I haven’t been looking forward to this week with much excitement. It makes me very anxious to listen to the president speak. When I see ordinary people turn a blind eye to his deficiencies, especially his cruelties, I am disoriented, and become anxious that what he represents in my mind does have a substantial following among people for whom I desire to have a great sense of affiliation. This president has articulated policies and carried out extreme actions that have left me feeling estranged from friends and family members whom I know support him for reasons that exceed my understanding. Perhaps it is a situation like those gimmicky visual tricks that occasionally appear on the Internet where some people see blue while others see yellow. I began my viewing of this week with a longing for it to be over as soon and as painlessly as possible, and dreading the increased sense of confusion and estrangement that it would create between me and about 40% of other Americans. You might ask, “Why watch? Why care? My best answer would be that it feels like a responsibility. My slim hope is that I might find a way to see some chance for common ground from which a rebuilding of trust might begin.

 

This morning’s New York Times has a review of the first night of the 2020 Republican Convention that contains about four minutes of highlights from the first night of speeches. The title of this post is my reworking of the title of that piece.

 

Nominating Trump, Republicans Rewrite His Record: President Trump and his party engaged in sweeping revisionism about his management of the coronavirus, his record on race relations and much else. And they painted a dystopian picture of what the nation would look like if Joseph R. Biden Jr. were president.

 

The article was written by Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Annie Karni. They begin with an expanded restatement of the summary in the title.

 

President Trump and his political allies mounted a fierce and misleading defense of his political record on the first night of the Republican convention on Monday, while unleashing a barrage of attacks on Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic Party that were unrelenting in their bleakness.

Hours after Republican delegates formally nominated Mr. Trump for a second term, the president and his party made plain that they intended to engage in sweeping revisionism about Mr. Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, his record on race relations and much else. And they laid out a dystopian picture of what the United States would look like under a Biden administration, warning of a “vengeful mob” that would lay waste to suburban communities and turn quiet neighborhoods into war zones.

 

As I ponder the warnings about the miseries that would be associated with the reelection of the president that were offered last week at the Democratic convention by speakers like President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama, Senator Chuck Schumer, or even John Kasich, the former Republican Governor of Ohio, I should not be surprised. Their predictions were the expression of the forward extension through a second term of our difficult experiences with the president over the last three and a half years.

 

NPR’s summary of the evening written by Domenico Montanaro drew similar conclusions. If you want a quick analysis of the evening and a review of the most significant speeches, the NPR piece or the New York Times piece represent good examples of the fair reporting and analysis that the president labels as “fake news.” It should not be a surprise that the evening contained many lies and misrepresentations. It also contained some balanced presentations from future GOP candidates for president,Tim Scott, the African American senator from South Carolina, and Nikki Haley, former UN Ambassador and Governor of South Carolina whose parents immigrated to America from India. Montanaro also begins his piece with the references to dystopia.

 

The first night of the Republican National Convention was a little scattershot. It seemed to be partially about counter-programming the Democratic National Convention last week, partially intended to fire up the base and partially aimed at winning back some of those 2016 Trump voters who are having second thoughts.

Trump had promised an “uplifting” convention, but aside from an opening video and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s closing speech, which largely wasn’t about President Trump at all, the night painted an image of a liberal dystopia that would take hold if Democrat Joe Biden is elected.

 

Earlier in the month The Hill published a pre convention piece that said that each of the four nights would have a theme, and that there would be surprises on each night. The article presented the four themes:

 

The convention will feature a combination of live and pre-taped addresses… Each night will feature a respective focus, including America as “a land of heroes,” “land of promise,” “land of opportunity” and “land of greatness,” 

 

CNBC was more specific and gave the designations for each specific night. 

 

The overall theme of the week will be “Honoring the Great American Story.” Monday’s tag line will be “Land of Promise,” Tuesday will be “Land of Opportunity,” Wednesday will showcase “Land of Heroes,” and the final day, Aug. 27, will be built around a “Land of Greatness” theme.

 

Last night was supposed to be “Land of Promise” and that theme was plausibly carried by the best two speakers of the evening, Haley and Scott. They both gave personal testimony of their own rise to success as a member of a minority. Scott gave great credit to his mother’s sacrifices and the people from whom he had received unexpected help along the way like the owner of a fast food restaurant who saw potential in him. I got a little confused about how to fit in the president’s pre recorded encounters with medical personnel and other essential workers, and his group interview with former prisoners detained in places like North Korea, Iran, and Turkey, but somehow even those exercises in reciprocal praise seemed appropriate for a political evening when job one was to recast the president’s performance as better than my personal experience would confirm.  

