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GOP Convention: The Man Who Sold the World

GOP Convention: The Man Who Sold the World

A weary J. BROOKS SPECTOR got up very early over the past several days to watch the Republican Nominating Convention in Cleveland. He wishes he hadn’t done so.

After the first night of the Republican National Convention, one might have thought it could not get much weirder than it had already become, but anyone who thought that would have been completely, totally wrong.

In its first night and the harsh light of the next day, the Republicans managed to step all over their intention of having something to say about keeping the country strong and safe. Instead, however, they generated a massive cotton candy floss of a firestorm over the wannabe First Lady’s personally crafted speech to introduce the warm and cuddly version of her husband to a nation at large, which had heretofore largely known him as the entertaining tyrant of reality television, a bombastic property developer, or a newly-minted politician given to gutter epithets. Unfortunately for them, Melania Trump’s speech turned out to use at least one ghost-writer currently residing in the White House, i.e. Michelle Obama, and another one who suddenly surfaced in the visage of a heretofore unknown Meredith MacIver, a supposed staffer in the Trump organization.

This mess managed to obscure the intended message of that first evening – and it had Trump campaign operatives tripping over themselves, scrambling to explain it all away. Eventually they settled on the narrative that it had been a plot by Hillary Clinton to destroy the gracious ex-model – now lovable billionaire’s wife – who had worked her way up from a small village in Slovenia, to the cat-walks of Milan, and then finally on to those streets of gold in the towers of midtown Manhattan.

The second night was ostensibly billed as an effort to explain how the Trumpian dynamo would rebuild the country’s supposedly imploding economy after explaining how it had come to be that it was just one tiny step from the bone knacker’s yard. Hint: Hillary. However, the actual speakers on the podium largely settled in for an evening of an extended version of that infamous Orwellian trope from “1984” of “the two minute hate”, those mandatory jeering sessions of party enemies in the ministry where Winston Smith worked, busily expunging all that history and all those inconvenient facts.

Watch: George Orwell’s 1984 – Two Minute Hate

Perhaps the best – or at least the angriest or perhaps most ready to foam at the mouth – exemplar of this approach was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor. Christie had run what amounted to a mock trial of the supposed class enemy, as he led a convention centre audience in chants of “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” – while other speakers (some just off the podium but who gained significant coverage anyway) began calling for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, hung or even shot for treason. But the gold medal in this category must surely go to Dr Ben Carson who deduced a “three degrees of separation” exercise to turn Hillary Clinton into a close associate of Lucifer. Really.

By the end of that night, one half expected to see one of those French “reign of terror” tumbrils rolled onto the stage for that last ride to the guillotine for a mock-up of the unlucky Democratic Party candidate. This must be a first nominating convention in the nation’s history where one party’s opponent was reviled as an agent of the devil, an associate of criminals, and a fiend worth being killed, all as part of nominating the other party’s own electoral champion.

This hasn’t even been good rev up the crowds rhetoric. Instead it is the kind of thing that smacks of slander and an affront to (small d) democratic values and public decency. Well, okay, the election of 1860 was no prize for public decorum either with the Democrats keening away about the perfidy and ape-like qualities of the Republican champion, Abraham Lincoln, but at least that was in the midst of an issue – human slavery – that was worth paying some real attention to in an election. This kind of moronic behaviour, now, is about what, exactly? That the Democratic candidate behaved stupidly with her emails and that she didn’t call in nuclear missiles on Benghazi? Geez.

But the third night provided its very own special brand of entertainment as well. Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz was given a spot on the speakers’ roster. Perhaps the convention organisers wanted some of Cruz’ red meat riffs sent out into the crowd to charge them up into being a ravenous horde. Ready to race out of the convention center and make Trump president by acclamation. Or, perhaps the assumption among those masquerading as being in charge of this convention for the Trumpians was that now that Cruz had clearly lost the race to be the candidate, he would just show up and magnanimously announce that despite the bitter race (Cruz had, after all, been demonised as “Lyin’ Ted” by Trump, his wife insulted by having been called “ugly”, and his father had been bizarrely slandered as being somehow tied up with the assassination of President Kennedy), Cruz would now offer his support to Donald Trump. And the convention crowd would go wild with a noise that would be heard around the world. Or something like that.

Didn’t quite happen like that. Instead, Cruz, clearly positioning himself as the alt-Trump for 2020, on the assumption that Trump would go down in flaming ignominy in under four months time and drag dozens and dozens of other Republican candidates for other offices with him. As a result, he spoke lovingly about all those social conservative issues beloved of a big chunk of the party faithful (and the newer versions such as Tea Party-style supporters), but then he told the convention attendees – and the national audience via television – that they must vote their consciences this November. And he never did get around to endorsing his nomination rival as the party’s standard-bearer. By the time he got to that business about having a conscience, he became the object of sustained booing from attendees who had clearly expected he would bury the hatchet – but not in Trump’s back. Still, the Trumpmeister tactically outfoxed him by staging a grandiose entrance into the arena and on to his family’s skybox just as Cruz was reaching his apogee moment – forcing the television cameras to cut away to the Trumpian arrival, rather than show the last minutes of Cruz’s speech.

And so, on early Friday morning, the weary viewers trudged onward to the final night of madness. This was the night when the candidate stepped forward to deliver his traditional acceptance speech that is supposed to finish up the convention’s formal business. But, before Trump got his big moment, there was again a litany of other speakers.

