The latest chaos at the convention reveals Trump as a miserable failure

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

August 28, 2020 at 12:03 a.m. GMT+9

Now that we’ve endured three nights of self-pitying grievance, openly advertised corruption, uncontrollable lying and cultish deification of President Trump, it’s time to focus on another aspect of the GOP convention: The chaotic and wildly implausible nature of what Republicans are asking Americans to believe about their country right now.

The convention’s big-picture depiction of the state of the nation isn’t just utterly divorced from reality in countless ways. It also asks viewers to perform a series of spectacular mental gymnastics that are useful to examine, because they reflect the excruciating task this convention set for itself.

Put simply, the convention’s big challenge is to depict Trump as a great success, when in fact, he’s been a miserable failure. Just about all of the follies and falsehoods we’re seeing flow from that basic disconnect.

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All this was driven home by Vice President Pence’s smarmy string of lies on Wednesday night, which hailed Trump’s stupendous vanquishing of the coronavirus and his spectacular economy, while lamenting our slide into anarchy at the hands of the “radical left.”

That dual messaging was echoed by speaker after speaker, including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who portrayed Trump as both a racial healer and an economic success, while depicting the country as sliding into full-scale civil collapse.

So let’s take stock of what this convention is asking you to believe about your country.

The story the convention is telling

On the one hand, the convention is telling you that in one sense everything is right and great in America right now. Trump’s stupendous leadership has utterly mastered the pandemic, and the economic calamity that his failures have unleashed simply doesn’t exist.

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On the other, the convention is telling you that America is tipping into total civil breakdown. The story offered here is not the truth, which is that large-scale protests have been mostly peaceful and grounded in legitimate grievances about the searingly real problem of deadly, racist police brutality, and have been marred by some unacceptable violence that can and should be brought under control.

Instead, the story is that the scenes of unrest reveal a deep sickness in the form of the aforementioned “radical left,” which is ravaging the country and threatening our very way of life. That’s absurd, but here it is actually true that we’re living through the most serious civil unrest in a half-century.

In one sense, this isn’t a direct contradiction. The argument is that on one front (the coronavirus and the economy) everything is stupendously terrific, and on another (the protests) we’re sliding into ruin.

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But this nonetheless requires viewers to make some truly extraordinary leaps.

On the first front, Americans are being asked to pretend none of their everyday experiences and perceptions of what’s all around them exist at all — while crediting Trump’s spectacular leadership for bringing about a substituted (but nonexistent) miraculous state of affairs.

On the other front, Americans are being asked to stare squarely at the scenes of unrest they are seeing on their televisions — and then to exaggerate them into something grotesquely absurd, while also telling themselves Trump bears zero responsibility for any of it, even though it’s unfolding on his watch.

Mike Pence’s deceptions

Take Pence’s speech. He actually had the gall to tell us this about coronavirus:

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President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties. We partnered with private industry to reinvent testing and produce supplies that were distributed to hospitals around the land.

This is the direct opposite of the truth. Trump squandered weeks and weeks early on, a key reason the virus rampaged out of control here. Trump utterly failed to marshal the full resources of the government. Trump relentlessly attacked governors who were pleading for help and often didn’t give it to them. Thanks in part to all these failures, nearly 180,000 are dead and we’re still averaging nearly 1,000 deaths a day.

Pence also told us this about the economy:

We are opening up America again. Because of the strong foundation that President Trump poured in our first years, we have already gained back 9.3 million jobs in the last three months alone.

Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic simply disappears as a cause of the economic crisis. The economic crisis itself is largely reduced to only a massive jobs gain, never mind that we’re still 13 million jobs in the hole. Pence treats the current economy as largely a continuation of the pre-covid-19 one.

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What’s also striking is the combination of this straight up gaslighting with the lack of any real plan to contain the virus going forward, given that conventions should be about where the nominee will take the country:

Meanwhile, on the protests and the violence, Pence and many others portrayed Joe Biden as a radical leftist. But that was based on numerous lies — that Biden would defund police (nope), that he supports open borders (nope) and that he won’t condemn violence (nope).

On top of that, Pence didn’t level with the country about the actual cause of some of the violence. Incredibly, Pence lamented an officer “killed during riots in Oakland, California,” without noting that the man charged with that killing is a member of the extremist race-war-seeking “boogalo boys."

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Even more absurdly still, Trump is in power right now. The claim is literally that if you think America is a smoldering hellscape at this moment, reelect the guy who is presiding over it, because only he is strong enough to overcome it.

But Trump actually has a record on this front, too, and it’s also a record of failure. The convention asks us to believe Trump’s Bible-photo-op celebration of the violent clearing away of protesters and his threat to send troops into major cities (which his own military officials repudiated); his use of law enforcement in Portland, Ore. (which local officials said exacerbated matters); and his ceaseless racial incitement are playing no role at all in stoking unrest. You can’t point to a single thing he’s done to make things better.

The only consistency to all this runs as follows. In neither case (whether it’s the worst public health and economic crises in modern times, or the worst civil unrest since the 1970s) does Trump bear a shred of responsibility for any of it. In reality, as the chaotic and convoluted nature of the GOP festivities confirms, Trump is a miserable failure on both fronts.