Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. (photo: Reuters)
21 July 16
Trump is a con man, so it's no surprise that his campaign studded the speaker's list with disreputable people
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the second half of Wednesday night’s RNC programming was dominated by
the usual professional politicians one expects at events like this (and fireworks thanks to Ted Cruz)
the earlier parts of the evening were downright puzzling. After Laura
Ingraham worked the crowd into an orgasmic frenzy of hate towards both
Hillary Clinton and the press, the hard-won energy drained out of the
room as the gathered were subject to one frankly weird speech after
another.
Phil Ruffin, Pam Bondi, Eileen Collins, and Michelle
Van Etten: These speakers ranged from uninspiring to being Ambien in
human form. Bondi managed to look alive at parts and Collins confused
the audience by talking about government having roles outside of
cracking skulls and kicking hippies, but it was Ruffian and Van Etten
that truly made no sense from an aesthetic or political perspective.
Ruffin was a trollish man whose speech was so boring
that it started to feel like a human rights violation. Van Etten,
portrayed as an entrepreneur, was somehow even worse, so bad that the
cringe could be felt across Twitter.
Sure, the Trump campaign is scooping from the bottom
of the barrel for convention speakers, but was this really the best he
could do? The crowd, as evidenced by the ecstatic response they offered
Ingraham, was primed and ready to go nuts at the drop of a hat. It took effort
to bore and confuse them. So one has to wonder: Why these people? Why
not roll out a few more talk radio demagogues like Ingraham, since
that’s clearly who the crowd wants to see?
Perhaps the reason is that three out of four of these
people — more than the pundits, family members or career politicians
otherwise populating the stage — represent the true heart and soul of
the Trump campaign. With the exception of Collins — who didn’t endorse Trump —
and whose presence simply makes no sense at all, what these speakers
have in common is a certain affection for the hucksters and grifters of
the world.
Ruffin is a casino owner,
albeit a more successful one than his buddy, Trump. Bondi ostensibly
has a respectable job, as the attorney general of Florida. But she is
also in serious political trouble, as it came out months ago that she
dropped a lawsuit against Trump University, one Trump’s most obnoxious
scams, after Trump donated $25,000 to her campaign. And Van Etten is not really an entrepreneur. She’s a grifter who made her money running a multilevel marketing scam selling useless vitamin supplements.
Between these three, we get a full eyeball of what
Trump means by making America “great” again, which apparently means
making America safe for sleazy operators who would rather make their
money through grifts and bribery than through a hard day’s work.
There’s something telling about the Trump campaign’s
willingness to trot out the kind of bottom-feeders that most Republican
politicians politely pretend are not the backbone of their party.
Perhaps it is a sign of unawareness, a demonstration that Trump’s people
have no idea that there’s something unsavory about being unsavory.
Or
perhaps it’s a savvy move, to populate the byways of a respectable
institution of the RNC with snake oil salesman, in order to make their
candidate seem normal instead of what he is, a lazy reality TV
personality who is so bad at business that his various ventures have
performed less well than putting his money in basic investment account.
Of course, that is attributing savvy to a campaign so
lazy that they allowed Melania Trump, who was supposed to humanize the
candidate, go out on stage with a plagiarized speech.
No, the likelier explanation for this roster of
embarrassments is that these grifters are just the kind of people Trump
likes and the kind of people he wants to roll out as the best and
brightest that his campaign has to offer as surrogates.
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