 

I expected that the convention would be a 9-11 PM presentation much like last week’s Democratic National Convention. So, I was a little surprised to hear a presentation by Mike Pence from Charlotte, North Carolina yesterday around noon while driving home from a community service activity. Over three hundred of the party’s faithful were meeting meeting in Charlotte to transact the business of nominating the president and the vice president for second terms. I was rushing home to meet guests we had coming from Massachusetts whom we had not seen since February.  My wife had planned a “socially distanced” visit and lunch on our deck, so after hearing Vice President Pence’s introduction with his usual unctuous praise of the leader, I did not get to hear much of the president’s 52 minute speech. I did not learn the content of the president’s rambling speech until later. An article in The LA Times by Eli Stokols and Noah Berman does review what I missed in the president’s noontime speech in Charlotte. Now, I have listened to the speech, and it is riddled with lies including his continuing representation that President Obama illegally wiretapped his campaign in 2016. The The LA Times reporters write:

 

Earlier Monday, the president unofficially accepted his party’s nomination for reelection by delivering an unscripted, tradition-busting and falsehood-riddled speech in Charlotte, N.C., where the scaled-down convention kicked off.

He taunted his enemies, suggesting that he might stay in office beyond the constitutional two-term limit. “If you want to really drive ’em crazy, you say 12 more years,” Trump said to cheers from the 336 Republican delegates in the Charlotte Convention Center.

Trump also accused Democrats of trying to “steal the election” by urging Americans to vote absentee to limit exposure to the coronavirus at polling places. Trump has long sought to sow doubt in the electoral process in case he loses, but doing so at a presidential nominating convention marked another unprecedented turn.

“Be very careful and watch it very carefully because we have to win,” he added, falsely claiming that mail-in voting systems were being used to perpetuate fraud. “It’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s not going to be possible to tabulate, in my opinion.”

Polls show widespread disapproval of Trump’s management of the pandemic, but in Charlotte on Monday he accused Democrats of taking advantage of COVID-19.

“They’re using COVID to steal an election,” he said. “They’re using COVID to defraud the American people.”

Traditionally, presidential nominees do not speak extensively until the final night of a convention. Trump plans to speak every day, and then give his formal acceptance speech before an invited crowd on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday.

Four years after party insiders resisted his insurgent campaign, Trump’s dominance of the GOP appeared all but total.

 

That last statement, “…Trump’s dominance of the GOP appeared all but total..,” says a lot. It seems to me that the party has divided into three camps. First, there are the enthusiastic supporters whose worship is blind to every human frailty. Second, there are those who for their own reasons are enablers who try to stay in the shadows, and whom we will not see or hear at this virtual convention. I am thinking of the many senators, like Lamar Alexander or Susan Collins, who refused to consider his crimes that precipitated a justified impeachment, perhaps seeing that he has accomplished by unorthodox methods what they could not do over many years of working “within the system.” They are not there, and don’t seem to want to be involved in the process unlike Representatives Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz, both of whom seemed delighted to deliver their usual misleading “red meat” rants to the loyal base. Thirdly, there are those Republicans who aren’t there because they share a repulsion with the majority of Americans who consider the president to be unworthy of office because of his personal lack of the traditional attitudes and abilities that we expect from a president. They are more than ashamed of being associated with him through a shared party affiliation, and are hoping that in time they may reclaim what was lost as a responsible voices for conservative ideas and policies. Some will speak up like Governor Kasich. Some will participate in the resistance of the Lincoln Project, and others will just sit on the sidelines and wait for the pain to end. 

 

Perhaps the most startling revelation of the past few days is that the Republican Party is not putting forth a new platform this year. They are just saying “ditto” to 2016. The Washington Post’s editorial board published a blistering opinion of this decision yesterday as the convention began.

 

IN RECENT years, people have tended to ignore or even gently deride the deliberations of party platform committees. All these arguments over arcane questions of policy, and for what? The nominee, if elected, won’t be bound by any of it.

True enough. Yet the Republican decision this year to adopt no policy platform whatsoever shines a light on the democratic significance of the exercise — and the alarming vacuity of the Republican Party under President Trump. The Republicans are announcing that they stand for nothing. The party’s only reason for being is to gain and retain power for itself and its comparably unprincipled leader. What kind of future can there be for such a party? And how healthy can the two-party system be if one party has no principles?

 

The editorial continues by contrasting the Republican’s decision (the assumption is that it’s the president’s decision) with the process that occurred among Democrats who ironically have been criticized in the press for focusing too much on values and not enough on policy. 

 

Leading up to the Democratic convention last week, supporters of former vice president Joe Biden spent hours debating with supporters of some of the candidates he had beaten for the nomination, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). They argued over health care, education funding, foreign affairs and more. They compromised at times, found new ground at times and hammered out a platform that the party could unite behind. If elected, Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress won’t be bound by it, but the exercise will help shape their governing priorities. It was a useful democratic exercise.

 

The editors go on to offer an explanation for the reality of “no platform.”

