Will it Work?

The Republican convention is over. And it was a Trumpian freak show from start to finish. Trump as usual used public resources for his own benefit. Ruth Marcus writes:

The gross misuse of public resources — more than that, of public symbols and presidential authority — was beyond imagining. Trump turned core executive powers into made-for-television, partisan spectacles. He commandeered newly minted citizens in a naturalization ceremony that belied the anti-immigrant fever central to his presidency.

Having spent his tenure debasing the power of clemency to reward political allies, he turned it into reality TV, once again helping himself rather than dispensing justice. By the time the fireworks ignited over the Washington Monument, spelling out “Trump” and “2020,” the death of outrage was complete.

And the chest-thumping must have produced a lot of migraines:

“The greatest economy in history”; “I say very modestly I have done more for the African American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln” — and his allies’ smears against the Democratic nominee. Those whizzed by too fast to digest, which was also by design. (One remark by one surrogate stands out for its calumny: former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, slandering Joe Biden as a “Catholic in name only,” a slur so outrageous that Notre Dame’s president was moved to rebuke Holtz.)

Trump will go down as the greatest liar to occupy the office. And his convention kept pounding on two blatant lies:

Concentrate, instead, on two areas of core misdirection: that Trump has handled the coronavirus pandemic brilliantly, and that Biden is a scary socialist. For all the convention’s flagrant disregard of public health guidelines, its speakers were even more flagrant in ignoring the extent and damage of the pandemic (economic adviser Larry Kudlow spoke of it in the past tense, on a day when 1,152 additional deaths were reported) and in praising the president’s supposedly effective handling of a virus whose danger he diminished and whose spread he permitted to flourish.

Trump, of course, outdoes all the rest. “To save as many lives as possible, we are focusing on the science, the facts and the data,” he proclaimed Thursday night — this on a day when his administration was forced to backtrack on its advice against testing for those exposed to covid-19 and not showing symptoms.

And then there was the sliming of Biden. “The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Vice President Pence warned on Wednesday — and then Trump took it up a notch.

The typical approach, especially for an incumbent president, is to rise above, to speak blandly of “my opponent” without deigning to name names. In acceptance speeches dating back to Richard Nixon, the eight incumbent presidents combined to mention their opponents by name only a dozen or so times, often with a measure of graciousness. Biden didn’t utter Trump’s name once during his speech; Trump named-checked him 40 times, as a weak-willed, job-destroying, tax-hiking, China-cosseting, police-hating radical.

“Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism,” Trump warned.

That this bears no resemblance to the actual Biden, to his lengthy record or his current platform, is of no import to Trump or his supporters.

Trump has made a fortune selling horse manure. I'm being polite. The question remains: Will it work?

Image: twitter