Wannabe dictator Donald Trump is a pathetic, insecure creature who lamely tries to project confidence in his “made for TV” illusions.
That was all too obvious Thursday night when his and First Lady Melania made their “grand” appearance from the White House to the strains of “God Bless the USA” in front of crowd that ignored pandemic rules by sitting bunched together without masks.
Trump insisted he have a crowd for his acceptance speech for him nomination for reelection as president number 45, and he would not allow social distancing and made it clear that anyone who wore a mask was not giving him the adoration he feels he must always receive.
Yes, the president spoke from the terrace of the White House, something no other incumbent president has done, but tradition means nothing to Trump. Neither does the law, the rules or the Constitution of the United States.
Trump filled his 70-minute speech with lies, misrepresentations of his record on the coronavirus, especially failures to act, which increased the country’s death toll to the highest on earth. He lashed into an attack on Democratic opponent Joe Biden by “failing” to take on rioters, which ignored Biden’s condemnation on acts of violence.
As the president whose lies have set new records during his first three-and-a-half years in office, Trump and his minions outdid themselves in the four days of their convenction with lies and falsehoods gurgling of their mouths like verbal diarrhea.
“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens,” Trump claimed in a speech that seemed far less robust and confident as her earlier pronouncements. “And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it. That won’t happen.”
“That won’t happen,” could haunt Trump in November is voters decide they no longer buy into his lies and false claims. Unlike 2016, this election is based on an America he has defined for the last three-and-a-half years and is the one responsible for ignoring the pandemic that has killed 180,000 Americans and destroyed a strong economy he inherited from Barack Obama.
In 2016, America was in the middle of economic expansion. Now, we have a country with nearly 6 million infected by a disease that is out of control, 6 million lost jobs during his presidency, $7 trillion in new debt and racial violence in our streets.
He’s going to fix it? His cult-like base may continue to buy into his lies but polls show most Americans now want a real change, not a collection of vapid promises by a con-artist and failed businessman who put six of his companies into bankruptcy.
You con has played out. One of your previous campaign managers went to prison, another is not indicted for multi-million dollar fraud based on our ill-conceived “border wall” and the last one is leading your administration at the end of August. Your personal lawyer went to prison for fraud and has written a tell-all book about your illegal and unethical actions, joining a growing list of those who served you and then left in disgust and sold their stories to book publishers.
Columnist Dana Milbank writes:
“I say very modestly that I have done more for the African American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln,” he declared. He proclaimed that “the wall will soon be complete” along the Mexican border. Factories are booming! Workers are happy! “This towering American spirit,” he said, has “lifted us to the summit of human endeavor.” He boasted of creating 9 million jobs since the pandemic struck, leaving out the fact that he lost 22 million.
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And Trump presented the mother of all fabrications Thursday night on the South Lawn of the White House. With the Truman Balcony as his backdrop and a massive convention stage erected outside the People’s House, he made only passing references to the pandemic that has disrupted our lives.
The alt-reality show on the screen this week, a Republican National Convention without platform or ideas, mixed Dear Leader adoration with primal fear jabs aimed at the weary American voter. And it may work.
But the reality outside the screen was a perfect fusion of elements central to the master con of Trumpism. The trick of tying the president to something more than the blimp of his ego — to religion, family, guns, a border wall, support for the forgotten man and woman, law and order — was exposed as an elaborate fraud in elaborate detail.
Even the riots in the cities, framed by the choreographers of fear as a preview of Joe Biden’s America, could not be time-traveled beyond the irrefutable: The violent dystopia is happening in Donald Trump’s America. The guns of August 2020 are his.
—The New York Times
In an editorial posted just after midnight Thursday, The Washington Post concluded:
THE REALITY-SHOW president turned his party’s convention this week into a spectacle befitting his true expertise. The televised festival of exaggerations showed voters a warped version of this country, in which circumstances are both far worse and far better than the facts support — depending on what makes President Trump look best.
His acceptance speech Thursday night, a seemingly endless recital of by-now familiar falsehoods, was notable principally for when and how it took place: before a crowd of more than 1,000 mostly unmasked people on a White House lawn festooned with campaign insignia. Mr. Trump managed to merge contempt for public health with desecration of a public monument, the final and most jarring of the convention’s exploitations of the perks of public office for political purposes. Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke from Jerusalem, where he was traveling on government business, and the president granted a surprise pardon and staged an on-screen naturalization ceremony, two of whose participants-turned-props weren’t even aware they’d be starring on national TV.
The speech elevated the darkest themes of the convention. The Republican National Committee chose not even to adopt a platform this cycle. In other words, the party no longer stands for anything. So it was unsurprising that, relying on a mixture of hyperbole and lies, both Mr. Trump and the speakers preceding him highlighted what they’re against. Joe Biden, Mr. Trump said, is a “Trojan horse for socialism” in whose America “no one will be safe.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) summed it up earlier in the week: “The woke-topians will . . . disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.” All this scaremongering was accompanied by outright slander of Mr. Biden, against whom Republicans leveled unsubstantiated corruption charges — and whose record and platform alike Mr. Trump distorted into almost a parody of radicalism.
Meanwhile, bereft of a positive record or a second-term agenda, Republicans created a mythical present in which the coronavirus is vanquished, the economy is booming, our “brave soldiers” are “on the way home” from the Middle East and, astonishingly, Mr. Trump is bosom buddies with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In this fictional realm, a man who lauded white supremacists as “very fine people” becomes a champion of racial comity, and a leader who ignored warnings about the pandemic actually sets the global standard for disease response. Mr. Trump touted selective statistics about the country’s purported success confronting covid-19; he neglected to mention the more than 177,000 Americans who have died so far, or the more than 1,000 who died on the day of his address.
I’ve been around politics and national leadership for 50-plus years, covering it mostly as a reporter and or working inside as a political operative for the GOP for seven of them, along with five years as Vice President of Political Programs for The National Association of Realtors. I’ve seen presidents good and bad, honest and not-so-honest and worthy and unworthy of the position.
Voters knew Trump is the worst. American voters knew that in 2016 when Trump lost the popular vote by more than three million ballots but still prevailed in the Electoral College, thanks in part to gerrymandered districts.
If pollsters are correct, a few million more voters now realize they were conned and will give Biden a margin that even the Electoral College cannot overcome.
Let’s vote and urge others to do the same. It’s pastime to dump Trump into the toxic swamp he promised to drain but, instead, made it more poisonous and dangerous.
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Copyright © 2020 Capitol Hill Blue
1 thought on “Fraudulent GOP convention promoted a phony record of Donald Trump”
Strictly technically, the Electoral College doesn’t have gerrymandered “districts”. Gerrymandered states, perhaps – North and South Dakota insisted upon being admitted to the Union as two states instead of one so they’d get four Senators instead of two. Wyoming and the Dakotas, plus Nebraska and Alaska, get ten senators (and thus ten Electoral College votes, not counting Representatives) for about five million people while California gets two senators for about forty million people… A democratically-elected Republic it ain’t.
States yes, districts no. But I’m being pedantic here, and your point stands. Jon
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