On its third night, the Republican National Convention served up two straight hours of nearly identical direct camera addresses, all before a cement wall festooned with approximately eight million American flags.
Lacking the dozens of pre-produced video montages and musical interludes of the Democratic National Convention last week, very little broke up the parade of speeches. The DNC experimented with different segments, having nominee Joe Biden interacting with multiple activists on video screens, or gathering all of his grandkids on a couch to converse, always flashing back to the emcee to direct the action.
The RNC required a much more dedicated attention span.
If you could muster the attention, though, you’d pick up on some absolutely crazy moments.
‘You will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America’
As much as you can pluck a theme out of the convention so far, this is it: a kind of fantasy world delusion where the speakers pretend that President Donald Trump is not, in fact, presiding over a country rent by civil unrest at the moment and that violence will befall the country if he’s not given the reins.
On the first night of the convention, they aired a video package to this effect which—aside from showing images from Spain as if they happened in the United States—show clips of protesting in Brooklyn and Chicago as a “taste of Biden’s America.”
It showcases the difficulty of running an incumbent campaign when Trump’s entire political ethos is one of outsider grievance and willingness to burn it all down. It’s much harder to drain the swamp when you live in it.
‘I want my daughter to grow up in President Donald J. Trump’s America’
It’s almost too easy to pick apart the RNC’s attempt at an “appeal to women” night. This particular sentiment was voiced by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
The President makes no effort to hide his disdain for women: he’s been caught on tape bragging about a sexual assault he allegedly committed, has been accused of sexual assault by over 20 women and routinely likens women to animals like pigs and dogs.
The party boasts a pathetically small number of female lawmakers in Congress, and has trotted nearly all of them out during the convention to mask that dearth.
Biden currently leads Trump in the polls by a massive amount with women, not that that statistic will alter the President’s behavior: It took him one day after she was chosen to decide that Biden’s Vice President pick Kamala Harris was “nasty,” harkening back to Hillary times.
‘I have watched President Trump charm the Chancellor of Germany’
This, from current acting DNI and former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, was possibly the most brazenly laughable line of the night. A picture is worth 1,000 words:
