequences are real. I've been thinking about my dad who passed away a long time ago. My dad, George Whitford. He was president of Planned Parenthood at Dane County when I was a schoolboy. He worked at Cuna Mutual out on Mineral Point Road. But he gave his time to Planned Parenthood, which was not a partisan thing back then. He was just a dad who loved his wife and his daughters and thought they deserved agency over their own bodies and access to the healthcare they need!

Radical lefty ideas like that. But now the guy who brags about sexual assault is also bragging about the fact that he overturned Roe v Wade and stripped those fundamental rights away from half of our population. I want to speak the name Amber Nicole Thurman, and I want us all to remember her. She bled to death in Georgia because she wasn't close enough to death for the doctors to agree to treat her until it was too late. She was denied the medical care she needed, and she passed away unnecessarily leaving her 6-year-old son without a mother. I encourage you all, there's a GoFundMe in her name that I encourage you to visit. Or Jess Hamilton, a woman in Texas who I met who survived barely after her husband, Ryan found her bleeding out on the bathroom floor after being denied the medical care she needed because she wasn't close enough to death for the doctors to treat her in Texas out of fear of being prosecuted because of the draconian abortion ban that Donald Trump helped made possible, and he is proud of it!

These are not isolated cases. This is happening right now.  According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, this is last January, there were 65,000 pregnant rape victims. Look it up! Last January, living in states without access to abortion care. 65,000 rape victims forced to carry their rapist's baby to term. My God, Donald Trump is proud of it though. He was laughing. He was laughing about Amber Thurman on Fox the other day. So yeah, you may know me from 'The West Wing'', but apparently I'm working on a documentary right now called 'The Handmaid's Tale', and make no mistake about it, misogyny is at the reptilian brainstem of white Christian nationalism, and that is what we are up against. It's not pro-life when you don't give a shit about the number one cause of death for children in this country, which is guns.

None of it is pro-life. It is a radical war against women, and Donald Trump is leading the charge. Now, speaking of Christian nationalism, you've had a chance to peruse Project 2025. You know that the sequel 'My weekend with Donny Trump' that he is planning is going to be even worse in Weekend at Donny's 2' he wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act which would rip away health coverage from tens of thousands of people and kick people under 26 off their parents' plan. It's not pro-life. He wants to cut taxes for the richest of the rich and slap a Trump sales tax on everyone else that will cost you $4,000 a year if you're an average family. By the way, my dad, he had his favourite riddle was,  'Who's happier? The guy with 11 kids or the guy with $11 million? And the answer is the guy with 11 kids. But the reason is he is the only one who doesn't want more!'

Rest of speech

Whitford is at the start of this YouTube (I can’t change the image)

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