The
Malign Fantasy of Donald Trump’s Convention
Using the White House as
his prop, the President makes war on Joe Biden, and pretends the pandemic is
all but defeated.
August 28, 2020
For
four years, Donald Trump has been asking us to believe
the unbelievable, to accept the unthinkable, to replace harsh realities with
simple fantasies. On Thursday night, using the White House as a gaudy backdrop,
the President made his case to the American people for four more years. His
speech capping the Republican National Convention was long, acerbic,
untruthful, and surprisingly muted in comparison to the grandeur of the
setting, which no chief executive before him has dared to appropriate in such a
partisan way. “We will make America greater than ever before,” he promised.
Even
for a salesman like Trump, it was never going to be an easy deal to close, what
with a deadly pandemic, mass unemployment, nationwide
protests over racial injustice, and even a killer hurricane smashing into the
Gulf Coast hours before his speech. Some seventy per cent of Americans
currently believe that the country is on the wrong track, according to recent
polls. Who can blame them?
This
should be devastating context for a President, any President, seeking
reëlection, a true picture of American carnage to replace the false one that
Trump conjured four years ago. Yet the strategy of Trump and his team is now
clear: to talk about how bad things would be in Joe
Biden’s America, a violent socialist ruin in which freedom itself
will no longer exist and rampaging protesters, like those now committing
“rioting, looting, arson, and violence” in “Democrat-run cities,” will be
coming soon to a suburb near you. “The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe
Biden’s America,” Vice-President Mike Pence said on Wednesday night. “No one
will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump said on Thursday night. To say this
sounded a bit off in actual America, Trump’s America, does not do justice to
the bizarre dissonance of this year’s Republican Convention.
Americans
know Trump pretty well by now, and so it was more than a little discordant to
hear him extolled throughout the Convention this week as a family man, promoter
of women, friend to African-Americans, champion of religious liberty, and lover
of immigrants, who interrupted his own Convention to preside over a White House
naturalization ceremony for five lucky new citizens. A courageous patriot who
works “from dawn to midnight,” as his daughter Ivanka told us, this Convention
Trump personally charmed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made peace in the
Middle East, and single-handedly saved U.S. industries and unborn babies. And
then there was his response to the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps the
Administration’s shining hour, in which the President bravely disregarded the
so-called experts to ban flights from China, thus saving millions of lives,
while working closely with America’s governors, providing medical workers with
all the resources they needed, reopening schools and businesses, and putting
the greatest economy in history on the path to a fast recovery. The trolling
was as epic as the setting was legally questionable: sitting and listening to
Trump were more than a thousand supporters, packed together tightly in white
chairs on the White House lawn, and almost none of them were wearing masks.
While thus publicly and flagrantly flouting public-health standards, Trump
touted his response to the pandemic as one that is focussed exclusively “on the
science, the facts, and the data.”
Did
they expect anyone to believe it? Who knows, but politically, at least, the
spectacle suggested a President entering his reëlection campaign not strong and
confident of victory but insecure and faltering, a President whose prospects,
left unvarnished by lies and fantasy, were so poor that his strategists had to
reinvent him as a different person altogether. The departure from reality was
so complete that I spent much of the week feeling sorry for the many
journalists now employed as real-time fact checkers.
The
truth is that Trump’s heart wasn’t really in the ridiculously uncredible
makeover anyway. Fear is his preferred political drug, and nasty personal
attacks are his default setting. This is what he is pushing, now and forever.
Minutes into his speech, he framed the election as a fight to “save the
American Dream” and “the American way of life” from Democrats who would give
“free reign to violent anarchists, agitators, and criminals who threaten our
citizens.” Trump attacked Biden by name forty-one times in his prepared
remarks, some kind of record in a Convention speech. Biden is a “destroyer of
American greatness” itself, Trump said, and he supports “the most extreme set
of proposals ever put forward by a major-party nominee.” He is a pawn of China
and the radical left, “a Trojan horse for socialism,” a representative of a
“failed political class,” and a loser on the wrong side of history. He and his
party will “demolish the suburbs.” They will “confiscate your guns.” Biden, in
short, will end America as you know it.
The
problem, of course, is that America as we know it is currently in the midst of
a mess not of Biden’s making but of Trump’s. Suffice it to say that, by the
time Trump’s speech was over and the red, white, and blue fireworks spelling
out “2020” had been set off over the National Mall, late Thursday night, more
than three thousand seven hundred Americans had died of the coronavirus since
the start of the Convention—more than perished on 9/11—and a hundred and eighty
thousand Americans total had succumbed to the disease, a disease that Trump
repeatedly denied was even a threat. His botched handling of the pandemic was
the very reason that his Convention was taking place on the White House lawn in
the first place.
But
the real message of the evening was that nothing, not even a deadly plague or a
cratering economy, can stop Trump from being Trump. He bragged. He lied. He
even ad-libbed a taunt at his critics, using the White House as his prop.
“We’re here,” he said, pointing to the flood-lit mansion behind him, “and
they’re not.”
Four
years ago, the Republican National Convention was not an electoral game-changer
for Trump, but it was an important marker for the man and his party. If you
listened closely, it was a herald of the scorched-earth campaign to come—and,
especially, of the fundamental dishonesty of the Administration that would
follow. Trump’s Presidency, just like that 2016 Convention, has always been a
puzzling combination of the incompetent and the dangerous; from the start, it
has been equal parts dystopianism and hucksterism, with a strong side of
nepotism thrown in. Pretty much all of it was on the giant gilded platform in
Cleveland, plain to see.
