So Gilbert Gottfried walks into a political fundraiser’s office, and he says, “Hey, I got this great NEW political party you wanna look at, they’ll knock your socks off.”
And the fundraiser said, “OK, who are these guys?”
The Democratic National Convention, having tried and succeeded in their quest to get even lower ratings than the last presidential cycle, nevertheless gained praise from the media critics who did watch. And given that the outcome of party conventions is never in doubt anymore, the value is not so much to gain ratings as to create an impression among those political insiders who actually do watch these things as to the party’s ability to present itself and its agenda.
And since this year the Democrats had their convention one week before the incumbent Republican Party, it raised the question of whether the Republican National Convention would learn from their example, and what agenda they would present.
Now as you know, all that was complicated by Viceroy Trump’s initial insistence that the agreed-upon site, Charlotte, North Carolina, have the traditional cheering crowds as an old-time convention, even after coronavirus made it obvious to the Democrats that they couldn’t do that approach in Milwaukee. And since Donald Trump is Your Lord GOD whose whim overrides petty concerns like science and disease theory, he didn’t accept the position of the Demonrat Governor of North Carolina that masking and social distancing had to be enforced. So he announced to all that the convention events were being moved to Jacksonville in the much more Trumpnik state of Florida, even though the official convention business (what was left of it) could not be moved from Charlotte. Except that by the time the planning for Jacksonville was in high gear, coronavirus was exploding in Florida, largely because their Trumpnik governor encouraged everybody to go to the beaches and public events with no social distance measures. The only solution to avoid another public health and publicity disaster like the Tulsa speech was to have Trump do his acceptance speech outdoors, in Florida, in AUGUST, around hurricane season.
Somehow this combination of facts penetrated the invulnerable skull of our God-Emperor, and he agreed to have a (mostly) virtual convention after all. But the Democrats had already come to that realization and had months to prepare, whereas by the time Trump bowed to the liberal bias of reality, there were only weeks to go until the RNC was set. And as a result, everything is largely improv, not least because Trump himself kept inserting himself into all the plans.
The first change that people noticed was that whereas the DNC reserved two hours of programming time a night, the RNC decided to cut into evening programming by starting an hour earlier at 8:30 pm, for a total of two and a half hours, apparently reasoning that if the Democrat convention was too dull and boring, the best solution was to add 25 percent more of the same thing.
The second change was in the Party platform, or deliberate lack thereof. Previously the party committees had earned ridicule by refusing to update the 2016 platform, with its remarks like “Our economy has become unnecessarily weak with stagnant wages. People living paycheck to paycheck are struggling, sacrificing, and suffering. … Our standing in world affairs has declined significantly — our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no long trust us” and “The President has been regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand. He defies the laws of the United States by refusing to enforce those with which he does not agree. And he appoints judges who legislate from the bench rather than apply the law. ” Well, now the RNC has announced, after first whining that “The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts” that “the Republican Party has and will continuously support the Presidents America-first agenda” and “RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention” – in other words, the Republican Party agenda is literally ‘we agree with everything Donald Trump says’ and furthermore, “RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.”
So one of the few legitimate purposes that a party convention still serves other than anointing the primary winner is officially meaningless. There is no independent thought allowed. There is not even the perfunctory one-minute speech Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was allowed to nominate Bernie Sanders for the roll call, because no one is competing in the roll call. There really ISN’T a roll call; the delegates made a remote vote earlier Monday affirming Trump as their nominee. The whole media event is that much more a TV show than the DNC, and the only thing being promoted is Donald Trump.
Then you combine that with the events between the Thursday acceptance speech of Joe Biden and the kickoff of the RNC Monday, with Trump whisperer Steve Bannon getting arrested for using a “build the wall” project to bilk people out of money, becoming yet another example of why MAGA stands for “My Ass Got Arrested.” And then on Sunday, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, police responded to a domestic disturbance by apprehending Jacob Blake, a black bystander who tried to break up an argument, and as he was walking to a vehicle, officers were caught on camera grabbing him and then shooting him in the back at close range. Blake’s children witnessed the incident from their car. While this case of police violence, like the George Floyd case, has no direct connection to national politics, like the Floyd case it flies in the face of black people and other groups who have seen the corrupt establishment get away with literal murder, and in the short term the Blake shooting has already sparked riots and fires in Kenosha. And as the RNC set up to make its pitch, we have no idea if this violence will have a similar aftermath to the Floyd video, given that the Blake video makes the George Floyd killing look like a hugfest.
