At a McDonald’s in Booval, Queensland, Australia, a customer caught an employee using a french fry heat lamp to dry a dirty mop head, Yahoo! News reported on May 20. The customer said the mop had just been used to mop the floors; she heard another employee say, “I don’t think you should be doing that as it could be a safety issue as it can catch on fire,” but the first worker just “laughed it off.” A spokesperson for McDonald’s Australia called it an “isolated incident” and said the staff had undergone “retraining” on food safety procedures. [Yahoo! News, 5/20/2024]
Awesome!
As a 32-year-old man and his 66-year-old father argued on May 28 in Commerce City, Colorado, the father allegedly shot several times at the son, CNN reported. The father was believed to be intoxicated. While his aim was right on, a fluke saved the younger man’s life: A .22-caliber bullet lodged in the 10-millimeter-wide silver chain link necklace he was wearing at his throat. The victim escaped with just a puncture wound; his dad is charged with first-degree attempted murder. [CNN, 6/4/2024]
Weird Science
Scientists in Japan are at it again, Oddity Central reported on May 31. The Japanese tech company Kirin Holdings has released the new Elecispoon, a metal-and-plastic, battery-powered spoon that will improve human taste buds’ perception of salt, thereby allowing them to use less salt in their foods. Overconsumption of salt is a health issue in Japan. The tip of the spoon’s bowl transfers an electric charge to the food it touches and generates an electric field around the tongue, which causes sodium ions to bond together. The spoon, which sells for $128, has four intensity settings. [Oddity Central, 5/31/2024]
Oops!
• The website for the Republican National Convention featured a photo of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the convention was to be held starting on July 15, on each of its pages. At least, it was supposed to. On June 4, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the website section called “News and Updates” highlighted a photo of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam — not Milwaukee. According to an internet archive, the errant photo had been in place on the page since February. The RNC declined to comment. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 6/5/2024]
• The South China Morning Post reported on May 27 that a 26-year-old man from Naringgul, Indonesia, was hoodwinked into marriage after dating his “wife,” Kanza, 26, for a year. Just 12 days into their union, the man, who goes by AK, became suspicious when his bride continued to wear her headscarf at home and avoided intimacy. After doing a little sleuthing, AK discovered that Kanza was actually a man who had been cross-dressing since 2020. The scoundrel later told authorities that he married AK to steal his family’s assets. He was arrested and could face four years in prison. [South China Morning Post, 5/27/2024]
Um …
Neighbors in Palm Beach Country Estates in Florida are upset about the noise levels they’re enduring from I-95 and the Florida Turnpike, which run side by side through the area, WPTV reported on June 5. Resident Greta Foriere, who lives two houses from the turnpike, said it’s like being tortured 24 hours a day: “You can’t go outside.” She and other neighbors are lobbying for a sound wall to muffle the noise, which she has recorded as reaching 146 decibels. Neighbor Gary Johnson said he wouldn’t have bought his house if he’d known about the noise level. Fun fact: The highways have been in place for 60 years. [WPTV, 6/5/2024]
Crime Report
Six Bricks & Minifigs stores across southern California have been targeted by Lego thieves, the Los Angeles Times reported on June 5. The popular figurines lifted from the Lego resellers amount to about $100,000 worth of merchandise. Katie Leuschner, who owns the store in Whittier, said that on May 3, burglars broke glass to enter the store, then filled trash bags with the booty. “They’re not stealing big box sets,” she said. “They’re stealing minifigures, and those individual guys go for $500 to $600 apiece, so they’re easily stolen and resold for a quick profit.” Other cities have been hit, too, by what one website calls a black market for Lego items. Leuschner and other owners are modifying their storefronts to be less vulnerable to the thieves. [LA Times, 6/5/2024]
Editor’s note: Our political columnist Jackson Baker and former Flyer writer Chris Davis traveled to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, last week for the Republican National Convention on Monday, July 15th, to Thursday, July 18th. For this story, Baker and Davis reflect on their experiences, giving light to the ever-changing political landscape.
No sooner had we begun to digest the facts and fallout from the Republicans’ just-concluded convention in Milwaukee than the prolonged drama in Democratic ranks regarding the status of the ailing and beleaguered President Joe Biden abruptly resolved itself with Biden’s withdrawal from the election on Sunday.
