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AUGUST

**27, 2020**

Harold Meyerson' s
National Convention Report

**Unconventional:** The Republicans, Day Three

Chicago, 1968; Pandemic, Kenosha, and the Hurricane, 2020

****

Like battleships, conventions take some time to turn around. They're
planned well in advance, and even this year, when both parties have
scrambled to improvise, many if not most of their presentations are
prerecorded.

The first convention I attended, the notorious 1968 Democratic
Convention in Chicago, never did get itself turned around. Planned as a
renomination celebration for Lyndon Johnson, it then shifted after
Johnson dropped out to a nomination celebration for his vice president
Hubert Humphrey. Away from the podium on the convention floor, however,
antiwar delegates (in the minority) and Humphrey's legions (in the
majority) raged at each other, while outside, in the parks and the
streets, Chicago's cops were caught on television beating the hell out
of protesters and random pedestrians.

At that point, the convention did go off script. Making a seconding
speech for McGovern, Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff (a former member
of JFK's Cabinet) said, "If George McGovern were president, we
wouldn't have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." A
handheld camera on the convention floor then captured a furious Chicago
Mayor Richard Daley shouting at Ribicoff. There was no mic, but
lip-readers could plainly see what he was saying: "Fuck you, you
motherfucking Jew, you!"

The following night, Humphrey returned the proceedings to regular order
in his acceptance speech. Amid the rage and despair, he gleefully
claimed the nomination and promised "the politics of happiness, the
politics of joy." If he'd noticed the rage and divisions that were
cleaving his party, he sure didn't let on.

That November, Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon.

The Great Chicago Debacle was my first convention. Initially as an
activist and then as a journalist, I'd attended 13 conventions (9
Democratic and 4 Republican) before this year's, which I've been
covering digitally gavel to gavel (well, gavels have seldom been in
evidence, but you know what I mean). But none of them even came close to
Chicago's clash between the scripted program and an intrusive outside
world.

Until this week.

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The first three nights of the Republican convention have been devoted to
convincing any viewers who are swing voters that everything they know
about Donald Trump is wrong. In fact, we've been told ad nauseam,
Trump respects women and would never bad-mouth minorities. He's built
a vibrant economy and conquered the pandemic. And if any of that comes
as a surprise, the fault lies with the media, which have missed these
stories or twisted them beyond recognition.

We've also learned that only Trump's re-election will guarantee your
safety and the preservation of Western civilization. As Mike Pence put
it in his speech last night, "You won't be safe in Joe Biden's
America." Indeed, Pence continued, Biden would so utterly change the
nation that when voters go to the polls, "the choice is whether America
remains America" (a line that's been voiced several times over the
past three nights).

But reality has been knocking on the convention's door, at times loud
enough to have shouted down the script.

Try though the Republicans may-and Pence made a run at it last
night-it will be hard to convince anyone but Trump's staunchest
supporters that he has dealt well with the pandemic. It will be almost
as hard to persuade Americans that the economy is a success story at a
moment when more businesses are failing than at any time since the
1930s. To get around this annoying detail, some speakers (Lara Trump, on
Wednesday) have actually cited the unemployment statistics from last
February as though they were the figures for last week.

Several speakers, including embattled Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, have praised
Trump for the aid he provided to Iowa after its devastating derecho and
flooding earlier this month, which Ernst termed a
"once-in-a-hundred-year storm." As the evening wore on, later speakers,
including Pence, offered prayers for Louisiana and Texas, which were
about to be ravaged by another once-a-century hurricane. Meanwhile,
Northern California continues to burn down in yet another wave of
hundred-year fires, which now occur annually.

The prayers and the thanks are all well and good, but three of the
convention's four evenings have come and gone, and not a single
speaker has so much as mentioned climate change, much less a climate
crisis. At least a dozen of them have attacked Biden and the Democrats
for being controlled by "environmental extremists," though literally as
they speak, environmental extremes threaten to burn down and wash away
whole sections of the land they profess to love.

Then there's the seemingly ineradicable plague of police violence
against African Americans. Another "officer-involved" shooting erupted
this week in Kenosha, Wisconsin, unleashing both completely necessary
protests and outbursts of rage, in turn countered by the armed legions
of the Trumpian right. On day three of the Republican counter-reality
show, police arrested a 17-year-old zealot, who'd stood in the front
row at a recent Trump rally, for shooting and killing two of the Kenosha
protesters.

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It's clear that Republicans came into the convention determined to
position Biden and the Democrats as either indifferent to or encouraging
of the outbreaks of property destruction and defiance of police that a
number of cities have experienced. Pence doubled down on that message
last night, while choosing not to note the police violence that sets off
the protests, and the gun-toting militias, white nationalists, and other
flotsam that have come out of the woodwork as Trump has summoned them
forth. Not only have the Republicans failed to acknowledge the existence
of these forces of disorder, but Pence shifted the blame for the
deliberate killing of a police officer in Oakland earlier this year from
the actual assailant-a Boogaloo Boy, among the most dangerous of armed
right-wing lunatics-to the left-wing protests which, the Boogalooer
believed, would bring out a cop he could kill.

The militias, the Charlottesville neo-Nazis, the Kenosha killer, the
QAnon Republican congressional nominee whom Trump has praised, the woman
whom the Republicans pulled from their convention speaker list at the
last minute on Tuesday when her anti-Semitic tweets were
discovered-they're the natural excrescence of Donald Trump's
presidency, and may well be on alert to show up at polling places to
keep the wrong people from voting if Trump needs them this November.

The law-and-order president is really the prince of disorder, and the
evidence of that disorder-both the right's and that of the
self-subverting enragés-has provided the loudest knocks on the
convention's doors this week. The Republicans welcome the property
destruction disorder, and magnify it into a national threat, even
though, as I wrote earlier this week, the ratio of small businesses
Trump has destroyed by his incompetent handling of the pandemic to small
businesses destroyed by rioters is roughly 10,000 to 1.

Down by nine or ten points to Biden in the polls, however, Trump's
embrace of law and order is one of the few ways he believes he can claw
his way to an Electoral College victory. He has counted from the start
on white racial anxiety. That's what he and his fellow Republicans
mean when they say the election is about whether America will remain
America-that is, with whites still in control, and safe behind the
walls he's erecting to keep out other races, whose numbers will
someday surpass the whites'. But that demographic threat is too
abstract by itself to turn the election in his favor; the protests and
the anger in the streets present a seemingly more immediate and palpable
threat, even if the overwhelming majority of Americans view them only on
television or social media. They're the grist for Trump's
law-and-order mill.

You can be certain that grist is going to be part of tonight's script.
Trump will proclaim, as he did four years ago, that our country stands
on a precipice and only he can save it. He will, as Pence hilariously
stated last night, "Make America Great Again, Again." Outside, the
waters rise and fires rage, the pandemic continues to kill, and the
Trumpian right is armed and dangerous. None of that, of course, will be
in the script.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Unconventional: The Republicans, Day Two

The Melania Mystery, the Kudlow Confusion, and the two-track convention
BY HAROLD MEYERSON

A Guide to the GOP Convention's Pretend Agenda

Talk of the real stuff (tax cuts and deregulation) has been muted, but
these less-than-meets-the-eye policies have been foregrounded. BY DAVID
DAYEN

Trump's 40 Biggest Broken Promises

The president talks a good game-but it's just talk. BY ROBERT REICH

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