If there’s anything that the RNC convention has been about it’s been telling the story of how Donald Trump personally stepped in front of the coronavirus and saved America from even getting so much as a sniffle. If there’s anything else it’s been about, it’s been demonstrating just how much Trump, other people also named Trump, and everyone working for Trump, just doesn’t give a monkey’s ass about violating the Hatch Act. And if there’s anything else it’s been about, it’s been about glossy infomercials with lots of brass in the music, designed to sell the idea that Donald Trump created every job on his way to saving the world.
The only truthful part of any of that is that it is “the world.” Because it’s certainly not the United States. The videos promoting Trump have included healthcare workers in Thailand and factories in Ukraine. That’s because the source of much of the footage contained in the Trump promotions is clip services where you can pick up what you want by typing phrases like “happy nurses” or “busy factory.” The idea that Trump is promoting his MAGAgenda with images from overseas is amusing, but there’s more to it than just the haste and laziness with which Trump’s video hagiography was constructed. These images are in there because of two important reasons: One, Trump’s whole team lives by the motto that was emblazoned on the back of Melania’s coat—they simply don’t care; two, the only actual footage of Trump’s activities over the last two years would be restricted to a golf course or a campaign rally.
Sure, Donald Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane survivors is sickly humorous … but it’s also rare. Though Trump doesn’t hesitate to spend taxpayer money to visit his own golf courses, or to arrange a mid-pandemic rally/hotspot in the making, in the large, he is not a traveling man. He hasn’t been to California to see the devastation of the wildfires firsthand. He most definitely has not clapped on a mask to visit hospitals on the front-line of the pandemic.
Trump may occasionally mount a mini-rally in the parking lot of a factory, but after making claims about saving the air conditioners, or washing machines, or Oreos, he prefers to retreat to a comfortable place—one with a cart, a buffet line, and a decided lack of working-class people.
The reason that the RNC is running ads copy-pasted together from collections of international clip art, rather than showing real images of real U.S. healthcare workers or real new U.S. factories is that those things don’t exist. Doctors and nurses in the United States are not grateful for a national response that has included a shortage of both tests and protective gear. Workers are not excited about factories that closed at record rates, including the factories that Trump specifically told workers that he would save. Trump lied about the impact of those factories to begin with, lied about being able to save them, and now he’s lying about them again … even though they’re gone.
The game of “spot the stock footage” may seem trivial, but it’s emblematic of what Trump really has to show for four years in office—a record so spotty that it has to be pasted over with images from elsewhere. Including, appropriately enough, Russia.
If Trump wants to record some real video of what he’s done to America, he could try talking to the coal miners who trusted him because he claimed he was going to save that doomed industry, or talking to the GM workers who stayed in their homes after Trump told them not to sell after he promised more auto jobs in the area. The RNC might consider interviewing some real healthcare workers who were forced to use garbage bags as personal protective equipment. They might show some video of children in cages, or police murders, or white supremacists waving torches. Because all those things aren’t horror stories of “what will happen if Trump loses.” They’re what happened because Trump won.
They might consider mentioning that the United States plunged into a recession in February, at a time when the number of known cases of COVID-19 in the nation was less than 100.
In their revisionist history efforts, Trump’s followers have been claiming that Obama left Trump a recession that he turned into the “greatest economy in history.” The truth is exactly the opposite: Barack Obama handed over to Donald Trump a nation that was strong and an economy that had been steadily growing for eight years. Trump took that economy and sent it into recession, and he took that nation and crushed it.
But that probably doesn’t generate very inspiring clips.