So would The Party of Trump be able to prevail in the face of all these embarrassments and present themselves as the positive alternative to the corrupt establishment, even when they’ve BEEN the corrupt establishment for four years?
NO PROBLEM!
Day One
For a lot of critics, the best speech on Day One, if you’re one of us who think that socialism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, was the presentation of a Cuban whose father first fled fascism in Spain then had to flee communism in Cuba. But his example only contrasted with the point that the Trump Organization’s policy stance against socialism in Latin America clashes with Trump’s own desire not to extend the legal status of Venezuelan refugees.
Then you had the couple who, depending on who you ask, either defended their home from bloody-minded rioters or exacerbated a conflict that didn’t need to happen by playing “I’m a Little Teapot” with firearms. And whatever you may think about the Second Amendment or the alleged threat to “single family” home development, these two demonstrate the real reason why it’s gotten so hard to defend gun rights these days: Because these days, most firearms fans have no trigger discipline.
But for those outside the Church of Jesus Trump Latter-Day Suckers, the funniest speech in a convention that had already become more blooper reel than script was from Trump intimate and former Fox News hostess Kimberly Guilfoyle, who delivered an apocalyptic warning against a Biden victory BY SHOUTING AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE IN ORDER TO PROJECT HER VOICE TO THE END OF THE ROOM SO THAT THE ECHO MADE IT THAT MUCH MORE OBVIOUS SHE WAS SPEAKING TO AN EMPTY HALL. That and her appearance gave the impression of Idina Menzel playing the Bob Geldof character in Pink Floyd The Wall (‘I’ve got some bad news for you, sunshine/Pink isn’t well, he’s, uh, back at the hotel/And they sent us along as a surrogate band/And WE’RE GONNA FIND OUT WHERE YOU FANS REALLY STAAAND’).
Day Two
Now, this all comes from what I saw of the convention from news reports. I didn’t actually see Day One of the RNC because unlike increasing numbers of Americans after the spread of Trump Virus, I have a job.
And given that I watched the DNC (such as I did) via MSNBC, I had thought, what the heck, I’ll go ahead and watch this on Fox News on my day off, given how devoted they are to The Leader. But then I found out from the news coverage that MSNBC and Clinton News Network were covering the RNC uninterrupted but Fox didn’t. And that’s because while The Trump Convention deliberately cut 30 minutes into prime-time programming, Fox didn’t want to take that time away from the Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity shows. Which only goes to show what I’ve already said: Fox News CAN report the news, and it still has a staff of people who are perfectly skilled to do so, but that really isn’t their job.
So I turned on MSDNC that day and one of the first stories before the 5:30 Pacific start was Chris Hayes telling us that a scheduled speaker, “angel mom” Mary Mendoza, was “cancelled” from Tuesday’s speaker lineup after she went on Twitter that day encouraging people to read an anti-Semitic conspiracy text. Too bad. That speech woulda been LIT.
The first major speaker was Jon Ponder, a Las Vegas native who, after being incarcerated for robbery and turning to Jesus, started a ‘Hope For Prisoners’ program. Trump’s testimony for Ponder was of course prominently featured along with an official pardon. And this story is genuinely nice, but it also drives home the idea that the best support government can provide for black people is through the law-enforcement system, with the secondary implication that Republicans finally care about prisoner rights now that so many of them are facing sentences.
Next speaker was Senator Rand Paul. He said “Donald Trump gets things done.” He gave Trump credit for instituting an insurance plan that Paul pushed and has not actually been passed. He said that if you hate war and don’t want to build roads and bridges in Afghanistan instead of building them at home, you should vote for Trump. By the way, we haven’t gotten out of Afghanistan and the Trump Organization is not building roads and bridges at home. And by the way, Fuck You, Rand Paul.
After a couple of little films, they had Larry Kudlow: “Hi. I’m not really an economist, but I play one on TV!” He went along the same line as the previous line as the short film, which is that we had the greatest economy ever, ‘a rising tide that lifted all boats’ and it was only interrupted by the horrible “once-in-a-century” event of coronavirus, which Republicans seem to think is a horrible curse that was cast on Our President by evil witches, Chinese or Democrats (same difference).
