The theme of the second night of the Trump Party convention was, “How many different ways can we violate the Hatch Act.” There was Mike Pompeo doing what no secretary of state has ever done before by speaking at the convention—and doing so from a foreign location, and there was the naturalization ceremony conducted by Trump along with illegally-acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf, and there was Trump issuing a pardon as part of the convention, and there was the use of active duty Marines to add some pomp and circumstance, and there was the overall use of the White House as a political stage. That’s far from a comprehensive list. But put it all together, and Trump’s show managed to violate not just the civil, but the criminal portions of the Hatch Act.
So now we just need to wait for William Barr to move on that. While we’re waiting, it’s worth a look at the theme on night two that continued from night one: Donald Trump as the action hero who saw COVID-19 coming and took swift action even as everyone else was busy on something else. Maybe golf. The full-bore attempt to rewrite Trump’s handling of the pandemic represents an acknowledgement that the deliberate failure to address the threat represents a huge weakness for Trump. After all, killing 180,000 Americans for a perceived political advantage is a bad thing. With that in mind, Republicans kept up the hard press on the pandemic—including painting it as over.
Trump as the COVID-19 savior was a position pumped up in the night’s speeches—right up through Melania Trump’s speech delivered to a non-masked, non-distanced crowd in the freshly gutted Rose Garden. It was also the subject of several videos that ran during the night, including a campaign commercial/propaganda slice done with all the integrity of a Dinesh D’Souza movie. Over and over the night tried to get across the idea that Trump had not just “done the best that he could” but that he was “bold” and the one world leader who was right about COVID-19 when everyone else was wrong. The video painted Trump as standing up to the virus, even as everyone else turned a blind eye. Trump was presented as not just being willing to act when Democratic leaders were asleep at the wheel, but being more right than doctors and disease experts.
Strangely missing from the video was any recall of Trump saying that COVID-19 was less of a threat than the annual flu. Or Donald Trump predicting that cases would go from fifteen down to zero. Or Donald Trump claiming that the disease would go away in April when the weather warmed. Or the numerous Times that Trump said that COVID-19 would just magically disappear.
Trump deliberately ended efforts to create a national testing strategy because he thought the disease would mostly ravage states with Democratic governors, and he hoped to use the resulting deaths for political gain. There may have been worse crimes in American history, but as the numbers mount, it’s getting increasingly difficult to find anything that matches Trump’s effort at political genocide.
As The Washington Post reports, many of the speeches and presentations at the Trump convention didn’t just paint Trump as the hero of a crisis that he authored—they also tried to paint it as something that’s already in the past. Done. Solved. In the words of a former Ted Cruz aide, “The RNC is taking a ‘Mission Accomplished’ approach to coronavirus.”
The revisionist history extravaganza is so front and center at the Trump convention exactly because it’s such a heavy lift. Trump really, really needs to convince the nation that he did not golf his way through the spring, chuckling over how he was cleverly killing people for profit. When, of course, that’s exactly what he did. That’s why COVID-19 wasn’t just the subject of multiple campaign videos on the first two nights, it featured prominently in many speeches.
It’s an effort that should be met not just with derision, but with disgust. Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 was not just demonstrably the worst in the entire world, it’s not over. There is still no testing strategy, still no case tracing, still no strategic handling of materials—even as states racked up another 1,291 deaths on Tuesday. And if the United States recorded “only” another 40,000 new cases on Tuesday, in large part that’s because testing levels are actually down, falling far short of the levels Trump has promised just about as often as he’s claimed that the virus would “just go away.”
And it appears that Trump was right. The theme of the RNC on night two appeared to be that the virus has just gone away. Trump was right. Trump won. Everything is cool now. So tip your hat to Trump and move on—even if that requires stepping over a few bodies. After all, Trump did make America great again, gifting the United States with both the greatest number of cases and the greatest number of deaths.
