Trump's speech was nasty, brutish and interminable

[Zorro]

Opinion by Michael Gerson

There is much that can be said about President Trump’s intemperate, interminable convention speech. It combined the generous, unifying spirit of an average Trump campaign rally with the concision and amusement value of a typical State of the Union address. After a week of speeches from Republicans attempting to humanize their nominee, Trump demonstrated that it is possible to be brutish and boring at the same time.

The speech was ripe with rhetorical tensions. Trump called for “a new spirit of unity that can only be realized through love for our great country.” So, Americans can be united — but only if they accept Trump’s version of American nationalism. The president is, in essence, urging national unity against people who don’t accept his version of unity. The point is subtle to the point of absurdity.

In another bold challenge to coherence, Trump said that “we have ended the rule of the failed political class” while depicting a country overrun by “illegal aliens,” political correctness, the “China virus,” violent criminals and godlessness. Trump’s incumbency requires a record of sterling achievement; his insurgent populism demands a dystopia to overthrow. Trump’s America must remedy the horrible ills of .?.?. Trump’s America.

I could pick at loose threads of logic all day. But Trump’s speech Thursday should be ultimately judged by its treatment of the two largest issues of our time. How did Trump respond to the covid-19 pandemic that has thrown our country into economic crisis and cost at least 178,000 lives? And how did he deal with deep divisions of region, race and ideology that paralyze our politics and threaten our union?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-speech-was-nasty-brutish-and-interminable/2020/08/28/d3a0ff96-e947-11ea-97e0-94d2e46e759b_story.html

[BlueWavePsych]

1. The RNC weaponized exhaustion

The sheer volume of lies and illegal behavior from Trump and the Republicans is what allowed them to get away with it.

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.

“Basically everything Trump says about Biden’s proposals is false,” the Washington Post’s Philip Bump writes. In a tour-de-force segment, CNN’s Daniel Dale spent three minutes debunking the speech at a rapid clip — and still didn’t cover all the lies:


https://www.vox.com/2020/8/28/21405144/trump-rnc-speech-fact-check-lies-hatch-act

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Heh. NIce title.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/nasty-brutish-and-short.html

[reACTIONary]

3. Props for the title....

... solitary and poor, also.