It was at this point that MSDNC (unlike CNN) cut in to do a fact check on Kudlow’s piece rather than go to the speech of a Wisconsin business owner. You didn’t see them cut in like this when the DNC was on. But then the DNC was more likely to alternate political speeches with songs from Jennifer Hudson or John Legend or someone whom people actually like.
Speaking of folks whom nobody likes, the Trump Convention had at least two people speaking in favor of anti-abortion measures, which I guess they had to do since they couldn’t actually write an anti-abortion plank into this year’s Platform, since of course there ISN’T one.
Then they had Nick Sandmann from the redcaps-against-Indians standoff at the Lincoln Memorial, who had previously been criticized for just standing in front of an Omaha protestor and smiling. In a taped speech in front of the Memorial, he went into full “victim of the media” mode and of course praised Trump for taking his side, putting his MAGA cap back on. Thus confirming the axiom “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
After a couple more speeches they brought in Tiffany Trump, which is only fair, since the DNC had to have Hunter Biden speak for his dad, so they had to excavate Tiffany from obscurity when she hasn’t really committed any crime other than being the white sheep of the family. And again, one of the points she brought up in passing was criminal justice reform, and I just can’t imagine why that’s become a focus all of a sudden. But the main point, however haphazardly delivered, was that the media and the universities are creating an atmosphere of “groupthink” where “diversity of thought” was discouraged. This at a convention where six of the twelve featured speakers are named Trump and (again) the Committee wasn’t even allowed to create an official agenda.
As events wound towards the second hour, I noticed that MSNBC, unlike CNN, was cutting in for commercials, and then their standard talking-head commentary, and I found myself wondering if it was worth it to break my pledge to boycott CNN to see a bunch of people talk about “freedom” while anxiously staring at the camera like hostages in an al-Qaeda video.
The other thing I noticed was that how many people in this “Republican” convention gave testimonials thanking Donald Trump personally, like the one who mentioned how Trump brought about the financial support for her business after coronavirus as though the Republican Senate had nothing to do with it.
Eric Trump said that the country is in a fight for freedom right now, “and it is a fight only my father can win.”
Just before the Eric speech they had a straight-up propaganda moment with Trump making an appearance supervising a citizenship oath ceremony being held by (supposedly official) Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. Several commentators, for example on Fivethirtyeight, said that Wolf’s appearance in the Convention film was a violation of the Hatch Act.
Speaking of violating the Hatch Act, you had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking from Jerusalem, except that he didn’t mention he is the Secretary of State, because even though he was on official business abroad at government expense and making a symbolic appearance at a city sacred to Zionists and Evangelicals in order to endorse Trump, he couldn’t say he was speaking as “Secretary of State” because apparently that would be violating the Hatch Act. As if they really cared.
And finally they cut to the Rose Garden, which the First Lady had recently eviscerated apparently to create more room for her Tuesday speech. This speech made her no less than the third person named Trump who was not Donald Trump to speak Tuesday. The live crowd – small and mostly unmasked as it was – brought the speech an energy that hadn’t been present to that point. But like the other Trump relatives, Melania gave the same stiff “read the surrender document or your children will be shot” smile and indirect stare as she went over the same litany as the night’s other speakers.
Melania Trump’s speech – as in, her manner of speaking – brings to mind a joke I heard Sofia Vergara tell about how she is the only Hispanic immigrant she knows whose accent got worse the longer she stayed in America. Which only makes me think I would be much happier if Sofia Vergara was the First Lady for President Joe Mangianello. Now HE’s cool.
Oh, and on Tuesday it was announced that the bullets that hit Jacob Blake in the back pierced his spinal column and he will most likely never walk again.
Day Three
Between the end of the Tuesday RNC and the beginning of Wednesday’s festivities the situation over Jacob Blake escalated as an out-of-state actor appeared to support the Kenosha police and then shot three people in a melee, killing two. He was eventually apprehended but not during the point that he was caught on camera actually approaching police.
In protest, the Milwaukee Bucks team decided to walk out of their scheduled NBA playoff game, which led to the entire league postponing the playoff schedule.
Now, just as I had better things to do on Monday, I had game night on Wednesday, so I didn’t actually see Day Three of the RNC. Mike Pence was the featured speaker, so I’m not sure who saw it, or who remembers it if they did.
