Susan Glasser
"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....
... 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."....
.... 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 Conventionmore than perished on 9/11and 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."...
...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....
...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
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."
The Malign Fantasy of Donald Trump's Convention | The New Yorker
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