The writing was on the wall last week, when Jacksonville, Florida’s Republican sheriff said there was no way he could provide security for the planned in-person Republican National Convention. And now it’s official: There won’t be a Jacksonville convention.
And that makes yet another humiliating failure for a president that hasn’t just made a mess of his own financial and familiar affairs, but has virtually broken America. And as usual, when it comes to your typical Donald Trump failure, all of this was easy to predict.
Trump needs his convention like a fish needs water. His moribund, low-energy campaign stems mostly from two factors: the lack of a woman or person of color at the top of the Democratic ticket to attack, and the inability to host his signature rallies. The latter, in particular, already led him to make one of the most hilarious unforced errors of his presidency—his sparsely attended Tulsa rally.
Thus, Trump was determined to deliver his triumphant convention speech in front of an adoring crowd, no matter the obstacles. So when original host city Charlotte, North Carolina, said it could not allow Trump’s plans for 19,000 people packed into an arena with no social distancing or masks, Trump took his ball and went home.
North Carolina officials were like, “See ya! Go spread your coronavirus somewhere else.” Well, that’s not a direct quote, but that was the gist.
Now imagine you’re the president who desperately needs a big crowd, but you’ve bungled the response to a global mass-death event and the disease has killed off over 100,000 of your constituents. That kinda limits you! So who do you turn to?
Why, Florida of course. It’s one of only a handful of states governed by someone as stupid and irresponsible as Trump: Gov. Ron DeSantis. (The other worst offender, Gov. Brian Kemp, also tried to get the gig.)
Yet the idea of moving something as massive in scale as a convention to an entirely new city, all on a lark, was always an impossibility.
Trump threw his temper tantrum on June 2. The Republican National Committee announced Jacksonville would get the gig on June 11. The convention date is August 24-27. So Republicans expected to plan an event that usually takes years to put together in only 10 weeks.
Of course, Florida wasn’t immune from the same safety problems facing planners back in North Carolina, so Republicans began to “scale back” their plans. They even began discussing the possibility of having Trump give his acceptance speech outdoors, in Florida, in August. In Jacksonville, the average August temperature is 90.9F with 80.3% humidity. Oh, and there are an average 15 days of rainfall for the month, with 6.8 inches of precipitation.
I was rooting for them to get it done—I really was.
But reality was never going to allow it. Remember how stupid tight the timeline was? So get this: As of this Tuesday, local officials still didn’t have a plan from the GOP for what Republicans planned to do! And that’s when Jacksonville’s sheriff stepped up and said it wasn’t going to happen.
"We knew some months back that this effort was going to be a huge lift…with a timetable that was aggressive to say the least, the communication required to make the critical steps come together just never seemed to gel. And still has not," Duval County Sheriff Mike Williams said to Politico. “Listen, maybe if things had gone perfectly, we’d gotten there, but they didn’t,” he added. “I mean, from the very beginning, there’s been challenges with communication. ... You know, I need to know the things I need. They’re going to be here in a month. And as it stands right now. I have no idea.”
A month out from the convention, the sheriff tasked with providing security still had “no idea” about what was being requested of him. Meanwhile, his budget had been slashed from $50 million to $33 million, and he couldn’t find enough police statewide to reinforce his force—they were all dealing with COVID matters back home. In all, he had commitments for only 500 officers, when he needed 2,000.
This being Trump’s GOP, you know the behind-the-scenes “planning” was a clusterfuck. You know that party officials likely had no idea that they were supposed to just up and move a massive event until they read that tweet from Trump. And then everyone, as usual, scrambled to appease the man-child’s latest tantrum, even when logic and reality screamed in their faces that it just wasn’t going to be possible.
Yet everyone enables Trump, from the RNC, to his governor friends like DeSantis and Kemp, to conservative media. As a result? Who knows how many millions the Republican Party just wasted trying to make Jacksonville happen. Now they have to go back to Charlotte, tails between their legs, admitting defeat, and trying to salvage something from the wreckage.
Meanwhile, Charlotte and North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Cooper can chuckle at Trump’s sorry state of affairs. After being on the receiving end of Trump’s fury and accused of all manner of “playing politics” by trying to undermine Trump’s convention, it turns out that even Florida, with the worst governor, couldn’t allow a mass-spreader event to take place.
So what now? It’s back to Charlotte. Republicans already have the facilities necessary to stage their convention. Maybe Trump can speak to a sparsely filled convention hall, with attendees masked, six feet apart. And if he doesn’t like it?
No one cares anymore.
Update: Look at this bullshit:
Trump said on Thursday he informed his team that his focus was on protecting the American people, even though aides advised him they could make an in-person convention safe.
"I looked at my team and I said the timing for this event is not right. It's just not right," Trump said at the White House. "To have a big convention, it's not the right time."
"There's nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe," Trump said.
No, this isn’t about Trump showing “leadership.” It was about security saying “we can’t do it.” It was about Jacksonville saying “you gotta mask up.” And it was about a Florida and America besieged by a virus that Trump himself has done nothing to stem.
Florida Republicans, who have been scrambling to piece together the components necessary to pull off the Jacksonville convention, received little heads up about the President's decision to cancel the event.
I laughed ha ha! Trump doesn’t give a shit about anyone, certainly not these peons trying to make his impossible demands a reality. When will people learn?