Last Night's Festival Of Deception And Lies

On Thursday night Trump spoke for an hour, closing out his 2020 nominating convention. The media rushed to count the lies and put them all into context. Glenn Kessler's fact-checking team at the Washington Post dubbed his speech "a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history" and listed 32 lies-- 25 from Señor Trumpanzee himself and 7 from his handpicked Thursday speakers. You're welcome to read them all here.

The Big Liar Ends The RNC With Big Lies About Himself And Biden was how Ed Kilgore introduced the topic for New York Magazine reader. He wrote that the "entire convention, reflected perfectly in Trump’s own acceptance speech, accepted the challenge of building up the incumbent and tearing down his opponent with big, audacious lies, repeated so monotonously as to seem less remarkable. And the Big Liar himself, described incredibly as an inveterate truth-teller by his wife on the second night of the convention, put an exclamation report on every lie. How many times did we hear that prior to the China Virus Trump had compiled the most stunning record of accomplishment of any president, who kept absolutely every promise he made in 2016? This is the president who, with partisan control of both Houses of Congress, could boast just one significant legislative victory in his first two years, a reactionary tax cut package that helped buy Republican loyalty. After his party lost the House, the Trump legislative agenda basically died with the exception of occasional deals to end or avoid government shutdowns he had triggered or brought near. We are still waiting on his health-care plan and his infrastructure plan...How often were we assured of Trump’s deep and abiding compassion for the downtrodden, those suffering from injustice and poverty and poor health? This is the president with a lifelong habit of sneering at hurting and vulnerable people as 'losers,' who struggled almost visibly during his daily coronavirus briefings to treat the pandemic as anything other than an annoyance that threatened his reelection."

For people who view truth-telling as a matter of bedrock values, it was most remarkable how often we heard of Donald Trump as a man of deep religious convictions, surrounded by the most sectarian of conservative Christians. This is the president who once confessed he had never done anything that require divine forgiveness, and who needs a coterie of religious advisors to keep him from laughable indications of his scriptural ignorance and spiritual poverty.

So often had his record been lied about that by the time Trump rose to praise himself, such amazing statements as this didn’t even seem out of the ordinary:

I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president.

More than Ulysses Grant, who fought for Reconstruction against the men honored in neo-Confederate monuments that Trump has defended? More than FDR, whose New Deal began chipping away at Black poverty? More than Eisenhower, who forced the desegregation of schools with the deployment of federal troops? More than LBJ, who pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the legacy Trump’s Supreme Court appointees are working to undermine? Trump’s arrogance is unsurprising, but that his allies let him say this in public is simply terrifying.

The Big Lies about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, however, match those about his own record as exercises in chutzpah. Perhaps Trump can be forgiven for attributing trade agreements, globalization policies, immigration legislation, and overseas adventures mostly championed by and entirely supported by members of his own party to Biden; Trump has attacked Republicans for them as well. But it probably took three days of speaker after speaker lying through their teeth in saying that Biden and all Democrats favor “defunding the police” for Trump to get away with this assertion:

Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will Defund Police Departments all across America. They will pass federal legislation to reduce law enforcement nationwide. They will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon. No one will be safe in Biden’s America.

And it got worse:

Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism. If Joe Biden doesn’t have the strength to stand up to wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders and his fellow radicals, then how is he ever going to stand up FOR you?

...If the left gains power, they will demolish the suburbs, confiscate your guns, and appoint justices who will wipe away your Second Amendment and other Constitutional freedoms.

That is what is known as a pack of lies, uttered in such close succession that it’s tough to process them all. Bernie Sanders is not a “Marxist.” The suburbs are rapidly becoming a Democratic base, not places they want to demolish. Nobody in the Democratic Party has talked about “confiscating” guns, or even regulating them unless they are assault weapons. And all the attacks on Biden and Democrats for allegedly defending late-term abortions (only in very limited cases where there is a medically established threat to the woman’s health) might be fairer if Trump and nearly all Republicans didn’t support outlawing all abortions from the moment of conception.

Perhaps the biggest lie of all was the twinned assertion that Biden is a prophet of darkness and division, compared to a president who embodies national unity and absolutely owns patriotism (as illustrated, presumably, by the cavalier way in which he appropriated the White House as a campaign staging area, complete with giant Trump-Pence signs). As Mike Pence boldly claimed in his gesture of maximum loyalty on night three of the RNC, Trump’s enemies are fundamentally un-American, while the 45th president loves real Americans. Yet at the same time, Trump is running against the “anarchy” in “Democrat-run” cities, for which her is somehow entirely blameless, and against which he darkly threatens to rain down fire.

The question remains: will it work? It seems unlikely. As noted above, very nearly a majority of voters have probably already decided to vote against Trump, and it’s unlikely many of them tuned into a convention so clearly tailored to MAGA tastes. Trump is unlikely to make it until November 3 living up to the image on Mount Rushmore this convention projected for him, and Biden isn’t going to live down to the bizarre caricature of him as a sort of communist fellow traveler who hates his country. Most of all, the biggest lodestone on Trump’s reelection campaign, his mismanagement of COVID-19, isn’t going to miraculously go away, even if his acceptance speech doesn’t turn out to be a super-spreader event.

Perhaps through his impressive willingness to lie and inspire others to lie, Trump can put himself into a sufficiently competitive position to lose the popular vote but either squeak out another improbable electoral college majority, or more likely, to muddy the waters on Election Night and hope through chicanery and perhaps a Supreme Court ruling he can turn defeat into victory before January. It’s the hand he has dealt himself, and if all else fails, he has enjoyed at least one more egregious White House display of the power he craves and the glory he believes he deserves.

CNN's review: "Taken in total, the speech felt like a mash-up of a State of the Union address and an opposition research dump. And one that you'd seen and heard before."

Politico: "It wasn’t a terribly effective address. The speech lacked structure and thematic discipline. The president swerved between topics, some of which felt beneath the occasion, and appeared so drained by the marathon effort that he failed to punch through what should have been the most impactful moments. ('Really needed to be edited down and reorganized. A lot of stuff that could've been left on the cutting room floor diluted the powerful parts,' tweeted Scott Jennings, the conservative CNN commentator and Trump supporter.)... This hodgepodge of oratory was wrapped around a warning to America-- that Joe Biden, 'a Trojan horse for socialism,' would destroy this country as we know it... [D]espite the statements and overstatements, Trump’s speech was most notable for what it lacked. Call it humility. Or self awareness. Or introspection. What the president failed to do Thursday is what he's refused to do throughout his presidency: acknowledge the thing that makes so many people dislike him."