However much that action had been anticipated, it still cast a shade on the events in Milwaukee, and attention, for better and for worse, will continue to gather and focus on the coming Democratic convention in Chicago in August. The immediate consensus among participants and observers alike was that there will be no open convention in Chicago — rather, a closing of ranks and a conferring of the nomination on Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.
The Sunday following the RNC, Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy. (Photo: Tennesseewitney | Dreamstime.com)
It is even possible that the Democrats could nominate a second woman — someone like the much-respected governor of battle-state Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer — to fill out their ticket as Harris’ running mate.
Whatever the case, various expectations have been turned on their head, and the over-the-top machismo of the Republicans’ convention, culminating with the final-night showcase appearances of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock, may look, in retrospect, like a misfire.
All the more reason to look back on the Milwaukee convention, which had been studiously stage-managed to present the aura of inevitable triumph.
Donald Trump sported an oversized bandage on his right ear, a reminder of his surviving an assassination attempt just the week before. (Photo: Chris Davis)
Against the memory of a doddering and fragile Joe Biden in the June 27th televised debate with former President Donald Trump, the Republicans could present the image of Trump as a hero-martyr, who, on the weekend before their convention, had risen after being felled by a would-be assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, to proclaim, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The donning of a conspicuously oversized bandage on Trump’s nicked right ear during the candidate’s public appearances in Milwaukee emphasized the degree to which the Republicans, understandably, expected to reap large symbolic dividends from the event.
On the opening night of their convention, last Tuesday, as on evenings to come, the Republicans, perhaps forgivably, would exploit Trump’s near-miraculous survival as a quasi-resurrection that reinforced what was already, here and there in his followers’ ranks, a near-messianic sense of the candidate.
And, though there was boilerplate aplenty served from the dais — regarding inflation, Biden’s presumed insufficiency, and other alleged shortcomings on the Democrats’ part — there were also overtures to voters presumed to be in the Democrats’ sphere of influence.
There was, for example, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who delivered a paean to the working class and denounced, in vivid detail, “greedy employers” and the evils of unbridled capitalism. It may have escaped most people’s attention that O’Brien did not explicitly endorse Trump; he merely expressed gratitude for being invited by Trump to address the convention. In a sense, he was more troll than Trumpian, but his participation in the GOP’s opening-night ritual was, ipso facto, an opening-out and an appeal to working-class voters.
The question rose uneasily to the minds of Democrats: Was it possible that a forthcoming realignment might occur as a benefit to Republicans, not themselves, the time-honored “party of the people”? And this concern could only have been deepened after remarks from the dais by one Amber Rose, a “model and TV celebrity,” as she was billed, and an ex-squeeze of Kanye West, no less, who professed herself a former “leftist” who could simultaneously praise Donald J. Trump and proclaim that Trump and his supporters “don’t care about Black or white or gay or straight. It’s all love.”
There were intermittent calls for national “unity” from the Republican stage, although, as these would be elaborated by Trump himself, notably in his later acceptance address on Thursday night, there were actually calls for the Democrats to surrender active resistance and to back away even from their forlorn hopes of salvation through acts of jurisprudence against Trump, most of those already all but scuttled by the Supreme Court.
Nor was there any mercy shown to President Joe Biden, who was subjected to patronizing remarks and Weekend at Bernie’s comparisons, alternating with chants of “Joe must go!” and claims that “He can’t even walk up steps and put on his own coat.”
J.D. Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate on day one. (Photo: United States Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Not that there weren’t signs of disunity among the Republicans themselves. The new party line on foreign affairs — articulated by both Trump and his hand-picked vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance — was to jettison the nation’s present commitment to shore up Ukrainian resistance against Vladimir Putin’s invading Russian armies. But some of the speechmaking — notably from an old warhorse, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and from Trump’s own erstwhile Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — was still insisting on regarding Putin as an arch-villain and the Ukrainians as victims.
Trump was credited simultaneously with being the only hope of restraining Putin and the architect of peaceful coexistence with him!
Such contradictions may now be highlighted as the Republicans refocus to train their fire on Joe Biden’s putative successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is something of an unknown quantity to them — as she is, indeed, to most Americans.
