Photo credit: Shealah Craighead
The Republican National Convention, a four-night fictional television show, celebrated a fantasyland version of America that has never existed under Donald Trump.
The imaginary nation successfully defeated the deadly coronavirus pandemic under the flawless leadership of a president working tirelessly “from dawn to midnight” protecting American lives to create a booming economic recovery that any day now will begin rehiring 30 million unemployed workers and reopening all the small businesses he’s destroyed to Make America Great Again, Again.
To believe such an incredible lie, voters have to ignore everything they’re still experiencing in their daily lives and forget all their legitimate fears for their own health and economic futures. Instead Trump wants Americans to be gripped with an absurd fear of what one speaker called “the terrifying prospect of a Joe Biden presidency,” a bizarre combination of words not usually found together in the English language.
After the Democratic Convention failed to nationally showcase Milwaukee because it was still far too dangerous to hold mass gatherings under Trump, another horrific police shooting of a black man drew national attention 40 miles away to Kenosha.
Milwaukee Can be Proud
Milwaukee is justifiably proud of the national leadership of its two professional sports franchises in response. The Milwaukee Bucks shut down the NBA playoffs to demand Republicans controlling the Wisconsin Legislature pass police reform. The Milwaukee Brewers suspended their own play in solidarity.
The Republican reactions in Wisconsin and from Trump were far less admirable. Republican legislators briefly opened a special legislative session on racial justice in policing called by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers without even discussing the issue and delayed action.
Trump at the convention showed no sympathy at all for the victim or his family after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back at point-blank range as Blake’s children, 3, 5 and 8-years-old, watched screaming and crying in his SUV. Blake somehow survived, paralyzed from the waist down from a spinal injury.
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Like many recent cases of police brutality, Americans saw the horror of the police action only because it was captured on video by a witness. Kenosha police oppose wearing body cameras and famously park facing walls or raise the hoods of their squad cars to prevent dashboard cameras from recording encounters with citizens. Two nights after the ugly incident, a 17-year-old Trump supporter armed with an AR-15 shot and killed two Kenoshans and wounded a third during a racial protest of the Blake shooting.
Trump’s only public message from all that was to condemn the protesters: “What we can never have in America is mob rule! 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.”
Long History
It wouldn’t have been hard for Trump to emphasize the right of Americans to protest the long history of police violence against African Americans as well as the importance of controlling public anger to prevent violence and destruction. Biden does it repeatedly.
“As I said after George Floyd’s murder, protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary,” Biden said of Kenosha. “Burning down communities is not protest, it’s needless violence. Violence that endangers lives. Violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community.”
Biden’s views are those of the overwhelming majority of Americans in 2020. That’s what makes Trump’s cartoon of a nightmare future where “no one will be safe in Biden’s America” so absurd. According to Trump, Biden only pretends to be a decent American politician. Biden has a diabolical plan to demolish every suburb and set cities aflame from coast-to-coast to destroy the American Dream.
Trump’s witnesses were Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two millionaire personal injury attorneys, testifying they barely escaped with their lives when Black Lives Matter protesters walked right past their 52-room, palatial home on a private street in St. Louis to demonstrate outside the mayor’s house. “I’m still scared,” Mark claimed in media interviews. “I thought we were going to die.” Patricia warned convention viewers: “What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country.” Adding injury to their harrowing ordeal, the McCloskeys were charged with felony counts of threatening the protesters with deadly weapons, Patricia’s pistol and Mark’s AR-15.
The dire convention warnings about Biden allowing African Americans to walk right into wealthy, white neighborhoods spoiled the other major fantasy Republicans were promoting— that Trump isn’t as racist as most people think so no one has to be embarrassed about voting for him. Trump refuted that fantasy by warning no American life will be safe under Biden from violence and shootings sweeping the country. Trump doesn’t appear to believe the black lives threatened under his presidency by violence and shootings from police and his own armed supporters are American lives.
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