An insane, rambling mess of lies

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I can’t believe I watched the whole thing. One hour and thirty-two minutes of incoherent, low-energy fascist ravings.¹ Last night at the closing act of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump couldn’t remember the name “Star Wars” (he claimed Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative was nicknamed “starship” or “spaceship”), got confused about the current governor of Wisconsin (he said some Republican former governor in the audience — probably Scott Walker, who left office five years ago, while Trump was still in the White House — “is doing a very nice job”), and claimed with his trademark brand of brain rot and abject racism that “illegal aliens” had taken “107%” of the jobs created under Biden.

Trump also pledged not only to repeat his 2020-2021 self-coup d’état if he ever loses another election² , but demanded that all the criminal charges he is facing — including, presumably, his 34 felony convictions for concealing a hush-money payment in service of election fraud — be thrown out to give him a better chance in November.

Trump lied so much and so profligately — lies building off of lies, riffing past lies baked into his audience’s brains — that it was impossible to keep track of all of them. He pledged to end the “electric car mandate.” (There is no electric car mandate.) He claimed he was “the first president in modern times to start no new wars.” (This is a weird claim — Carter didn’t start any wars, and Biden hasn’t started any either, though he is indelibly tarnished by his support for Israel’s Gaza War, including U.S. bombing of Yemen. Trump bombed Syria, Iraq, and Libya, killed countless civilians across Africa and the Middle East, broke his promise to end the “forever wars” in Afghanistan, and by sheer luck avoided starting major wars — up to and including a nuclear war — with Iran and North Korea during his four years in office.)

But it isn’t worth getting lost in the pedantic details; details that even Trump doesn’t waste time on. What matters here is the overall image he and his coterie wanted to paint: an image constructed by surrounding the doddering, terrified 78-year-old manchild with comic symbols of hypermasculinity (Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—the latter of whom was last seen drunkenly slapping his wife in a Mexican night club on New Year’s Eve); by Trump kissing the fireman’s uniform of his “fan” killed by a stray bullet at his rally, and wearing the comically oversized ear bandage to remind everyone of his near-brush with death. It is the image of Trump as God-appointed leader, the nation’s savior, and protector against the violent “un-human” hordes.

Major media, parroting the Trump team’s pre-spin, had promised for days that the speech would be an exercise in “unity,” reflecting a newfound humility that Trump had allegeldy gained from his brush with assassination last weekend. Racket readers were better prepared: As I argued on Tuesday, Trump’s obvious move would be to follow the example of fascist leaders before him —including Generalissimo Francisco Franco and, yes, Hitler — in claiming that his near-death experience was “proof” that his authority was sanctioned by the divine.

In fact, let’s make it a game. Who said it: Trump last night, or Adolf Hitler in the wake of a failed July 20, 1944, assassination attempt:

1. That the Almighty protected me on that day I consider a renewed affirmation of the task entrusted to me. In the years to come I shall continue on this road, uncompromisingly safeguarding my people's interests, oblivious to all misery and danger, and filled with the holy conviction that God Almighty will not abandon him who, during all his life, had no desire but to save his people from a fate it had never deserved ….

2. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God. And watching the reports over the last few days, many people say it was a providential moment … For the rest of my life, I will be grateful … Our resolve is unbroken and our purpose is unchanged, to deliver a government that serves the [nation’s] people better than ever before. Nothing will stop me in this mission, because our vision is righteous and our cause is pure.

How did you do?³

Trump then used his shooting story (a story he pledged to never tell again, lol), to launch into his signature promise: a pledge to round up 20 million “illegal immigrants,” herd them into concentration camps, and deport them. He did so by, helpfully, reminding everyone that the assassination attempt that could have taken his life came just as he was launching into that ultranationalist fantasia. (The highest estimate of unauthorized immigrants, which includes those who overstayed tourist or work visas, is 11 million, the vast majority of whom as of 2021 had lived in the U.S. for a decade or more. This means that, if he is serious about the 20 million number, that Trump is planning to round up legal residents as well, if not U.S. citizens whose birthright citizenship status he plans to revoke.)

The AV techs then surrounded him what Trump called “the chart that saved my life” — a grossly misleading combination of conflated numbers and outright lies he uses to make his case. (Among other things, chart confuses successful migrants with apprehensions — i.e., would-be immigrants who didn’t make it across the border — and mendaciously claims that Trump left office at the nadir of apprehensions, which came in the depths of the initial COVID pandemic, as opposed to a year later when migration attempts had long since started rising again.)

The crowd at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum ate it up. Fox News’ cameras cut to women with heavy eyeliner weeping as Trump repeated his lies about immigrants — terrorists, insane asylum escapees, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” — frequently preying on defenseless white women. They frantically waved signs reading “Mass Deportation Now!” (A day earlier, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was speaking, they also chanted “Send them back!” I’m not sure if they did that while Trump was speaking as well.)

The New York Times tried to “contextualize” Trump’s threats a few days ago, noting that the “costs and hurdles would be enormous.” But this is, again, missing the forest for the pedantic trees. The point isn’t that it would be easy or legal to round up 20 million people, any more than it was going to be easy or possible to “build the wall” during his previous term. It’s that this is the direction he wants to drag the entire country in.

And don’t be confused about this: Rounding up 20, or even 10 or 5, million people is a project that will touch every aspect of life in the United States. It will mean checkpoints and random raids at workplaces and in neighborhoods; it will mean mistakes, wrongful detentions and deportations, racial profiling and state violence at an unprecedented scale. I can tell you from having covered past threatened mass expulsions, particularly in the Dominican Republic, that even when the full extent of the government’s threat is not realized, in practice it is an exercise in terror and a virtual carte blanche for violence against the targeted minority, up to and including outright lynching.

The Times wrote that “consensus among immigration experts and former homeland security officials is that logistical, legal, bureaucratic and cost barriers would make it virtually impossible to carry out the mass deportations Mr. Trump seeks in the span of a four-year presidential term.” But what legal barriers? The Supreme Court just ruled that a president can do whatever he wants, so long as it is an “official act.” And who says Trump — who, again, tried to overthrow an election by force — will allow himself to be limited to just one more four-year term?

And I guess, at root, that’s why I and other political observers sat through all 92 minutes of the longest, most rambling, incoherent speech by a major party nominee in televised history. Because if the Democrats, media, and the rest of the supposed pro-democracy opposition don’t get it together and figure out how to stop this immediately, it will be a preview of the next chapter of our lives.

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1  I don’t want to get derailed into theater criticism, but I really have to underline the length of the thing. Only two prior nominees in the 70 years since people started measuring these things have droned on for just over an hour: Bill Clinton in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2004 — both notably at their renomination conventions, when they had started running out of people to tell them no. Trump holds the records for the top three speaking lengths, and last night’s bested his previous record-holder, his similarly unhinged “I alone” speech from eight years ago, by nearly 20 minutes. You could almost fit Biden’s 2020 acceptance (a nice tight 24 minutes and change) in the difference.

2  “And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat. We’re never going to let it happen again.”

3  Sources: Hitler radio address, January 30, 1945; Trump acceptance speech, July 18, 2024.