She may become the target of Republican reproaches owing to her lackluster early efforts as Biden’s vicar for border issues, but her prominence as a spokesperson for women’s reproductive freedom will more than offset that perceived weakness and reactivate the militant reaction against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Milwaukee was chosen as the site of this year’s Republican convention for the same reason that Democrats had wanted to convene there in 2020 before Covid-19 had nullified their gathering then. The city, a de facto distant suburb of Chicago, is a haven for the struggling middle class and is a key to the votes of Wisconsin, a rust-belt state that both parties consider a must-win in November.
Like Memphis, it is a bit ahead of itself, a place for logistical anomalies — like the hotel which housed the Tennessee delegation, containing a splendid water park but no gift shop. Forget your toothpaste and you’re looking at an Uber ride to make up the difference. But meanwhile you can dream.
For the space of a week, Republicans indulged in a dream of political supremacy over a disabled opposition. We — and they — are about to see whether that was fantasy or reality, as the Democrats, under new management, prepare to meet in Chicago next month.
— Jackson Baker
……………
On day three of the RNC Chuck Fleischmann, Tennessee’s 3rd District representative, caught a tingle. “There is a certain sense of vibrancy in this convention that I haven’t seen since I was a young man in 1980 for Ronald Reagan,” he said to applause from the Tennessee delegation, who gathered for a breakfast meeting at The Ingleside Hotel and Water Park, a good half-hour bus ride from the main event at Downtown Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum. That’s one way of describing the weird feeling in Milwaukee, where a general avoidance of Downtown by locals made the high-energy convention seem like it was happening in a ghost town patrolled by squads of imported bicycle cops with little to do but ride around in big loopy circles.
TV ratings were disappointing. The convention’s opening night was strong enough that pundits were talking about the possibilities of a new political realignment. In spite of featuring the party’s most diverse lineup ever, viewership was down 25 percent compared to a high-water mark in 2016. Even with 25 million people tuning in for Trump’s speech on the final night, the overall numbers fell just short of 2020’s Covid-impaired convention. Protests in Milwaukee were modest and almost nonexistent after the convention’s first day. A smattering of charismatic street preachers remained, leaping and shouting their fiery messages about God and Trump, while a few dedicated liberal activists walked lonely beats with their handmade signs resting on slumped shoulders. Overall, the energy was pretty low for this sort of event, but inside the Fiserv Forum, a hard-working five-piece cover band called Sixwire kept things humming along with hits by Steely Dan, Loverboy, The Rascals, and REO Speedwagon while delegates on the floor and guests throughout the forum danced and prayed and waved their cowboy hats from side to side for the cameras and all America to see.
RNC guests could buy all sorts of merch. (Photo: Chris Davis)
“We are the party of opportunity,” Fleischmann continued, back at the Ingleside, where there was no band and production values were less glamorous. “Race doesn’t matter. Gender doesn’t matter,” he said, naming two things that seemed to matter very much inside the Fiserv Forum, where delegates and guests can buy “Black Americans for Trump” stickers, and “Latino Americans for Trump” stickers, and “Women for Trump” stickers; and where, judging by reoccurring themes and enthusiastic crowd response, few things are worse than DEI, and nothing is more important than a willingness (the Republicans would say “ability”) to define what a man or woman is in the most simplistic terms.
Race has certainly mattered in Milwaukee, the swing-state city where the RNC chose to stage its big event. The city’s joint designations as the most segregated city in America and also one of the poorest, can both be linked to a legacy of redlining, and other race-based restrictions. But here I go missing the point.
It’s difficult to talk about what happened at the RNC, especially on the night of former President Donald Trump’s incredibly long and occasionally weird acceptance address, without falling into the fatal snare of fact checking. Trump, who boldly led the world into the post-truth era we currently occupy, made so many untrue statements he overwhelmed cable news resources who struggled to keep up an admirable exercise in futility. In a post-truth environment, facts will always matter less than feels, and right now the Right’s right to terrify immigrants with threats of mass deportation, and rattle the vulnerable, electorally insignificant trans community by insisting they don’t exist, makes our current GOP feel good enough about themselves to ignore that, even according to the very libertarian Cato Institute, Trump’s tax cuts skewed toward the rich and did none of the great things they were supposed to do.