Plus which, as if 2020 couldn’t be 2020 enough, there’s a DOUBLE hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that hit landfall in Louisiana on Wednesday night (after midnight Thursday morning) so now Trump has his own Katrina to deal with. Oh, that’s right, two. So that’s pretty much what the news was focused on by the time I got home.
It’s almost AS IF there are more important things in the world than the ruling party of our government fluffing King Donnie, The First of His Name.
But back to the Mike Pence speech: The TrumpNC continued its week-long policy of using its control of government institutions as an implied endorsement of Our President over the evil, corrupt, senile sexual harasser who used his position to get his kid a cushy job. You know, the one who ISN’T Donald Trump. In Wednesday’s case, it was Vice President Pence making his keynote speech inside the grounds of Fort McHenry. This, like the Melania Rose Garden speech, had it’s own (mostly unmasked and undistanced) audience, and it was duller than Lawrence Welk conducting Nixon in China. It was telling that the big standing ovation line was when Pence only acknowledged the Kenosha fiasco by saying “the violence must stop – whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha… we will have law and order on the streets of America” and even the standing ovation seemed deeply subdued. And before that, of course Pence went along with the going theme that for three years Trump was the greatest president since Jesus Himself: “And then, the coronavirus struck from China.”
Several times in this convention, Republicans have referred to China and their plots against the country, and how the Democrats failed to bring them up. On Tuesday, Pam Bondi invoked Hunter Biden’s work for a corrupt company in Ukraine. You know one country they haven’t brought up? Russia.
Gilbert said, “Oh, that reminds me of a joke.”
The political guy said, “What’s the joke?”
“What’s three inches long and covered in Cheeto dust?”
“I don’t know.”
“Vladimir Putin’s dick.”
Day Four
This is where it became clear that the “strategy” to present Trump every day of the convention, once again flouting the conventional path where the candidate is only brought out at the end, might temporarily feed Trump’s bottomless need for praise and attention, but it undermined the dramatic buildup. I mean, if you were given a four-course dinner and the appetizer was Fried Dogshit and the salad was Dogshit Salad with Urine Vinagarette Dressing, you’re not that enthused for Dogshit Parmagiana and Scallopini in Tomato Sauce.
Not only that, it’s been clear for months (and from the previous two keynote speeches, in which Trump appeared in person) that Trump desperately craves to go back to the good old days when he was in front of a podium, with thousands of people surrounding him and eating up everything he had to say, and all this radical-Left crap like “life” and “reality” just keeps getting in the way.
But Thursday they wrapped up with some of the few people in the Republican Party who (now that Paul Ryan has retired) had some standing independent of Trump. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the few Republicans who practiced social distancing by taping his speech back home in Kentucky. And even then, while he actually has some say in how things are run, McConnell just did the same thing that the other speakers did, praise Donald Trump while bagging on the Democrats, saying things like “they even want to control how many hamburgers you can eat.” Well. I’m sure that would be a losing topic for Democrats if they wanted to make that part of their platform, which is why they didn’t.
During his extremely loud speech, UFC head Dana White said that “President Trump realized that one of the best ways of restoring the American people’s sense of normalcy was to restore our entertainment options.” Which explains not only why White is freaking out from a pocketbook standpoint but why Trumpniks are so freaked by the NBA boycott, because more and more people are refusing to acknowledge this regime as normal. But then White also said “(Trump) is one of the most loyal men I’ve ever met”, so that skews his credibility right there.
A little later they had Ben Carson come out and say a few good things about American character, but then he undermined it by saying that Trump kept every promise he’s made.
After that they had America’s Mayor Rudy Guiliani out to attack the Democrats who “allow” crime and go against Law & Order. Here’s the thing, his record as New York Mayor, in comparison to “progressive Democrat mayors” is probably the best advertisement for the law and order approach, even if the emphasis of “stop and frisk” is exactly why that approach isn’t popular anymore. It’s just that Rudy’s own credibility is undermined by his increasingly wacky behavior, such as today’s speech, which was even more Grandpa Simpson in its delivery than the usual Trump speech. Not to mention that Rudy’s own definition of law and order seems to be elastic.
