The speech delivered on the final night of the Republican convention by Donald Trump was extraordinary. That is, it wasn’t ordinary in its tone, in its content, in its delivery, or in its intent.
Its tone was apocalyptic; constantly driving a picture of a dystopian America under assault from within and from without—an America on the brink of chaos and dissolution. Its content reinforced that tone, drawing on both anecdote and statistic to pound the drum of not simply approaching, but crushingly present doom. It’s delivery was apoplectic, red-faced, screaming, angry and sweating. And the summary intent was simple: fear. Fear of the other. Fear of the future. Fear of the humiliation and betrayal.
It was extraordinary. It was unique. It was the ugliest speech ever delivered in the United States—certainly so when it comes to speeches delivered in the name of a major political party, and quite possibly true even if the ranks of venues were expanded to include basement gatherings of Aryan Nations and the bonfires of the KKK.
It was the most fear-filled, hate-filled, anger-filled call to fascism ever delivered in this nation. Bar none.
Treating Donald Trump’s blackshirt recruitment session as an ordinary political speech is in itself dangerous. This wasn’t a normal speech. This isn’t a normal candidate. Analyzing either of them as we might inspect the latest address of the local House candidate before the Rotarians isn’t merely pointless, it risks legitimizing Trump in a way that’s itself dangerous.
Still, looking at the content of the speech is necessary, and marshaling objections to its dark-night of the American soul is going to be vital to keeping the sound of boots, boots, boots from our cities.
At more than an hour and quarter, Trump’s massive tirade was so lengthy that a thorough review is painful to contemplate. Even just combing the numbers and statements of “fact” that Trump made is a challenge. Thankfully, some organizations put teams of reporters at just that, and have produced compilations of where Trump went off.
The Washington Post has a fact-checking of Trump’s speech that blows away the shadows of Trump’s speech.
The dark portrait of America that Donald J. Trump sketched in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention is a compendium of doomsday stats that fall apart upon close scrutiny. Numbers are taken out of context, data is manipulated, and sometimes the facts are wrong.
The Post calls out Trump for excising from his nightmare-vision statistics showing economic growth and falling crime. The review also points out Trump’s manipulation of select statistics to make even improving situations seem dire. The Post points up again and again places where Trump misrepresented the numbers, ignored evidence, or was quite simply wrong.
The New York Times points up Trump’s many factual errors, though their dry-as-toast response treats Trump’s polemic as exactly what it wasn’t—just another speech.
• “Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.”
Fact Check: Those numbers come from a report by the Department of Homeland Security, which told Congress late last year that nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants have been ordered deported but remain in the country. Mr. Trump did not mention that most of those 180,000 are likely people charged with nonviolent crimes.
Politico has an article that tackles Trump’s assertions with lengthier responses.
“The Iran [nuclear] deal ... gave back to Iran $150 billion.”
Trump often criticizes the United States for giving $150 billion to Iran through the nuclear deal. He’s referring to the Iranian assets that the U.S. froze through its sanctions. Experts aren’t certain how much is frozen in total, with many estimating a lower figure.
The nuclear deal allows Iran to access some of this money as the U.S. and other countries lift sanctions on Tehran. However, other sanctions remain in place and so far, Iran has only received a few billion dollars under the deal. The reasons for that are varied and Iran will likely unlock more funds in the months and years ahead. But they haven’t suddenly received a $150 billion windfall as Trump suggests.
Of the three, the Post review provides a degree of context as well as explaining the manipulations Trump used to generate “proof” of America’s eminent collapse.
In the end, it’s clear enough what Trump did in order to direct the burning eye of hate across a crumbling America.
Where there was good news, he ignored it.
This was the case with most of the economy, where Trump simply avoided giving any numbers because those numbers would almost invariably be positive.
When facts are inconveniently positive — such as rising incomes and an unemployment rate under 5 percent — Trump simply declines to mention them. He describes an exceedingly violent nation, flooded with murders, when in reality, the violent-crime rate has been cut in half since the crack cocaine epidemic hit its peak in 1991.
Where there was almost all good news, he selected for the bad.
This was the primary approach on both immigration and crime, where a single underperforming location or brief reversal from statistics with a positive trend was plucked out and presented as if the sea of good news did not exist.
Trump cites a 17% increase in homicide in America’s 50 largest cities in 2015, a figure that appears to come from a Washington Post analysis of data the paper gathered earlier this year. The FBI’s annual report for 2015 is still not out, but a half-year report out in January had murders up 6.2% nationally. Still, according to the official, full-year national tallies, murder rates have declined nationally under Obama from 5.4 per 100,000 in 2008 to 4.5 in 2014.
Where he couldn’t find news that seemed dire enough, he simply made it up.
Whether it was a rising tide of police deaths, or a massive rate of black unemployment, where reality could not be made to cooperate through selective editing, Trump didn’t hesitate to fabricate values dark enough to suit his polemics.
• “The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 percent compared to this point last year.”
Fact Check: In fact, the Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks officer deaths, reports that 68 police officers have been killed so far this year, almost exactly the same as the 69 who were killed in the same period last year.
