For three days, Donald Trump’s surrogates have described him as a kind-hearted visionary who eschews identity politics, is a great friend to the most marginalized among us, who has faced the pandemic and other crises facing the nation head on, and who is America’s last backstop against the deprivation and anarchy his opponents, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, would surely bring. That description of Trump—shady real estate developer-turned huckster-turned reality television host-turned unlikely president—was already unrecognizable to anyone who’s seen him at any point in his decades in the public eye. It’s the exact opposite of those qualities, after all, with which he proudly made his name—in business, entertainment, and politics.
But it wasn’t just the entirety of Trump’s well-documented public life that undercut these claims to his humility, caring, and largess—it was the speech he gave at the very convention at which his allies attempted to whitewash him. Speaking outside the White House Thursday, Trump outlined a stunningly dystopian vision of America: “Everything we have achieved,” Trump said, “is now in danger.”
“This election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life,” Trump continued, in a grotesque and partly-riffed speech, “or whether we will allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”
It was an odd, droning address, delivered through dripping sweat and filled with the idiosyncratic Trumpisms that leave one scratching their heads. What, precisely, does it mean to “profoundly accept” a nomination for president, as Trump said he would? Also, though, nothing Trump had to say was particularly different from what he’s said a thousand times on his Twitter feed, in press scrums as he leaves the White House for weekend stays at his golf resorts, in the briefings at which he’s supposed to be discussing the raging coronavirus pandemic, and in his embarrassing call-in interviews with fawning Fox News hosts. That, of course, is part of the problem. We’ve already heard everything he has to say, we’ve already seen everything he can do, and it bears little to no resemblance to how his speakers this week characterized it.
The coronavirus crisis is not, as Larry Kudlow suggested on the convention’s second night, in the rearview. The pre-pandemic economy was not solely Trump’s doing—he inherited the post-recession growth from Barack Obama—and it is no longer a real selling point with double-digit unemployment. And the racial unrest engulfing American cities—Trump has neither been open to the justified cries for justice of protesters, nor has he brought the “law and order” he says will come in his second term. And those are just the crises that have been consuming America for months. Little was said, by the president or his surrogates, about the natural disasters currently hammering the country, let alone the global emergency experts say exacerbated them and that he’s turned his back on: climate change. Instead, Trump boasted about increasing drilling and withdrawing from the Climate climate accord.
Such national and international challenges have not been seriously addressed by Trump, but erased from the record. So, too, have they been erased by speakers from Ivanka Trump to Ben Carson to an amped up UFC President Dana White. In doing so, they’ve had to create an alternate reality. In this reality, he is, as Trump aide Dan Scavino tried to convince Americans, “a kind and decent man,” displaying “kindness to everyone he meets.” His opponents, in this upside-down world, are afflicted with the same issues he is: Biden, according to a wild Rudy Giuliani, has “changed his principles so often he no longer has principles.” And the biggest issues facing Americans are not the pandemic and the economic turmoil and the national unrest: the Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a pre-recorded message, want to tell you “how many hamburgers you can eat.”