There was Peter Thiel, co-founder of Pay Pal, who as a self-described gay Republican (the first to do so publicly at any Republican convention), depicted a future America (presumably under the tender ministrations of Donald Trump) that would offer opportunity to all and that would wind up all those divisive, foolish fights such as those who can use which toilet without discrimination or the threat of legal sanction. The irony, of course, was that Thiel’s comments ran directly counter to the contents of what has to be the most regressive, right wing, social conservative, ugly, prescriptive party platform – including a big dose of ugliness directed at the LGBTI community – adopted in many years by a major US party.

Then, a long-time business associate and fellow real estate mogul, Thomas Barrack, spoke warmly about the Donald he knows, describing him as a kind of loving, beautifully groomed, perfectly mannered King Charles Spaniel in a room full of snarling, ravenous hyenas – otherwise known as property developers. Self-knowingness and irony are clearly not instruments in the Trumpian convention toolbox. Barrack explained that he was the son of immigrants – from the Middle East! – the very people his buddy, the Donald, would have expelled from the country or prevented from entering in the first place. Anyway, with Thiel and Barrack’s loving embraces done with, the convention moved on to a worshipful video tribute to the Donald, narrated by Jon Voight. It was a presentation that sought to portray the candidate as a colossus among men, a man who could singlehandedly rebuild a city ice skating rink as proof of his readiness to become president. Really.

By this time my mind was reeling, but I rose from the sofa to get still more coffee to prepare myself for the Donald’s own speech, an address that went on and on and on, but whose message was admirably simple. The core was the country is totally screwed up, everything is broken or stolen, or threatened by dark forces within and without, and it is all decisively and conclusively entirely Hillary Clinton’s fault, with some help from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

But mostly it was that dastardly Hillary, now scheming to defile, lie and cheat her way into the purity of the White House. Two wars in the Middle East begun in the early 2000s? Clinton’s fault. Infrastructure run down? Clinton’s fault. Trade deficits and lousy trade deals? Clinton’s fault. A policeman shot by a deranged ex-soldier with issues? Cities with blighted neighbourhoods and jobless young people? Clinton’s fault. People without jobs, former college students with big student loan debts? Clinton’s fault. And everything else wrong in the world? Guess what – Clinton’s fault. Clinton’s fault, Clinton’s fault, Clinton’s fault! Smirk, smirk, smirk! Shades of those two-minute hates in Winston Smith’s Ministry of Truth.

But his plan to solve everything was admirably simple too. He will make it all better, fix it, spend the money to build up the military to make it stronger, fix any problems with veterans health issues, lower taxes on everyone, solve student loan problems, make the sunset better, solve Fermat’s last theorem and the four colour map problem, develop perpetual motion machines and, just incidentally, make America safe and punish the evil jinns of ISIS and al Qaeda. And he would build that wall, rewrite every trade agreement ever made, and punish, punish, punish those perfidious Chinese. About the only thing he didn’t mention on that score were the machinations of that evil Ming the Merciless.

Trump painted such a dark, foreboding universe that the word picture conjured up in his speech was a dying, broken, twisted Gotham City, just before Bruce Wayne found his Robin, his bat cave and that handsome serated cape and utility belt. The speech was a cartoon in the cinema noir style of many graphic novels – until Trump shows up to sweep away the mess. While some of his cheerleaders on air were comparing his speech to Ronald Reagan’s first acceptance speech, the real parallel was an amalgam of the harsh “law and order” platitudes and racial coding of the rhetoric of George Wallace, mixed together with some of Richard Nixon’s worst dystopian fantasies.

Reprising all the greatest hits from his march to the nomination, it clearly fed that sense of grievance and growing fury felt by Trump’s fans and supporters that had propelled him to the nomination in the first place. But the challenge now is a very different one – in a general election a candidate must expand beyond that kind of narrow base to capture undecided voters, wavering voters, and weakly-supportive-of-the-other-candidate voters. Feeding grievance and anger of the base runs the risk of repelling voters like the ones that must also be brought into the tent, and this speech just didn’t do it.

To end the entire phantasmagorical convention, when Trump finished his speech, and his family, his running mate, Mike Pence, and Pence’s family all joined him on stage, the improbable strains of the Rolling Stones’ epic, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” were playing inside the convention center, with those lyrics:

I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was her footloose man

No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need

We went down to the demonstration
To get your fair share of abuse
Singing, ‘We’re gonna vent our frustration
If we don’t we’re gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse’

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you just might find
You get what you need

I went down to the Chelsea drugstore
To get your prescription filled
I was standing in line with Mr. Jimmy
And man, did he look pretty ill
We decided that we would have a soda
My favorite flavor, cherry red
I sung my song to Mr. Jimmy
Yeah, and he said one word to me, and that was “dead”
I said to him

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

You get what you need–yeah, oh baby

I saw her today at the reception
In her glass was a bleeding man
She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need

And at that point I felt like what I needed most was to meet Mr Jimmy myself – and the hope that just perhaps Mr Trump might get what he deserved (as opposed to what he wanted) for stirring up all those dark passions and setting loose all those unpleasant crawling things coming out from under the rocks he had now turned over. DM

Photo: Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump delivers his address during the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 21 July 2016. Donald Trump formally accepted the nomination of the Republican Party as their presidential candidate in the 2016 election. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS.

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