No single idea presented onstage received more consistent applause than God, and outside of Trump, no single person received a bigger ovation than former Trump staffer and Project 2025 contributor, Peter Navarro, fresh from prison where he’d been cooling his heels following a contempt of Congress charge for refusing to provide documents and testimony relating to the January 6th insurrection. Tucker Carlson, the ex-darling of Fox News, might have gotten even more applause than Navarro had he not successfully petitioned the crowd to stop.
“God is among us,” Carlson concluded, following a gushing endorsement of the man he once claimed to hate “passionately.”
There are many layers to the RNC onion beyond what’s broadcast to the world. The friendly state delegation breakfast meetings are more intimate, and are often a place for more frank and practical conversations about what’s ahead. Mark Green, the embattled representative from Tennessee’s 7th District, wanted to make sure delegates understood what they were watching when the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron deference doctrine. He describes the decision as a victory over bureaucracy.
For 40 years, Chevron deference gave government agencies broad latitude to interpret ambiguous legal statutes and its dissolution puts a raft of public safeguards and environmental protections at risk. Green rejoiced in the decision to kill Chevron deference, and announced his plans to start rolling back regulations as quickly as possible
“The day of the hearing I dropped the ‘Save Us From the Chevron Deference Act’ [or the Sunset Chevron Act],” Green boasted. “It will repeal, in a rolling 30-day fashion, every single regulation passed under the Chevron doctrine.”
Inside the Fiserv Forum, wrestling icon Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off and forcefully announced the arrival of “Trumpamania!” Back at the Ingleside Hotel, things were rarely so over the top, although 2nd District Representative Tim Burchett did say he believed America came one centimeter away “from full-blown Civil War,” when a lone gunman’s bullet grazed former President Trump’s ear in Pennsylvania. Inside the Fiserv Forum, Trump’s unfortunate and very nearly tragic brush with American gun violence is described as a holy miracle: proof of God’s divine purpose for the once and future leader of the free world. Back at the Ingleside Hotel, Chad Connelly, founder of the Faith Wins organization, showed the Tennessee delegation another way God works in politics.
“What if we go to churches in key precincts, get everybody to vote, and teach them to vote biblical values?” Connelly asked, recalling the questions he asked himself while figuring out how to “maximize” the Christian vote.
“I wasn’t going to push Republicans. I wasn’t going to push a candidate. I was going to push Christian values,” Connelly told Tennessee Republicans. By recruiting pastors to register voters and teach them to vote “biblical values,” Connelly says he helped to flip nine U.S. Senate seats in 2014.
“I believe a man named Jesus hung on a tree for me and for you,” Connelly said before announcing that he’s currently recruiting poll watchers to monitor elections in swing states like Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan. It’s not a hard job, he says. You only need to watch for voters over 100, and houses “occupied by more than six people.”
Representative Chuck Fleischmann was right about one thing: The 2024 RNC was a vibe. Almost mellow and with an eye for wholesale political realignment, it platformed unions, and women, and all kinds of Americans we’re not used to seeing at the RNC. With Christian Nationalism coming hard off professional wrestling’s top rope, it was also a camp masterpiece: a populist extravaganza with all the classic rock and J.D. Vance’s Mamaw’s 19 loaded handguns. Sure, the Nielsen ratings were low, but with President Biden exiting the race only weeks before the DNC, a “certain sense of vibrancy” may be all it takes to win the White House. — Chris Davis
Baker-Davis team: (top) 2004, RNC, New York; (bottom) 2024, RNC, The Ingleside Hotel and Water Park (Photo: Picjointer)
You have to give Donald Trump this: He has good taste in music to close out with. It’s hard to beat the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” with which he ends his rallies. (Against the wishes of the Stones, it should be noted.) And singer Christopher Macchio’s renditions of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and the traditional “Ave Maria” (delivered from the Truman Balcony at the White House) were certainly powerful codas to the President’s climactic address at the Republican National Convention Thursday night, outdoing even an extended round of fireworks that filled the sky over the nation’s Capital.
That the White House, historically known as “the People’s House,” was able to be employed as a backdrop to the events and festivities of the four-day RNC affair was a consequence, in a way, of the deadly coronavirus pandemic that had made planned arena extravaganzas in Charlotte, North Carolina, and, later, Jacksonville, Florida, impossible. Invoking the protocols of the Hatch Act, Democrats had complained about their rivals’ appropriation of national structures and symbology for such partisan purposes, but, as in so much else, Trump just does what he wants and gets away with it.
