Trump National Convention 2020 -- Nights 2 and 3
The middle two nights of the 2020 RNC were a far less hysterically entertaining continuation of the first night. More and more Trumps showed, insisting that literally everything you know about Trump, and have witnessed with your own ears and eyes, is wrong. And plenty of Republicans showed up to continue the Scott/Haley project of night one—to insist that none of this is unusual, that the party of Lincoln and Reagan is as strong and vibrant and conservative as it ever was.
Tuesday wasn’t just second-tier Trump kids and GOP stooges, though. It was also Take Your President to Work Day at the RNC, with Trump and pals brazenly flouting anything resembling established norms around the distinction between campaigning and doing the job of the presidency—breaking the shit out of the law along the way. Not that that matters.
The Donald-starring segments of the night were a naturalization ceremony for five new citizens at the White House and a surprise presidential pardon for a convicted felon—both segments slick and sickly with the “benevolent leader deigns to exercise his great power” vibe that accompanies anything Trump does that isn’t purely for his personal benefit. The feeling that Trump is bestowing something upon the gratefully sputtering, tearful unwashed is only reinforced by the fact that it’s made into a campaign spectacle, broadcast as a cheap reality television stunt instead of just a commonplace function of normal, ordered government.
Think of how often Trump imagines dead people, soldiers or otherwise, looking down from heaven and being pleased with Trump’s own work, or basking in Trump-permitted “record-setting applause” to capture the feeling. To wit:
The dead special forces operative, son and brother and husband and father to three children, is in heaven and "very happy" because he received an apparently record-breaking standing ovation from a room full of politicians. An ovation that went on *precisely* as long as Donald Trump wanted it to. "I have done you and your dead husband a great honor with this record-breaking applause! I have made him quite happy!" What the fuck are you talking about, Donald?
Orchestrating one of the most significant moments of some other person’s life into an advertisement for your own magnanimity, glorification, and career advancement is comically amoral—but even suggesting that these obvious displays of self-aggrandizement are anything but selfless, heroic patriotism will get you labeled deranged by those in the cult. It’s not exploitation if they’re getting what they want, right?
Something I said four years ago is worth bringing up here—Trump, for all his loud and ongoing claims of hostility to political correctness, is himself stridently politically correct. Unable to identify and name a single rational reason or argument outside of himself for idolatry of the flag, the anthem, and (lately) the pledge, he casts all “disrespect” of these icons as blasphemy. That’s absolutely PC. He constantly insists on decorum, accusing his perceived enemies of sins of taste, etiquette, and failures of politeness—people who don’t look right on television, who cough at the wrong moment, who are nasty, disgusting, hormonal. He is basically always in formal wear. All he seems to care about is who is and who isn’t being nice to him. What is political correctness if not a slavish devotion to revered institutions and put-on interpersonal politesse?
It is also long established that he makes hiring decisions based on preconceived notions of how a person in a particular role should look—or would look on television. This is another form that his fundamental PC-ness takes, all the way down to the way nights two and three of the RNC were filled to the seams with non-white people alternately benefiting from his personal largess and singing his praises, or both. It doesn’t matter whether it’s genuine outreach to marginalized communities, or giving nervous whites a tokenized out to justify their support for him, or simply trolling the libs—regardless of motivation, the campaign used the fact of these people’s appearances or identities to communicate a message. This is just politics and messaging, of course, certainly for as long as I can remember. But it’s also the height of political correctness—crass, debased, dehumanizing, and hypocritical underneath, all coated in treacly sentimentality and plausible deniability.
In other words, phony. In other words, everything we’ve known about Trump for his forty years in public life. The only way he’s not PC is in his inability to be anything but himself—his narcissism gets in the way of attempts at inauthenticity. It’s almost more damning, in a way—he really is the way he seems.
Mike Pompeo, a paragon of PC self-seriousness himself, is the Secretary of State, the former head of the CIA, a former congressperson from Kansas, a veteran of the US Army, graduated at the head of his class from West Point, and went to Harvard Law, where he was an editor for the law review. He is obviously extremely well-credentialed. He is also, by all outward appearances, kind of a moron.
Every Mike Pompeo speech sounds like it was written by a belligerent fifth-grader, and that’s how Pompeo delivers them, too. He’s a little better in interviews, but not much—he often tries to project toughness by clipping off his words and tightening his lips and breathing through his nose, an odd tough guy routine that I guess he thinks makes him look big and strong in comparison to, say, Margaret Brennan.
Pompeo has achieved his level of power and influence with a great deal of ambition and sucking up, and no doubt at least a middling intelligence, dopey speaking patterns aside. This grasping mediocrity goes for a lot of politicians of all stripes, certainly, if not quite all of them. But the people in this administration, and those outside it who will defend it publicly, really do seem to be either dumber than the average talking head we’re accustomed to in politics, or more straightforwardly bad, or both.
BRIEF ASIDE: This was the highest profile of the Hatch Act-style violations, and probably the worst. The whole point of such a law is to try to keep personal or partisan ambitions from getting in the way of, or superseding, the duties and obligations of those in public service. His speech also explicitly violated State Department legal memos that he himself approved. But the Republicans don’t care, because this is the sort of thing that only gets mentioned on conservative media in terms of highlighting Democratic hypocrisy. They choose which laws to follow based on what is politically expedient and who will care. For an allegedly law-based society, it’s less than ideal!
It’s not all just nepotism, either, though there was plenty of that. Eric Trump and his wife both spoke, with the former claiming, among other lies and absurdities, that Trump had secured peace in the middle east despite all the haters, and the latter offering a made up Lincoln quote while also claiming that the Trump family is secretly very down to earth and normal.
Mike Pence, who looks more like Roger Stone with each passing day, gave a fairly long speech in which, if you take out the lies, he said absolutely nothing memorable but certainly sounded the part of a made-for-tv politician. Larry Kudlow introduced himself as “Larry Kudlow, you know, from television!” before launching into three minutes of utter nonsense about the “Trump economy.” Kayleigh McEnany (you know, from television) tried to humanize the president by letting us know that after she had a serious medical procedure, Trump called. That’s it. He just…called. A nun said that Jesus wasn’t politically correct, either, and you know what the powers that be did to him! She then called Trump—who once referred to his promiscuity and unsafe sex practices as his personal Vietnam—the most pro-life president in history.
The cream rises to the top, as they say, but the festering Trump latrine is no cup of tea. So what to call the putrid layer of nepotism, stupidity, and opportunism that floats atop the swirling sewage of Trump world and has spoken all week to Trump’s alleged secret generosity of spirit and selflessness? Santorum’s already claimed, after all. Calling it the Sandmann would be cruelty to children and idiots—and I wouldn’t want to fight him in court, anyway. I nominate Giuliani—the perfect personification of slimy, lying, stupid, power-desperate shit.
Aaauughhh! What is that, you ask, recoiling in horror from the spitting, sweating, yelling, lying, bejeweled turd—someone so obviously unfit to be in a position of power or influence. A giuliani. The longer The Trumppening goes on, the lower sort of character will rise to the top to defend him. Those who surround and defend him at this point have long since descended beneath the obscene depths of an extended The Aristocrats joke. We call it, The Giulianis!
