Heading into the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign understood something Donald Trump didn't—he repels most people even if his cultists adore him.
That was clear by Trump's soft viewership ratings on the fourth night of the convention, coming in at 23.8 million viewers across thirteen cable and broadcast networks. Despite appropriating the grandiosity of the White House for his own political gain, Trump still fell solidly short of Joe Biden’s 24.6 million viewers. And on the third night of the convention, Kamala Harris at 22.8 million viewers trounced Mike Pence, who delivered a dismal 17.3 million viewers.
But even before we had that metric to judge by, GOP convention organizers sought to make the case for Trump mostly in his absence. Even though Trump bookended the 4-day liefest by showing up early on the first day and blathering away for nearly an hour, and then closing out the convention by blathering for more than another hour, Trump was surprisingly more absent than expected in between those two appearances.
In Trump's absence, his validators worked really hard to sell Americans on some mythical Trump figure who's really a nice guy deep down, not racist, and much more mainstream than the cringe-worthy Trump we're all subjected to on a daily/hourly and sometimes minute-by-minute basis.
"From the day that I met him, he has only wanted to make this country the best it can be," first lady Melania Trump said in her Rose Garden speech Tuesday. "America is in his heart." Of course, she also said Americans deserve "total honesty" from their president and Trump's guy to give it—so let's just say Melania's more of a grain-of-salt validator.
But the Trump-less mirage was the plan—placing fictional warm-and-fuzzy Trump in a fictional world where he never bungled the coronavirus cuz it never happened and the Biden-Harris ticket is actively planning to destroy the suburbs as white America knows them.
The problem for the Trump campaign moving forward is that fictional Trump doesn't exist and everyone damn well knows it because his main mission in life is bringing as much misery to the world as he experiences in his own miserably decrepit brain. Additionally, the fictional world in which Joe Biden is an antifa puppet and the coronavirus isn't claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives also doesn't exist and every voter who could swing this election also knows that.
We're not talking about the 30%-35% of Trump cultists who appear to have prematurely donated their brains to science. We're talking about a segment of white female Trump 2016 voters, mostly with a college education, who ditched Republicans for Democrats in the midterms and, without whom, Trump doesn't have a glimmer of hope of being reelected.
Now, it's possible that the Democratic base and Black voters in particular will show up in numbers that completely swamp Trump no matter whom he persuades to vote for him. But the fact remains that without winning back these "soft Trump" voters, the Dons stands no chance whatsoever.
And in their world, the coronavirus exists as do the protests and the chaos in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and they are worried about both to varying degrees. Of those two concerns, Trump has lost the pandemic battle and ceded the issue. We've seen the polling, it hasn't wavered, and Trump did absolutely nothing during the convention to reassure swing voters that he would miraculously start demonstrating some kind of leadership on the issue.
What's left to him and his Republican allies is to convince these voters that what is happening in Kenosha could happen anywhere and is a bigger threat to them than the pandemic.
"What we can never have in America – and must never allow – is MOB RULE," said Trump’s prepared remarks for his acceptance speech (emphasis theirs). "In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and New York."
At a New Hampshire rally on Friday night, Trump followed up, telling the crowd, "We are all that stand between the American people and the left-wing mob."
So far, the people wounded in Kenosha include: a 29-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back seven times by police, point blank; and three peaceful BLM protesters—two of whom died—shot by an armed Trump enthusiast. The violence isn't coming from the protesters. It's a product of the fury and division Trump has fueled from the moment he launched his political rise on the back of the racist birther movement seeking to delegitimize Barack Obama's presidency.
Republicans, in an act of total desperation, are going to pour gasoline on the fire Trump has ignited to detract attention away from the roughly one thousand Americans who continue to die each day due to Trump’s COVID incompetence. During Mike Pence's convention speech, he despicably suggested a federal officer, Dave Patrick Underwood, was killed by protesters in Oakland, California, when Underwood was actually executed by an adherent of the right-wing extremist "Boogaloo Boys" movement that's mission is to ignite a race war.
Naturally, pathetic Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is already getting in on the action, pretending he was attacked by a “crazed mob” of DC protesters and demanding an FBI investigation and arrests.
"Something's going on here, and it's much bigger than people think,” Paul told Fox News Friday, “but the bottom line is, we can't let the United States become Portland, and that's what my fear is: that the United States is going to be on fire if we have no police."
The only thing that's going on is Rand's overactive imagination (perhaps caused by a little PTSD after being pummeled by his neighbor several years ago) and police shooting black men while armed right-wing activists murder people.
The violence is Trump's own doing. As former Trump Homeland Security official Elizabeth Neumann explained in a video this week, “We are less safe today because of his leadership. We will continue to be less safe as long as he is in control.” Neumann, a pro-life Republican, voted for Trump in 2016. After serving several years in the Trump administration, she’s voting for Joe Biden this year.
Don't let your neighbors or your family members fall into the trap of being overwhelmed by the "chaos" in the streets of Donald Trump’s America. It's not random, it's orchestrated and Trump has been pulling the strings for years to produce the effects we are now seeing. Trump is uniquely responsible for the violence erupting on his watch. And the only way to heal this nation, to bring calm, is to boot Trump from office this November.
