Falsehoods fly as Trump headlines final night of the GOP convention
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The last night of the Republican convention featured words from President Trump's closest allies, and an acceptance speech from the president himself. (Monica Akhtar, Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
Opinion by
Greg Sargent
Columnist
August 28, 2020 at 11:04 p.m. GMT+9
When Donald Trump accepted the presidential nomination from the Republican Party in 2016, he declared to the nation: “I alone can fix it.”
Four years later, as he accepted the nomination for a second term on Thursday night, he delivered a speech that in effect told the nation: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Trump really did utter that latter quote in March, of course, while evading any responsibility for what turned out to be only one of many disastrous failures on coronavirus. But Trump’s speech is the moment that converted this quote into doctrine. It should convince us to treat “I don’t take responsibility at all” as an unmistakable declaration of what to expect from a second term.
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Trump’s speech contained countless big lies and distortions. Some portrayed Joe Biden as radical and destructive: Trump falsely suggested Biden would open the borders and defund the police, and absurdly claimed his “socialist agenda” would “destroy” the “American way of life.”
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Other lies and distortions whitewashed Trump’s record: He falsely claimed he would protect preexisting conditions, even though he has tried to destroy the Affordable Care Act and continues to do so. He absurdly exaggerated his toughness on China and his revamping of trade deals.
But Trump’s biggest deception of all concerns what he didn’t say and what he didn’t acknowledge. In his telling, the depths of the current coronavirus crisis and the economic disaster it has unleashed simply don’t exist at all.
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Trump’s acknowledgment of the existence of the virus essentially treated his handling of it as uniformly a success story, one in which it has largely been defeated. This began with a concerted effort to disappear all the ways his failures led to the current moment:
Trump vastly inflated our testing, while claiming he marshaled a massive “national mobilization” via the Defense Production Act. This memory-holes the fact that he didn’t utilize the DPA to even remotely the degree needed and didn’t come anywhere near marshaling any such mobilization.
Trump again hailed his travel restrictions on China. This memory-holes the fact that his depraved dithering over many weeks allowed the virus to rampage wildly out of control here after that ban.
Trump absurdly vowed to hold China accountable for the coronavirus. This memory-holes the fact that early on he spent weeks propping up China’s claim of control over it to sustain his sociopathic lie that we didn’t have to worry about it here, which also let it rampage.
This magical act continued with an extraordinarily deceptive depiction of the present:
Trump falsely claimed the United States the lowest fatality rate of any major country. Even as we’ve seen nearly 180,000 deaths and we continue to see approximately 1,000 daily deaths, Trump’s reference to ongoing bereavement was limited. And you don’t get any empathy points if you’re lying in our faces.
Trump hailed “over 9 million jobs” gained in the last three months, which insultingly memory-holes that over 22 million jobs were lost and we’re still 13 million jobs down. As Paul Krugman details, the current spread unleashed by Trump-urged reopenings has produced another economic pullback.
Trump hailed his backing of previous economic rescue packages for getting the economy to roar back (it isn’t). This memory-holes the fact that help for small businesses and the unemployed is in limbo because he won’t agree to another generous package, a potential disaster for millions.
Trump essentially tore an enormous hole out of the reality that we all experience every day and have experienced for many months, and didn’t even acknowledge the existence of the hole itself. Obviously this rendering also memory-holes his role in creating the reality that he tried to expunge.
In so doing, Trump and all those in the audience nodding along robotically with his wholesale rewriting of the last six months basically doctrinized his “I don’t take responsibility at all" declaration.
This matters for what’s next
But this is about much more than accurately accounting for how we got here, because Trump’s no-responsibility doctrine also taints his promises going forward. Trump also vowed a vaccine by the end of the year, but scientists inside and outside the government have already warned that this process is being thoroughly politicized to boost Trump’s reelection.
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And Trump piously pretended to care about “science” in reopening schools. But Trump already politicized this process: He relentlessly bashed the idea of showing caution (to recreate the illusion of normalcy on his reelection schedule), and the White House edited reopening guidelines to downplay risks.
It will be extraordinarily important to get things like the vaccine roll-out and school reopenings right next year. Trump has already shown he subverts judicious treatment of such incredibly consequential matters to his own perceived interests. Why would this ever change?
The journey of the Trump presidency has taken us from the false promise of “I alone can fix it” to the reality of “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Trump didn’t “fix it.” He smashed just about everything he touched.
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That Trump contemptuously assumes he can obliterate our own experiences with his magical lies; that he pathologically refuses to acknowledge the depths of what we’ve all been through; that he will never, ever show us the basic respect of taking a shred of responsibility for his own role in creating these national travails; that he will always see the presidency as a device for personal enrichment and ego gratification — all of this is terrible to contemplate.
Fortunately, we have recourse. And the parade of deceptions and lies he just insulted the nation with should only make us more resolved to avail ourselves of it.
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