Last night Donald Trump accepted the Republican coronation in an extravaganza whose central theme was “Farewell to democracy.” In a genuinely horrific display of authoritarian ownership, Trump not only filled the South Lawn with white chairs—and equally white supporters—but bracketed the White House with enormous LED signs surely secunded from their normal roles of advertising mattress sales along the interstate. Then Trump-themed fireworks burst over the National Mall. It was gaudy. It was sickening. It was deeply, intrinsically tacky.
In front of the Vegas-ified White House, Republicans delivered a night of lies which repeatedly turned to one theme: We wouldn’t be in this mess if Trump was in charge. The pandemic, the economic collapse, the violence … all could be solved if someone like Donald Trump was at the helm. Gee, what a shame Trump isn’t here to steer this ship out of the storm some absolute jackass got it into.
As Joe Biden tweeted during the evening, Trump wasn’t asking for a second term; he was asking for a do-over.
When it came his turn to speak, Trump demonstrated that the complaints that “anyone can read from a teleprompter” were not true at all. Not only did Trump struggle to follow along in an emotionless drone—like a large, orange, sweaty bee—he also mangled multiple phrases, from “profoundly accepting” the nomination to “we pioneered the fatality rate.” Reading, as it turns out, is a skill.
When he was managing to chew his way through the words on the screen, Trump spewed so many outright lies that real-time fact checking could have been on Olympic sport. Trump once again claimed to have given veterans the choices in health care that President Obama signed well before Trump came down the escalator. He exaggerated the miles of useless border wall constructed by 6000%. He repeatedly painted Joe Biden as being somewhere to the left of Che Guevara. And, like every other speaker on every other night of the RNC, claimed that he had handled that China virus brilliantly. Good thing that’s over.
Overall, Trump spoke for over an hour, dragging the closing on toward midnight. It’s fair to say that while some number of American televisions might still have been tuned in, it’s a very good bet that American eyeballs had long closed. It was a bad speech. Not just a speech filled with lies and riddled with vindictive, but a bad speech in the sense that it was badly written, badly structured, and very badly delivered. It was like the laziest writer imaginable took the off-cuts from Trump’s rally addresses and tossed them in a blender, with no concern for sequence, impact, or consistency.
Before Trump appeared to sing the nation an all-too-familiar lie-lullabye, the a tag team of some of Trump’s biggest supporters appeared. That included a visit from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who seemed to be present to show that he could out-sweat even Trump. During his time on stage, Giuliani repeated and expanded on a claim made several times over the course of the RNC, saying that Joe Biden is "a Trojan horse with Bernie, AOC, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter and his party's entire left wing just waiting to execute their pro-criminal, anti-police policies."
First off, there’s not room in a horse for all those people. Secondly, Joe Biden isn’t hiding his support for, or from, any of these people. Both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (do Republicans really burst into flame if they say her full name?) had speaking slots at the Democratic convention. As for Black Lives Matter, both Biden and Harris have expressed outspoken support. In Giuliani’s version, the Greeks apparently knocked on the door and informed the Trojans that they were all going to climb into this horse, please drag it inside.
But despite trotting out such reliable fire breathers as Giuliani and Tom Cotton, the whole of the fourth night of the RNC failed to generate as much heat as Karen Pence talking about art classes. It’s hard to imagine that even the most ardent Trump supporter found the night something to enjoy. It was just … something to be endured.
Now, everyone stay tuned for night five of the RNC. Because that’s apparently where they’re going to reveal all the optimism, positive statements, and detailed plans they promised before the convention began.
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