Give him this, too: Though the pandemic had caused the RNC to uproot and move its venue, twice, Trump remained intent on flaunting his so far successful penchant for gambling. He wanted crowds? He got crowds — upwards of 1,500, packed in tight on the south lawn of the White House to hear him speak. Masks? We don’t need no stinking masks! No social distancing, either. It was Tulsa writ smaller but grander, and, if the late GOP African-American eminence Herman Cain had been a casualty of that earlier wager, Trump’s own luck, and that of his family and entourage, seemed to be holding.
Masks? We don’t need no stinking masks!
Once again, the president had hurled a defy to the fates. No one — or no one so prominent — has so obviously and so consistently moved unprotected amid tight groups of people during the six months so far of medical emergency. And in his RNC address, he sort of laid it on the line to the country: “Joe wants to shut down, to surrender to the virus,” he declared of Democratic nominee Biden, who had spoken of intensified health-safety actions, including a national mask mandate. Trump’s own preference? “The states have to be opened up — back to work, back to school.” All Americans are involved in Trump’s parley — and its consequences.
“Let’s Pretend”
If the situation required a bit of rhetorical let’s-pretend, so be it. Speaker after speaker at the convention either ignored the pandemic or treated Trump like a triumphant Horatio at the gate. Early on, he had clearly minimized the threat and procrastinated in dealing with the virus, which has so far resulted in 6 million cases and 180,000 American lives, a full quarter of the world’s total. But this week in others’ telling, and in his own, he would seem — by the simple act of incomplete and temporary halts on traffic to and from China and Europe —to have stopped Covid-19 cold. On the convention’s second night, Trump’s economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, put the whole pandemic thing in the past tense. It’s over, folks.
In a convention only selectively attentive to realities, that was par for the course. On the convention’s first night, Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, sadly, had been among those slain in 2018 by a gunman at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, took the stage to praise President Trump, whom he’d met with after the shooting, as a “great man and good listener” and blamed the massacre on the emphasis on “restorative justice” by “far left Democrats.” Guns themselves and their ready prevalence in the land remained unmentioned.
Two nights later, logger Scott Dane contended that “crazy environmentalists” had somehow been responsible for the sporadically raging forest fires on the west coast and praised President Trump for his idea (so far unelaborated on) of “managing the forests.” Throughout the convention, in fact, “environmental extremists” were the villains of disparaging testimonies, right up there with “radical socialists” and “looters.” Those latter two categories were conflated, to the extent possible.
The McCloskeys
The McCloskeys, a couple from the St. Louis area who had brandished weapons at protesters of George Floyd’s murder, warned that the suburbs themselves were under direct attack. And ongoing events in Kenosha served, in both spoken and unspoken ways, to reinforce the sense of peril for Trump’s base. Never mind that the only deaths in that Wisconsin city had been those of Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man shot by police, and two protesters gunned down by a right-wing vigilante.
In all fairness, though, there had been martyrs of out-of-control mobs, and several of these were spoken to — notably, retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, shot and killed by looters of a pawn shop he was trying to provide security for during a post-Floyd disturbance. There was a telling bit of having-it-both-ways during the emotionally moving description of the tragedy by Dorn’s widow, a white woman. The portrait of the late captain on a mantel behind her, was out-of-focus in such a way as to make his fact of his race indeterminate. Black viewers could see — and grieve for — one of their own, while those whites who chose to do so could remain uncertain about the matter.
In any case, for the RNC-ers, Kenosha was the ill wind from which some benefit could be derived. The concept of the Democratic nominee as “Sleepy Joe” had seemingly been mined for all it’s worth — and, on the evidence of Biden’s performance at the DNC convention, debunked. Now Biden was being described, by Trump and the president’s surrogates, as a “Trojan Horse,” a hapless government time-server for 47 years (a span alluded to over and over) who was now in the clutches of sinister elements to the point that an early RNC speaker had professed to be “terrified of Joe Biden coming after everything we’re building.”
Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general, made bold to reprise the discredited slander of “Biden family members” as Ukrainian grifters, but mainly focused on the Bidens in China, a country so repeatedly referred to in the RNC convention as a super-specter, the gravest menace to America. (Russia went unmentioned and, on the evidence of this convention, might have ceased to exist on maps of the planet.)
