The dichotomy between the US that we are living in and the one that the Republicans claim they are living in was more than striking – it was schizophrenic. Over the course of four nights, various members of the Trump family and assorted hangers-on and Republican sycophants painted a dystopian picture of the country as great now, but ready to dissolve in anarchy and revolt should Joe Biden win in November. Where do these people live that the Covid-19 pandemic is over, or that the crisis itself was handled perfectly by Trump?
The in-your-face violations of the Hatch Act throughout the entire reality-show ‘production’ – which is what it was, given that the nomination was completed early Monday – using The White House, Fort McHenry, and other federally-owned properties and government employees and political appointees as backdrops for their partisan politics,further reveals the rank hypocrisy of the party as a whole. The Republicans who have claimed that they are the party of ‘law and order’ since the 1960’s are fully complicit with using taxpayer-funded federal properties to get their president re-elected, with an abundance of violations of the Hatch Act on national television. I have to go there – if Obama had done this… Of course, they also decided it was in their own best interest that Trump should remain in office despite abusing the power of the office of the president to force an ally to announce a bogus investigation into his political rival. They are the same people we saw spreading lies and conspiracy theories during the RNC and within the Senate itself, often using Russian talking points for those conspiracies, again in order to maintain their minority hold on power. They are the same people willing to destroy the Postal Service in order to disenfranchise and suppress the votes of those of us not likely to vote for them.
The Fox ‘New’s bubble is so much more dangerous than we thought, because most of us don’t watch them in the first place. Fox ‘New’s shows present Trump with stories, often unsupported by any real facts, that he then posts on his Twitter account, where there starts a dangerous echo back and forth from Trump and Fox to the base and back again. Trump ignores experts and does whatever the talking heads on Fox ‘News’ tell him to do. The Trump cult, unmasked and packed in like sardines, was on full display in the political events that we paid for, and it was unbelievable in its flouting of the law and in its absurdity.
I’ve said over and over that the lives of his followers are of absolutely no value to Trump, and his insistence on having these events with his adoring followers shouting his name at a super-spreader event is just proof of his total lack of basic human kindness and empathy. Trump has always only cared about what is in it for him, without regard to anyone else involved. When he built those casinos in Atlantic City, scores of local small businesses provided him with products and labor that Trump then screwed over by refusing to honor his contract to pay. As a candidate, he swore he would release his taxes right up until he got elected, when he admitted that no, he never intended to release his taxes.
No one should be surprised by his willingness to just throw his followers into huge petri dishes for his own edification – in fact, I’d go further and say that we should in fact expect this and worse in the coming weeks, as he tries desperately to hold on to power and the temporary immunity that the presidency affords him. Trump felt no compunction in staging the pardon of a Black man (the irony!), a naturalization ceremony (without telling the immigrants it would be used for the RNC beforehand) or using a formerly pardoned woman as a prop because nothing outside of Trump matters to Trump at all, except insofar as those things can benefit him right now.
Listening to one speaker after another would have driven me mad, and honestly, this is the kind of event that the DVR was made for. While I watched most of the DNC at normal speed with the sound turned on, I utilized fast-forward through the speakers, only listening when MSNBC interrupted to provide fact checks for the lies just aired to keep my blood pressure from rising. Altogether, it made for a much more enjoyable experience than it would otherwise have been, given the toxicity the entire thing contained.
Is it possible that somewhere out in the country there are people who agree these fever dreams are real, or do they believe the things that their eyes see and their ears hear? Of course it is! Again, Fox ‘News’ and its policy of ‘all things Trump’ provides the base with the propaganda that keeps them fired up while making it almost impossible for friends and family to disabuse those Fox-ites of their manipulated view of the country and Covid-19. These are the same cult members who refuse to wear masks or remain socially distant because of ‘personal freedom’ while refusing to accept that their personal freedom ends where your personal freedom to not get sick starts. The problem with elevating ‘personal freedom’ above the public good is that any attempt to require those freedom warriors to do their civic duty and wear a mask leads to some kind of confrontation, often with someone with a firearm.
Trump’s diatribe at the end of night four was something, alright. It’s so obvious whenever he reads from a teleprompter that he refuses to really familiarize himself with the speech before he goes live, between his reading like a young child (almost singing) to his mother for the first time and saying that he “profoundly” accepted the nomination. Either he was supposed to say “proudly” or his speech writer is an idiot. Or perhaps both can be true simultaneously.
Elections have consequences.
Boomer Dem-Nation 