By William Rivers Pitt,

Truthout

The Los Angeles Times wins the prize for best description of the thing that happened on my TV last night: “Welcome to a parallel universe.”

You cannot fully wrap your mind around what took place on the first evening of the Republican National Convention unless and until you bear witness to what took place that morning. Donald Trump was re-nominated in Charlotte via a genuinely creepy delegate roll-call video that looked like a flip-card cartoon of aggrieved mostly white male faces. The production value was shabby in its speediness — a bunch of delegates were chopped off mid-word as they endorsed — and then, of course, it got worse.

None other than the nominee himself suddenly appeared before the mostly-unmasked crowd of delegates for the first of multiple appearances at the convention that day. CBS and ABC cut into their regular daily programming to carry chunks of Trump’s volcanically fact-free rant to the faithful, an eerie flashback to 2016 and the $2 billion in free air time the networks gave the Trump campaign because mayhem is good television.

“This is the greatest scam in the history of politics, I think, and I’m talking about beyond our nation. What they’re doing is using COVID to steal an election. They are using COVID to defraud the American people, all of our people, of a fair and free election, and we can’t do that,” Trump told the crowd. “We’re going to win this election. The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election. We’re going to win this election.”

In the background, as Trump raved about Democrats using the pandemic he failed to contain as a vehicle for stolen electoral victory, shouts of “Yes!” and “Right!” could be heard. This was the appetizer, the tone-setter for the remainder of the day. GOP promises of an upbeat, optimistic convention went by the boards before lunch. From that point on, it was the Trump Show from soup to nuts.

“The absence of Republican Party heavyweights is vivid,” I wrote yesterday morning. “Instead, a great many of the week’s speakers are either family-connected to Trump, or are people who gained fame by going viral in a video that Trump likely saw in his Twitter feed. Due entirely to the influence of the man at the middle of it all, the Republican National Convention appears poised to be little more than a trolling festival designed to ‘own the libs.’”

So it was. A part of my skull is going to vibrate forever with the fear-fetishing of Kimberly Guilfoyle, campaign official and girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr. “They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear,” she warned. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live.”

Was she the worst of the lot? Not by many long nautical miles. It’s not real, what was portrayed last night, any more than all of the pig-eyed lies Trump has unspooled over these long years were real.

Read the Article →