Halloween Comes to the Dog Days of August: The Trump Convention
“Owning the libs and pissing off the media. That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”
I don’t think anybody actually believed it when Republicans promised an uplifting and positive 2020 convention.
The one thing good you can say about the GOP’s quadrennial gathering is that there were no huge technical glitches, which is a testament to the party techies who were saddled with uncertainty right up until last week.
Donald Trump saw enough of the Democratic convention to know what he didn’t want, so the party spinmeisters told the White House stenographers pre-taping wasn’t going to be a thing with the GOP convention.
Like so much of what the president does, this was an erroneous prediction. There were three live speeches on Monday night --Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, & Ronna McDaniel-- using up 25.5 minutes. The evening’s program lasted two hours and twenty four minutes; meaning the live portion of the program used up 18% of the time.
Oh, and it ended seven minutes early, which amounted to a gift for the pundit panels presented by the broadcast media.
What was presented for the most part amounted to a parade of grifters selling grievance politics, much of which was based on provable falsehoods. And most of it was taped in a small auditorium near the White House.
CNN’s Fact Check ran with the headline: First night of the Republican National Convention features more dishonesty than four nights of DNC.
https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1298209708810141696?s=20
The President’s daytime speech to the delegates gathered in North Carolina included eleven lies, according to Politifact.
Aaron Blake, writing at the Washington Post, had three takeaways from night one:
A promise of optimism, quickly abandoned
A focus: Combating allegations of racism
Rewriting history on the coronavirus
In case you haven’t heard, Republicans have decided not to publish a party platform for 2020.
From New York Magazine’s Intelligencer:
In lieu of a document attempting to define the party’s beliefs and priorities, the RNC simply states that it agrees with everything Trump has done and will do:
Aside from South Carolina’s Tim Scott and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, most of the program consisted of dire threats about Democrats and praise for the Dear Leader.
The most entertaining speakers were Donald Trump Jr, and his significant other, Kimberly Guifoyle.
I’m not sure what words came out of Junior’s mouth, because I couldn’t get past looking at his overall appearance; red eyes, runny nose, and a hyper tone. I’ve seen that look before, usually after somebody’s done way too much cocaine.
It wasn’t just me. The hash tag #Cocaine rose to second place on Twitter, and the mentions were all about Junior’s mania
Guifolye screamed for six minutes. Maybe it was just too much Red Bull for her. Or maybe she wanted to make sure the folks at the back of the empty auditorium could hear.
Claiming that her Puerto Rican heritage was somehow connected with immigrant status (Puerto Ricans are US citizens), Guifolye ranted about the “radical” agenda of Democrats condemning former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and others as “socialists” who “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear.”
“They want to steal your liberty, your freedom, they want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live,” she said.
If it wasn’t such a tragedy fraught with fascist overtones, the first night of the GOP convention could have been passed off as a Saturday Night Live skit gone bad.
My analysis is that Trump has given up doing anything but playing to his base, whose loyalty is cult-like. As GOP pollster Frank Luntz told Politico: “We’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like Elvis and the Beatles wrapped up in one.”
While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at least claim to be “for the people,” Donald Trump is for Donald Trump. Period.
Tim Alberta at Politico Magazine has a long piece about the GOP’s lack of direction beyond loyalty to the Commander in Chief. I wish I could repost it in its entirety; it’s that good. Here’s a snip:
If you think about the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—they’re all about ideas. Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman who ran a short-lived primary against Trump in 2020. “John Adams was an ornery guy, but he believed in his ideas. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, he certainly didn’t live up to the ideas he espoused, but shoot, at least he talked about them. Nowadays, it’s just regression to the lowest common denominator on everything. It scares me. You keep going this way of cult of personality, you will kill our Republic.”
It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to. If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.
“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”
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https://twitter.com/grantstern/status/1297995246408785921?s=20
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