Is There Nothing Donald Trump Won’t Say?
Shamelessness
meets illogic in a memorable (and endless) speech.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
Aug. 28, 2020
I’m so relieved that the pandemic is
over! I’d somehow missed that news, but then I watched the Republican National
Convention, culminating in President Trump’s big speech on Thursday night, and
learned that with his swift, muscular action, he’d pretty much vanquished the
“China virus” and other countries wish they were so lucky. I learned that the
economic toll of it was fast receding and would be a blurry memory soon.
I learned that it’s now perfectly safe
for hundreds of people to sit cheek by jowl without masks, because that’s what
they did in order to bathe the president in applause and chants of “four more
years.” I learned that anyone who says different is just being a hater. But
Trump is a lover. I learned that, too.
How to reconcile that with the vicious
tone and vitriolic content of much of his remarks, which were as grounded in
reality as a Tolkien novel and about as long? I’m stumped.
But I’m impressed:
that he claimed such big-heartedness while showing such small-mindedness; that
he twisted facts with such abandon and in such abundance; that he again trotted
out that nonsense about having done more for Black Americans than any president
since Abraham Lincoln; that he disparaged Joe Biden for not “following the
science” about Covid-19 when he, Trump, mused about injections of bleach and
vouched recklessly for hydroxychloroquine; that he characterized Biden’s
positions as a “death sentence for the U.S. auto industry” when the Obama
administration helped to save American carmakers.
It was an astonishing performance.
When Joe Biden spoke a week earlier, he
never uttered Trump’s name. Trump sure as hell uttered Biden’s, over and over,
in order to call him a latent leftist or an enemy of cops or a friend of
terrorists or a baby killer or the bridge to economic Armageddon or any other
awful thing that popped into Trump’s and his speechwriters’ minds.
A few of Trump’s attacks in particular
demonstrated one of his superpowers, which is smearing opponents along the very
lines where he’s most flawed and vulnerable. It’s a crafty form of denial and a
potent kind of diversion — you just have to be amoral enough to avail yourself
of it.
Trump availed and availed. There was
the science bit, and then there was the suggestion that he had special
intelligence that China was rooting and possibly working for a Biden victory
because, in Trump’s words, “China would own our country if Joe Biden got
elected.” If ever a hostile foreign power connived for a certain result and
seemed to own an American president in the aftermath, it’s Russia in the case
of Trump. But that didn’t give him pause.
He also accused Biden
of betraying blue-collar workers as he “gave them hugs — and even kisses.” The
“kisses” prompted laughter from people in the audience, who clearly heard what
Trump surely intended: an allusion to some women’s stories about Biden. But
those accounts pale, in number and severity, beside the accusations of sexual
assault by Trump and his “Access Hollywood” confession of grabbing women “by
the pussy.”
Still, Trump went there. He’ll go
anywhere. And a shockingly large number of Americans will follow him.
On Thursday night he didn’t just give a
middle finger to norms by delivering his convention speech at the White House.
He reveled in that naughtiness. He milked the magisterial setting for all it was
worth, appearing first with Melania on a balcony, then taking an eternity to
descend a curved staircase with her, then musing aloud on the history of the
residence, complete with a roll call of many of its most beloved denizens
before him.
He later taunted Democrats by gesturing
at it and saying, “We’re here and they’re not.”
This wasn’t patriotism. It was
puerility. He was rubbing his rebellion against tradition and presidential
etiquette in his critics’ faces.
He also insisted that he had kept all
his promises. Really? How’s that wall coming, Mr. President? And will Mexico’s
payments for it come in installments or one lump sum?
He said precious
little about the pandemic, except to blame it all on China, and he most
certainly didn’t mention that we’re No. 1 in the world in recorded deaths (more
than 180,000) and in reported infections, which are quickly nearing 6 million.
He had different figures, ones that painted us as the envy of other countries.
Gee, then why aren’t they letting Americans visit? Is that just sour grapes?
Given how thoroughly
the convention had reinvented Trump, I half expected him to show up at the
lectern on Thursday night with the physique of a man half his age and the hair
of a man in less follicular distress. If he’s going to fabricate his character
and record, inserting a saint in his place, why not do the same with his
appearance, inserting a stud?
I wrote in a previous column that this
convention was defined by its shamelessness, which President Trump’s speech
certainly exemplified. I gave short shrift to its illogic.
Why would we need to make America great
again again
— an
actual pledge that Mike Pence made on Wednesday night — if Trump had made
America great again already? This isn’t a re-election campaign. It’s a tape
loop. I’m surprised Trump on Thursday night didn’t crow that he alone can fix
what he alone didn’t fix despite more than three and a half years so far to do
so.
He did tell Americans to look long,
hard and fearfully at recent scenes of lawlessness and violence in some cities
for a glimpse of Biden’s America. But, wait, isn’t this Trump’s America? The
unrest is happening on his watch, so how does keeping him in office protect
America from it?
It takes a vacuum of integrity to sell
such bunk with such righteousness. It takes a Trump.
Like Ivanka! Introducing her father,
she bragged that he, unlike those icky career politicians, didn’t “kick the can
until it was someone else’s problem.” Did she mean a can like the national
debt, which he promised to curb but which ballooned monstrously during his
first term, even before the pandemic came along?
Ivanka achieved a norm-busting double
whammy by not only shilling at the White House but deciding that it was OK as a
federal employee to make a nakedly partisan speech at an expressly partisan
event, much as Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pompeo and Ben Carson before her had
done. It was another trailblazing moment for America’s princess, who can put a
picture of it in her photo album alongside portraits of her and the president
with Kim Jong-un in the Demilitarized Zone.
Will this mix of pageantry
and prevarication work? My stomach is in knots, maybe just because the stakes
are so high, maybe because Trump offers the kind of simple answers and jingoism
that are often most seductive to voters, maybe because, in the midst of all the
malarkey, there was a cunning recognition of where Biden and Democrats are
weak.
“How,” Trump said, “can the Democrat
Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our
country?”
That’s a misrepresentation, of course,
but one that will have resonance for many voters. Biden should beware of it and
shut it down, lest Trump’s barely endurable speech presage a wholly unendurable
second term.