Senator Tom Cotton was one of the few people who made a point by point comparison of Trump and Biden on substance, it’s just that the “substance” was meaningless. For example, Cotton said Trump built up the military by creating the Space Force. Which does WHAT, exactly? Hand out parking tickets to Martians? This was apparently so much for the MSDNC team that they felt obliged to do a fact check after the speech, pointing out for instance that rather than eliminating terrorists, Trump gave support to Turkish strongman Erdogan to drive out Kurdish strongholds in Syria that were helping us fight Islamic State.
Then they had a very effective, Evangelical-style speech from Alice Johnson, another former inmate pardoned by Trump (at the urging of the West-Kardashian family) about how she became an ordained minister in prison and was “freed in body” by the president but “freed in mind by the Almighty God.”
Even Rachel Maddow thought she was good.
Then in the 7/10 o’clock hour they did the main show, led by opening act Ivanka Trump and her truly wonderful, silky hair. It was pretty easy to notice given how much it blew in the wind outside the White House lawn, which was a bad omen for her Dad’s combover. Given that at least 85 percent of the speaking up to this point was vapid praise for Donald, and that’s what Ivanka specializes in, it’s no surprise that that was much of her speech, although I liked the line “he is so unapologetic about his beliefs that he has forced me and countless other Americans to take a hard look at ourselves and ask what we stand for.” Well, true enough. Then she said “America doesn’t need another empty vessel who will do whatever the fringe on his party demands.” Whatever you say, Tucker Carlson.
And with that, Ivanka introduced Donald and Melania, who walked at a reasonable pace down the stairs. Trump approached the podium with an odd smile that reflected either overwhelming emotion or just constipation. He saw Melania off after holding her hand for some time and then began his speech.
After first acknowledging the people in the path of Hurricane Laura, and Mike Pence (which implies that Pence is still his running mate), Trump formally accepted the party’s nomination, saying it was willing to accept Democrats and independents who believe in America’s greatness, which is certainly dreaming big. He once again claimed that the country was struck by an “invisible enemy” and was developing life-saving therapies, even if it wasn’t doing the common safety measures that kept the death toll down in other countries. He then went into the tack that the future of America as a country is at stake in this election, which is the one area where I’m sure Democrats would agree with him. Trump said that “the Democrat Party” was bent on tearing down our country, whereas “we give our faith to Almighty God.” With his hairline patriotically flapping in the breeze, Trump shoved the nitrous oxide in the culture war tank and presented himself as a selfless martyr who sacrificed for the country as opposed to career politicians like Biden.
He got lots of applause for nominating two conservative Supreme Court Justices. He got almost as much applause for saying “I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President” from a crowd that had slightly more black people than people wearing masks. He got applause for moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. From Ivanka, Jared and maybe five other people around them. Trump bragged about himself like a rap star while claiming that Joe Biden was for every rotten thing that’s happened to this country up to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby. He said that when the China Virus ™ hit we launched the largest national mobilization since World War II against it, which was one of the most obvious lies in the series. I mean, contrary to liberal critics, Trump DID acknowledge the virus Thursday, it’s just that everything he said was misread statistics and bullshit. It’s really amazing how much time he did spend on it with this speech, so it’s that much more amazing how much bullshit there was. I mean, the deeper he got into the speech, the more it had to be fact-checked.
Trump self-righteously pandered to the crowd of fetus fetishists about how Democrats do not protect unborn life while being responsible for more deaths outside the womb than any other president. He said “Biden is a Trojan Horse for socialism”, years after declaring that the white nationalists at Charlottesville were “very fine people”. He praised the police and said “we must never allow mob rule” which presumably wasn’t a reference to that kid with the AR-15 in Kenosha. He said that “the far left” wants to make you say the things you know aren’t true, which is presumably why so many more Republicans spoke at the Democratic convention than the other way around.
With his stance becoming more of a lazy slump as the speech wore on, Trump continued to brag and promise and slander. He talked about Americans of the past and their Bibles and covered wagons and how they did things with style, and confidence and flair, and all the other things Trump doesn’t have. And he said “I am very, very proud to be the nominee of the Republican Party.” And that was it. I think. He might still be talking.
In any event the cameras cut away to a beautiful fireworks display around the Washington Monument, rudely interrupted by giant glittery explosions spelling “TRUMP” and “2020” which was about the most on-point moment of the whole event.
….
And the fundraiser blinked his eyes – about twenty times – and asked Gilbert, “So… what are you calling this political party?”
“THE ARISTOCRATS!!!”