WATCH: Trump Dances, Basks in Screams and Air-Kisses From Maskless Supporters at Florida Rally

President Donald Trump was in high spirits by the end of his Jacksonville rally Thursday night, dancing around the stage and drinking in the screams and air-kisses of maskless supporters just a few feet away.

Trump’s Florida rally delivered many of the features that have become de rigueur at these events, including a packed and mostly-maskless crowd — with the exception of the supporters standing directly behind Trump in the frame as he riffs on familiar subjects.

It also featured Vox’s Aaron Rupar tweeting out a thread of clips featuring those riffs, including one about the practice of calling a “lid” — when reporters are informed that there will be no further news opportunities from a candidate on a given day. Trump claimed never to have heard of “calling a lid.”

“He puts a lid. I did not know what the hell a lid is & I have only been doing this for 3 & a half years…he’s lidding up…they’ll give him a big shot & he’ll go out there – Trump devotes multiple minutes of his speech to attacking Joe Biden for spending a day doing debate prep pic.twitter.com/jNjzPNtTC5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2020

But a review of White House emails shows that Trump’s own press office regularly calls a lid, often in the morning.

He also revived his celebration of the shooting of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, again misidentifying the projectile as a tear gas canister rather than rubber bullets.

“They say it hurts. That is only going 52 miles per hour. A bullet goes about 2000 miles per hour.” — Trump on Ali Velshi getting shot with a rubber bullet in Minneapolis pic.twitter.com/Oo8e05QoZn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2020

The common thread is that the supporters visible throughout most of the speech are wearing masks.

But at the end of the rally, as the disco strains of The Village People’s YMCA blared — a use that members of the group have spoken out against — Trump began to dance around the stage, and turned to revel in the screams of some now-maskless fans behind him. For several minutes, he danced and gesticulated to those supporters, getting close enough to cast a shadow on the stands.

The event occurred just hours after Trump appeared in public wearing a mask for only the third time, as he was being jeered at a memorial for late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Apart from those very occasional nods to COVID-19 reality, Trump has consistently mocked and complained about the wearing of masks, despite the fact that a key predictive model used by the White House coronavirus task force projects that “universal mask use” could save hundreds of thousands of lives by the end of the year.

Watch the clip above via C-Span.

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