 

The Republicans can’t risk such a debate. Many of the party’s senators and other leaders used to have principles, or at least claimed to. They believed in fiscal rectitude, free trade, limited executive power. Now, they have fallen in line behind a president who believes in none of that. So, are they the party of managed trade, unbridled presidential power, unlimited debt? No one wants to say that. Instead, they define themselves as the party of Donald J. Trump.

 

Looking back on last night the editors were prescient. They know the situation, and can predict the experience in direction if not in volume.

 

As a result, you will hear a great deal at their convention this week about what Republicans are against: socialism, the cancel culture, unbridled crime, Marxism, the “deep state” and — oh, did we mention socialism? At times, their negative passion will be focused on real but exaggerated problems (murder rates have climbed in some cities); at times, the threats will be imagined. And because they believe in nothing, they can put up no resistance when deranged and dangerous conspiracy-mongers move in, as has happened in several GOP congressional primaries.

 

They were right. In speech after speech I heard about “cancel culture,” defunding the police, promotion of riots, potential emergence of socialism under the control of “the squad” and the threat to the American way of life to a “Godless” philosophy. Are you telling a lie if you say that your opponent doesn’t believe in God, wants to defund the police, promotes riots, favors Medicare for all, and is a socialist or a tool or socialist? I heard all of those things said by multiple speakers, they were echoing what the president has been saying recently and reiterated in his Charlotte rant. 

 

The Washington Post editors finish their piece with warnings about cults of personality. If you want to get a real feel for the cult of personality, go back to the link above to the president’s speech in Charlotte yesterday. You can’t see them because the camera is on the president, but you can hear all of the fawning coming from his listeners who cheer every lie and every slur as if they were expressions of great wisdom and insight when in reality they are the lies of a political bully who could give Joe McCarthy lessons. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that both Trump and McCarthy work with and learned from Roy Cohn, one of the most negative personalities of the twentieth century.

 

..in a cult of personality, the government itself becomes the property of the leader. He wants to give his acceptance speech on the South Lawn of the White House? He wants to use the country’s chief diplomat, the secretary of state, as one more political prop?

The party can only cheer its approval.

 

An interesting low point of the evening that may well accurately reflect what we should expect for the rest of the week and for the remainder of the campaign came from Kimberly Guilfoyle. She is the ex wife of Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, a former Fox News personality, and the current companion of Donald Trump, Jr. One report described her presentation as like “Evita.” Eric Lach described the charged feeling of the convention today in a report in the New Yorker entitled, “Kimberly Guilfoyle’s High-Volume Trumpism at the Republican National Convention.”

 

The first hour or so of the Republican National Convention’s prime-time lineup on Monday included dog whistles about defending “Western civilization,” shout-outs to the discredited covid-19 treatment hydroxychloroquine, riffs about Democrats keeping Black people on “mental plantations,” and denunciations of the “China virus.” There were effusive expressions of gratitude directed at President Trump for, among other things, giving up his “life of luxury” to rule the country. There was a speech from Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis couple, who recently brandished firearms at Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and a cameo from another couple, an elderly pair, who, in voice-over, spoke of wanting “this nation to continue to be the beacon of hope for the world,” as video played of them looking lovingly at a section of border wall being installed. There was talk of Donald Trump not being racist, juxtaposed without irony against racist warnings to white voters that Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs.” And yet, even with all of this buildup, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality turned Trump campaign official and girlfriend to Donald Trump, Jr., managed to stand out.

 

She was very enthusiastic in her defense of the president (Click to hear see and hear her.), and her warnings about what might come if Joe Biden were elected. Here is Lach’s description of her six minutes in the spotlight.

 

Going into the Convention, the Trump campaign had suggested that it was looking to strike a note of sunny optimism. Guilfoyle’s speech wasn’t it. “They want to destroy this country, and everything that we have fought for and hold dear,” she said. “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! They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal, victim ideology, to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.” Howard Dean’s Presidential aspirations are popularly remembered as falling apart after one misdeployed yelp. On Monday, Guilfoyle went on for six minutes.

 

I must admit that the evening was difficult for me. I know that shouting at the TV accomplishes nothing. I live in fear of what will happen to healthcare if the chant of “four more years” for Donald Trump becomes true. The case against the ACA comes before the Supreme Court shortly after the election. After the ACA is gone, what might follow? That possibility certainly doesn’t give me much hope for our country soon resolving the factors that create healthcare disparities, or economic inequities. I doubt that Black Lives will matter the way they should during four more years of Trumpism. I know what healthcare was like before the ACA. Even with the election of Joe Biden, the Triple Aim is far into the future, but with the reelection of Trump it may become a lost cause. I have seen the deficiencies in the management of the pandemic. I see that if there is a “dystopian” future for anyone, it will be for those who already suffer from healthcare disparities. As I watch and listen, it is hard for me to believe that there is any hope for the reelection of such a destructive and dangerous national leader, but he is a skilled “carney” who can sell snake oil. He will harp on the success of the stock market during his term. He was elected once against all rational considerations. He is convinced that he can do it again, and I am terrified.