Perhaps
the most quoted line from Trump’s 2016 speech was a memorable expression of his
aspirational authoritarianism: “I alone can fix it.” That, it turned out, was
not a throwaway line or an odd exaggeration by a narcissistic political novice;
it was a precursor and a prelude to the radical reimagining of the Presidency
as a one-man show. Cleveland was a prologue. What happened at the White House
last night was its tawdry, perhaps inevitable, sequel.
Trump
appears to believe that what really worked about that Cleveland speech were his
repeated calls for “law and order.” The dark hellscape of America in the Obama
years was not the subtext of his candidacy back then; it was the text of it,
and if it did not actually exist—well, that was O.K., because Trump was more
than willing to invent it. Four years later, as an actual hellscape unfolds,
there is another act of invention: pretending that the cataclysm is not
happening, or spuriously claiming that the true crisis is not the pandemic or
the economic catastrophe or police brutality toward Black people but a plague
of illegal aliens and open borders and attacks on law enforcement—all the same
old racially coded appeals to the President’s white political base, freshened
up and brought back out against the backdrop of this summer’s protests, which
began with the police killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, and have
escalated once again this week following the police shooting of another young
Black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “The more . . . violence reigns,
the better it is” for Trump, Kellyanne Conway, his soon-to-depart White House
counsellor, told Fox News on Thursday morning, as pictures of looting in
Kenosha dominated the news. Trump thinks law and order won him the election
four years ago. He thinks it will do so again in November.
Back in 2016, the only
unscripted drama at the Convention involved the final defeat of what remained
of the G.O.P. resistance to Trump, culminating in a prime-time speech by
Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who had stayed in the Republican primary race long
after it was apparent that Trump would win. Instead of endorsing Trump, Cruz
ended his appearance in Cleveland not with a pitch for Party unity and getting
behind the future President but with a defiant plea to “vote your conscience.”
As it turned out, it was not Cruz’s last-ditch rebellion that mattered; it was
the boos and jeers that followed him off the stage.
This
year, Trump wanted it to be all about him, and it was. There were no Ted Cruzes
left to resist (and indeed Ted Cruz, now a reliable Trump ally on Capitol Hill,
was not even invited). With a prime-time lineup heavy on Trump family members
and current White House officials, it appeared that Trump was “down to blood
relatives and paid staffers,” as the late John McCain loved to quip. Trump’s
ever-slavish Vice-President managed to mention him thirty-three times in his
thirty-six-minute speech.
Not
surprisingly, all the speeches praised Trump, which was over the top but also
telling. Last week, at the Democratic Convention, Biden was also praised—as a
loving husband and father, and a friend to Amtrak conductors; as a relentless
extrovert, given to randomly calling the mothers and grandmothers of the young
people he meets. A boy he befriended on the campaign trail recounted how the
former Vice-President gave him the courage to speak publicly despite the
childhood stutter that he was determined to overcome, as Biden had. No one said
anything remotely like that about Trump this week. Claims about him were
outlandish and untrue—he is “the bodyguard of Western civilization,” the Trump
youth activist Charlie Kirk said; a paragon of “total honesty,” averred his
wife, Melania, little more than a year after it was revealed that Trump lied
about paying hush money to a porn star to cover up their extramarital affair.
Even so, there was barely a suggestion that Trump was personally empathetic or
loving. The only speech that seemed to humanize the President at all came from his
White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when she talked about how he
called her on the telephone when she was recovering from surgery.
Now
Trump is Republicanism, and Republicanism is Trump—at least for the duration of
2020. The Party’s transformation into an ideology of Trump and Trump alone was
made explicit from the start of this Convention, when the Republican platform
for the election was released on Sunday evening. “RESOLVED,” it said, “That the
Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the
President’s America-first agenda,” and his second-term plans, whatever they may be. That was it.
One
of the more enduring subplots to come out of Cleveland was Melania Trump’s
botched speech, which lifted portions from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008
D.N.C., a mini-scandal that lives on in countless memes about the largely
inscrutable and intensely private current First Lady. The plagiarism that
occurred at this year’s Convention, however, was not by Melania but by Trump
himself. The President can’t help but recycle his own lines. He has no other
playbook. He is fighting for law and order. His opponent is a phony, the
captive of sinister leftist forces. It’s what he said about Hillary Clinton in
2016, and what he said about Joe Biden on Thursday night. Even his 2016
campaign slogan, the one that he himself stole from Ronald Reagan, has been repurposed
for use once again in 2020, no matter how odd it sounds for an incumbent
President to be running on the promise to make America great again.
Running
as an incumbent was always going to be a problem for Trump. He is a divider, a
fighter; he prefers to be against things, not for them. He loves to take
credit—and to avoid responsibility. His speeches skew dark and
grievance-ridden, even in the best of times. And, despite Trump’s bombast and
lies, these are not the best of times. We don’t know if Trump will be reëlected
in November, but as he enters this final sixty-six-day race to Election Day, we
do know this: Donald J. Trump has only one script in politics, and he is
determined to use it over and over and over again.