Ironies Abounding
It was a convention in which extremes, exaggerations, and ironies abounded — one in which Tennessee’s high-intensity junior Senator, Marsha Blackburn, mustering every word slowly and carefully, came off as a relative moderate, although she still could breathe some fire: “Democrats] close our churches, but keep the liquor stores and abortion clinics open. They say we can’t gather in community groups, but encourage protests, riots, and looting in the streets. If the Democrats had their way, they would keep you locked in your house until you become dependent on the government for everything.”
Senator Tom Cotton
Question: How is it possible that Kimberly Guilfoyle, now Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, who had, in a memorably screechy address, proclaimed of Trump Sr., “He liberates you. He lifts you up,” could have earlier been married to the laid-back Gavin Newsom, California’s currently serving Democratic governor?
The gaunt and ultra-grim-looking Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, meanwhile accused Biden of “coddling communist dictators” and failed to mention the exchange of love letters, as they were characterized by the President himself, between Trump and Kim Jung Un of North Korea.
In his 70-minute finale of a teleprompter address, Trump would recap all of the calumnies directed at Biden, declaring outright that, if the Democrat were elected, “China would own our country.” He characterizes himself as “the People’s President,” and the claim reflects a reelection strategy based less on foreign issues than on day-to-day concerns in the population. In that sense, the threat from China is presented as primarily economic (though, just in case, Trump credits himself with rebuilding the nation’s military).
Democrats note correctly that the nation’s economic recovery from the 2007-8 crash began under the “Obama-Biden” presidency (as Republicans now choose to characterize it), but Trump’s argument that his administration accounted for the most robust economy in American history still has legs. The President notes the addition of “9 million new jobs” in the last three months, while Democrats counter with the fact that some 21 million were lost just previously, in the coronavirus shutdown.
The president’s taking point remains, and the outcome of the election depends at least partly on the continuing viability of it vis-a-vis the ever-looming threat of the virus. In the either/or of things, the two tickets are each emphasizing a different side of the dichotomy.
“Family Values”
Then there are domestic factors — matters of tranquility, racial fairness, gender equity among them — to be reckoned with. It was no accident that the Republican convention featured an unusual number of women and African Americans to serve as proponents of the president. As identity groups, blacks and women are being counted on by Democrats, with some degree of confidence, as anchors of the Biden-Harris ticket. Trump and the GOP nevertheless are seeking such inroads there as are possible.
Though the LGBTQ community is overwhemingly Democratic, there are clearly a certain number of its members who opt for the GOP, and Republicans are not so foolish as to entertain the strategy of gay-bashing.The one issue on which there is no likelihood whatsoever of the twain’s meeting amicably on the battlefield of this election is abortion. There would seem to be no middle ground between being anti-abortion and being pro-choice. The Democratic platform opts for the latter and the Republican platform, such as it is, for the former.
For all the vau
The Rev. Franklin Graham
nting during the convention of his family members (all of whom appear to have been on hand, save those who have denounced him publicly), Donald Trump is not, and will never be, a symbol of “family values.” Nevertheless, his brand encapsulates issues of that sort as well as spokespersons for them (cases in point being the Rev. Franklin Graham and various smaller fry), and social conservatism is one of the cards Republicans are certain to play.
The exact power of that constituency is hard to estimate, though, as a voting bloc, it is arguably more dependable than are those forces galvanized so strongly right now by Black Lives Matter and other movements to redress historic wrongs. Assessments of strength and staying power in such matters are notoriously difficult to assess in polls.
Que sera sera, and, as a friend of ours is so fond of saying, events are in the saddle. Covid-19, George Floyd, and Kenosha have all reminded us of that. In any event, the Democrats and the Republicans have each had their show now, and, a little more than two months from now, (Postmaster General DeJoy willing) the Nielsen ratings will come in — with dramatic consequences, either way.
Classic SNL-era writer/comic-turned-senator Al Franken was the guest speaker at the Tennessee delegation’s first breakfast meeting at the Democratic National Convention.
Here are some of Franken’s comments: “I’m very excited about this convention. I’m really looking forward to the speakers. I’ll give you an example of the contrast between [the Republican] Convention and our convention. They had Scott Baio. We’re going to have President Barack Obama.
