GOP Day Two: Credit-Grabbing, Demonizing Dems, but No Plans for Anything

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In 2007, I wrote a post explaining why I had stopped watching presidential debates. They had become like “mood” ads for cars that associate a brand with sex, speed, excitement, power or safety, without ever telling you much about the car. A car, after all, is a machine; it’s not your sex life, your career or your family. It might help to know something specific about it and how it differs from competitive products.

Most debates don’t give you anything like that. Among the many mostly-irrelevant things candidates sell us is this: “They tell us little inspiring stories about other people that they’ve heard. They praise others’ heroism, hoping some will rub off on them.”

The most memorable moments of the GOP’s virtual convention last night were of that sort. They were not just stories; they were “show and tell” sessions led by the master political showman himself. Literally worming his big body between and beside them, Trump had others tell their tales of kindness, grit and transcendence. He supervised and commented, as if he had personally gotten them to do it all and deserved to bask in their glory.

There was a Black bank robber who had found Jesus in prison and, upon release, had formed an effective group to transition formerly incarcerated people to normal life and jobs. There was a policemen who had adopted the baby of a pregnant drug addict he had found on the job. There were five immigrants who achieved naturalization, after years of patient effort and waiting. Trump presided over their ceremony, as if he personally, and not the law, were conferring their new citizenship.

Forget that Trump, in his public statements, has not been noted for kindness to either criminals or immigrants. Forget that he has used the scourge of drugs to scare and inflame. Forget that Mexican border apprehensions alone exceeded 850,000 in the last fiscal year. Forget that Trump has reduced legal immigration to historic lows, like those after “Red scares” early in the last century. What does it tell you about Trump’s policies or plans—or even his on-the-job-competence—that he (or his party) employs talented PR folk who can put on heart-warming shows?

The next most salient thing from last night was the diatribes. Like Cicero railing against Carthage, Trump’s two sons, Don Jr. and Eric, produced thunderous tirades against the Dems and Joe Biden. The Dempocalypse they predicted included riots, looting, homes under siege, socialism, Communism, and the loss of freedom to think and speak. (This after Biden had roundly beat the socialist Bernie Sanders.) The speeches were long on abstractions and polysyllabic words, big on fear and loathing, but short on concrete examples, logic and common sense. They were, in Shakespeare’s words, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I doubt they convinced any viewer not already hiding under his bed with a locked and loaded AK-47.

Trump’s daughter, Tiffany, produced a feminized version of the same thing. More a lament than a tirade, it predicted that Biden as president would cause the loss of all we hold dear. The only strong impression it left me was that Tiffany has too many teeth.

So what did we learn last night about Trump’s plans for the pandemic? Not much. We were told there are several vaccines on the way, including one from the “Warp Speed” program that Trump waved his hands over. Most of the programs are from abroad and beyond Trump’s reach. But we already knew that.

As for the thing we face that could cause many more deaths and far more suffering than our worst war ever—global warming—we were told absolutely nothing. Trump has no plans to deal with that because he thinks it’s a hoax. His entire party follows like the lackeys they are, despite growing concern in the business community that the GOP is supposed to represent. Meanwhile, California is being consumed by record wildfires, whose smoke is polluting the whole Southwest, and two hurricanes are bearing down on New Orleans. (The Dems should pound this glaring omission to death.)

So it went. Nine years ago, I took stock of our ten most serious national problems, which then had had an average longevity of 17.5 years, now 26.5 years. I didn’t include health insurance because Obamacare had just passed two years before and seemed promising. I didn’t include systematic racism and historic division because I wasn’t sufficiently sensitive or prophetic. But of the ten generation-long problems I described, only one—foreign oil dependence—has been more or less solved by now, and by the private sector, not any pol. And anyway oil is running out worldwide.

So what, if any, plans for anything important did the GOP’s video extravaganza lay out? Nothing I can recall. Lots of claims were made about past actions, many of them false or misleading. Secretary Pompeo told us that his “leadership” has made the world safer for us and for freedom. He spoke from Jerusalem as if we owned it (which our evangelicals surely wish). But even he didn’t state any policies or plans, just foreign-policy “spin.”

So when you get right down to it, a vote for Trump in 2020 is just as much a gamble as it was in 2016. You put all your money down on double green zero and wait to get rich without effort or to throw yourself off the nearest bridge. As Sarah Palin might say, “How’s that workin’ out for ya, America?”

One unusual thing that Trump’s operatives did try to offer is pomp and circumstance. In his naturalization “ceremony” and in his introduction to his wife Melania’s utterly forgettable speech, Trump used the White House as a prop. His own walks were replete with liveried soldiers opening doors and a band playing “Hail to the Chief.” Melania’s walk down the Rose Garden Portico, with the closely assembled but maskless GOP multitudes applauding vigorously, was reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s walk down the Kremlin’s long hallway on his inauguration as Russian President in 2018.

I wondered whether Trump’s staff had gotten the idea from the Russians. (Maybe not; Putin’s walk was much longer and the Kremlin’s bigger halls filled with many more sycophants.) But Trump himself or someone on his staff apparently thinks that Americans, or at least die-hard Trump supporters, long for a monarch. So much for “freedom” and self-determination.

So there you have it on Tuesday, August 25, 2020. No plans for anything, as usual. Ciceronian diatribes against demonized opponents. Credit stolen from ordinary people’s lives and achievements, and the trappings of a king. If our Founders rolling over in their graves could generate electricity, they ought to be making enough now to retire two coal-fired plants.

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