The epic shamelessness of the Republican Convention
Conventions lie. Or at least they tell extravagant fibs. That’s how they transform their nominees from mere mortals to near messiahs. That’s how they whip up the faithful and woo the agnostics.
But the Republican convention is going well beyond that. It’s less a feat of pretty storytelling than an act of pure derangement.
To turn Donald Trump into a president worthy of a second term, speakers are conjuring an entirely different person. I can tell that Trump is the man they’re talking about, because he keeps popping up amid all the monumental imagery.
But I otherwise don’t recognize their version of Trump. Their Trump brims with empathy. Their Trump burns with passion to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Their Trump heroically spared the country from the worst ravages of COVID19, which is surely news to the relatives and friends of more than 175,000 Americans who have died.
On the convention’s first two nights, you didn’t hear that figure. You didn’t hear any explanation for why the United States has the world’s highest number of recorded deaths related to the coronavirus and the highest number of reported infections.
To recast Trump’s record on the coronavirus as a triumph isn’t revisionist history. It’s science fiction.
And the speakers at this convention dare to praise his outward focus, generosity of spirit, compassion and tenderness? They are standing — no, grandstanding — at the confluence of audacity and absurdity. And they are scaring me, because they are demonstrating Trump’s most formidable advantage over Joe Biden, which isn’t incumbency. It’s shamelessness.
On Tuesday night, Trump pardoned — on live television — a former bank robber who now works with prison inmates, cheapening a bighearted gesture by making it MAGA theater.
He emceed a naturalization ceremony — on live television — of five immigrants who belong to the sorts of ethnic groups or come from the kinds of places that he has routinely caricatured and vilified. This didn’t honor them. It reduced them to reelection props.
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, beamed into the convention from Jerusalem to gush over his boss, the kind of flamboyantly partisan act that had become unthinkable in this post. There’s no place for propriety when you’re pumping up this president.
Melania Trump spoke from the Rose Garden, never mind that the
White House had never been used as a setting for a presidential nominating convention in modern times. Norms are for chumps, not for Trumps.
“Donald will not rest until he has done all he can to take care of everyone impacted by this terrible pandemic,” she promised Americans, hewing dutifully and without any discernible animation to the laughable Trump-asbig-beating-heart theme. She also praised his candor, saying: “Total honesty is what we as citizens deserve from our president.” Agreed. Can she point us toward a president who’s going to give us that?
He’s also a champion of women — the first lady floated that screamer.
It’s as if the “Access Hollywood” tape was apocryphal. It’s as if his putdowns of Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris don’t have the barest hint of sexism in them.
It’s as if one of the world’s greatest egoists is one of its greatest altruists. Which only confirms that he’s perhaps its greatest fantasist.