“I talked to Bernie [Sanders] last night, and I’m really looking forward to his speech this evening. I know Bernie will be urging unity because there’s so much at stake, and you know how much is at stake from watching last week’s convention. That was one of the ugliest conventions I’ve ever seen, and the acceptance speech by Donald Trump was one of the scariest I’ve ever seen. What he basically did was present a dark, ugly picture of America. There are problems with America. There’s no question about that, but he gave us no solutions to any of them. He gave magical thinking. He’s going to defeat ISIS, and it’s going to happen fast.”
Body Talk
Sexism was rampant in the streets of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. So remember, every time you share on Facebook that picture of Donald Trump with a small penis, you make this seem okay to some people. And this shouldn’t be okay to anybody.
The other day I spied a high Republican official walking on the street and called out his name. He stopped, hit his smile app, and exclaimed how glad he was to see me.
“What are you going to do about Trump?” I asked. He paused and then uttered the dreaded word: unity. “We have to have unity,” he said.
I got his message. He’s selling out. In the coming weeks, Republicans everywhere will be seeking unity by embracing their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. They will be ignoring his utter lack of qualifications for the presidency, his harebrained schemes for controlling migration, his knack for insulting billions people at a time (Muslims, women, the disabled), his gaudy womanizing past, his lying, his exaggerating, his enthusiasm for torture, and his ingenious view of the Constitution as a lease that can be broken.
That paragraph, politically lethal if I were writing about someone else, encapsulates precisely why Trump is so hard to stop. He is, among other things, scandal-proof. At the moment, an army of journalists is scouring the land looking for whatever Trump has done that we might not yet know about. Trouble is, there is little that can be revealed. Call him a womanizer, and he shrugs. Say he lies, and he lies by saying he doesn’t. Confront him with the truth, as when he insisted on having seen nonexistant Muslim revelry in New Jersey following the September 11th attacks, and he just perseveres, creating his own “truth.” He cannot be shamed.
It’s trite to liken Trump to a Kardashian, but I shall do so anyway. What they have in common is the determination to outlast our moral or political revulsion. Kim Kardashian hit the big time with a sex tape. Revolting? Yes. But forgotten? Mostly. What lingers is the name.
It is similar with Trump. The shock of his statements — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” for instance — has worn off. The same with his insult to Megyn Kelly or his mocking of a disabled New York Times reporter. All that is now “old news,” blanched of its repellent ugliness by time: Oh, that’s just Trump. He’ll say anything. He doesn’t mean it.
Bit by bit, Trump will accumulate more endorsements. The motley crew that now surrounds him will be supplemented and upgraded by establishment names. They will use the same reasoning that Senator Lindsey Graham did last month when he endorsed Ted Cruz, whom he hates — a higher purpose. In Graham’s case, it was to stop Trump. With others, it will be this thing called party unity or, its functional equivalent, stopping Hillary Clinton.
But what is the point of a party that attempts to unify around a candidate such as Trump? What then does the party stand for? Does the GOP endorse anti-Muslim bigotry? Shall the party have a plank about Mexican rapists or the physical attributes of women? If Trump is its nominee, will the party endorse what are certain to be misogynist and personal attacks on Clinton? (Trump’s campaign boasts he has the endorsement of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, both associated with Bill Clinton’s sexual rap sheet. This could get ugly.)
Trump’s message, we are incessantly told, is that the GOP has double-crossed its constituency with trade, immigration, and just about anything else you can name. But it will do the Republican Party no good to win back the aggrieved at the cost of everyone else — not to mention what is good for the country. A glance at Trump’s endorsees — check his web page — is an effective appetite suppressant.
Imagine a Republican National Convention’s dais stocked with some of the people who have already endorsed Trump — not just the feckless Chris Christie or the bizarre Sarah Palin, but such figures as the disgraced football player Richie Incognito, Hulk Hogan, and Teresa Giudice from The Real Housewives of New Jersey, a fresh alumna of the federal prison system. A meeting of Trump supporters might have to be sanctioned by a pro wrestling promoter.
When I spotted that Republican official, I did not say what I initially wanted to. I wanted to say that we are taking names — “we” being the American people. We will remember who endorsed a man who took American politics lower than it has ever been, no doubt extracting promises of good behavior that later will be broken. Party unity will not wash. The GOP is going to lose, the only question is how — with some honor, or being deservedly mocked by history?
Richard Cohen writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.
