Zack Beauchamp: ‘The R.N.C. Weaponized Exhaustion’

From Vox:

The most consistent theme of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention wasn’t that Joe Biden was a puppet for radicals. It wasn’t even that rioters and looters are coming to your home and only Trump can protect you from the radical left.

The clear theme of the RNC was a flagrant and brutal disregard for the truth.

The first night of the RNC featured more false and misleading claims than all four nights of the DNC put together, according to a CNN fact-check. The second night starred an anti-abortion activist whose tale about the horrors of Planned Parenthood had been exposed as a fraud more than 10 years ago. On the third night, Vice President Mike Pence suggested that the murder of a police officer by a far-right extremist was a crime committed by left-wing rioters. It was all capped off by President Trump’s Thursday night speech, a farrago of falsehoods that even veteran Trump fact-checkers found stunning.

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Ezra Klein: ‘A loyalty test for the GOP, a reality test for the country’

Facebook photo of White House advisor Kimberly Guilfoyle speaking at the 2020 Republican National Convention

From Vox:

What is there to say upon hearing Trump described [at the 2020 Republican National Convention] as “the bodyguard of Western civilization”? It’s not an argument so much as a loyalty oath, an offering cut from the speaker’s dignity and burnt for the pleasure of the Dear Leader himself. But the outrageousness is the point. Protest and you’re triggered — just another oversensitive lib who can’t take a joke. Ignore it and you’re complicit. To care is to lose.

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Nicolle Wallace: Trump Hasn’t Yet Secured His Base

Jonathan Chait: ‘GOP Will Not Write a 2020 Platform, Pledges Undying Trump Support Instead’

From New York magazine:

Modern presidential conventions are inherently propagandistic affairs, usually devoted to a mix of glitzy patches for the presidential nominee, the vice-president, and the party as a whole. The 2020 Republican National Convention has altered the traditional emphasis, which is now devoted almost entirely to glorifying its presidential nominee....

And perhaps most remarkably of all, the party has announced it will forego a platform altogether. In lieu of a document attempting to define the party’s beliefs and priorities, the RNC simply states that it agrees with everything Trump has done and will do....

The official excuse is that the coronavirus has made it impossible for the party to get together and write a platform: “The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts.” Yet somehow the Democrats managed to come up with a platform without killing anybody.


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Seth Meyers: ‘Trump’s Plan to Sabotage the Post Office Before the Election’

Jonathan Chait: ‘U.S. Intelligence Says Republicans Are Working with Russia to Re-elect Trump’

Image from BosGuy.com

From New York magazine:

The Russians have given Republicans stolen tapes of secret conversations [Joe] Biden held with Ukrainians during his tenure as vice-president, and pro-Trump media outlets have hyped up the material, but nothing they have is inconsistent with the narrative that mainstream news organizations found. Biden was working to clean up Ukraine. 

Senate Republicans tried to be cagey about their activities. After pro-Russian Ukrainians said they’d passed materials on to Republican officials, a [Ron] Johnson staffer told NBC News in July that it was “‘false’ the committee has received any ‘oppo,’ or opposition research, without responding directly to whether that covers any materials from foreign sources.”

The Washington Post reported that Homeland Security Committee chairman Ron Johnson received secret documents from Ukrainians. And former [Rudolph] Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has confessed to putting Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and perhaps Trump’s most energetic defender on all things Russia, in touch with one of the Ukrainians releasing documents in the United States.

There is hardly any secret to what they’re up to. Johnson says he plans to release his report on Biden in September. It hardly matters if the information Russia gives him actually substantiates his allegations, or even whether it is authentic. The obvious plan is to splash some headlines into news screens in the heat of the campaign that seem to connect Biden to some kind of wrongdoing.

In reality, it is not a scandal about Biden at all. It’s a scandal about Republican co-operation with a Russian propaganda campaign.

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Amanda Marcotte: ‘Trump’s base loved that he was a liar and a cheat — but now it’s coming back to bite them’

Trump with Axios National Political Correspondent Jonathan Swan

 From Salon:


[I]t’s not so much that Trump thought he would directly profit from people dying. It was more that he convinced himself that any measures taken to mitigate the pandemic — whether that meant a rigorous lockdown, mask mandates or a serious nationwide testing regimen — would hurt his chances of re-election, and he’d much rather see people die in large numbers than let that happen. 

But perhaps this is splitting hairs: However you slice it, millions of people have gotten sick and more than 155,000 are dead because Trump thought he could cheat on the coronavirus numbers the same way he cheated on his taxes, cheated his customers, cheated charities and cheated the so-called students at his so-called university. His voters elected him because they admired his sleaziness, and thought they would benefit from his cheating ways. But now they’re just as likely to get sick or die as the liberals they were so eager to enrage and humiliate.

We can’t expect some mass exodus back to reality among Trump supporters, of course. It’s very common for people who have been defrauded to refuse to admit it, and to defend the con man who targeted them, rather than admit that they were wrong in the first place. This is visible in cults like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, where members may be willing to die before conceding they should never have followed their cult leader. Trump’s approval rating remains stuck at a stubborn 40%, so now we know: That’s the proportion of Americans who would rather risk death from a pandemic than admit that maybe the liberals were right all along. 


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Paul Rosenberg: ‘On the de-Trumpification of America: It definitely won’t be easy, but it must be done’

From Salon:

Despite the deep hole he’s in, Donald Trump could still win re-election, as we are constantly reminded. If he loses, some observers warn, there could be considerable trouble, even violent resistance. But perhaps the biggest problem facing us in the medium-to-long term is what happens if Trump loses. In particular, what do we do to undo Trumpism? Not just to counter the destruction Trump has wrought, but the decades-long preconditions that made his election possible, if not almost inevitable.
 
This question was raised recently by Foreign Policy in Focus editor John Feffer....  Feffer’s recent column cited several historical signposts to illuminate the challenge we face — the end of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All those efforts to rebuild were “flawed in various ways,” he wrote — the first and last most dramatically. But learning from them “might help us avoid repeating the mistakes of history.”

The thrust of Feffer’s argument is twofold: First, that Trump is backed by an amalgam of forces, including “the bulk of conservative civil society,” and even if he's defeated, Trumpism — the particular articulation he's given to those forces — will survive the election and continue to be an existential threat. It “could succeed in finishing what Trump started — disuniting the country and destroying the democratic experiment — unless, that is, the United States were to undergo a thorough de-Trumpification.” In fact, he notes that “a post-election insurrection is not out of the question.”

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