The first night of the Republican National Convention proved to be a genuine reflection of Donald Trump: many lies and lots of name-calling.
The mostly virtual RNC Monday night was billed as a showcase for the most prominent members of Trump’s immediate family, and on Monday night Donald Trump Jr. fulfilled that promise.
In a “blood and thunder” speech that resembled “a torqued-up version” of many Fox News segments, reported the New York Times, Trump Jr. “pelted” Joe Biden with slurs like “Beijing Biden” in an effort to tie the Democratic nominee to the Covid-19 coronavirus that first emerged in China.
Biden’s long service in Washington, Trump Jr. said, made him “the Loch Ness Monster of the Swamp.”
Speaking to a near-empty auditorium in Washington D.C., he claimed that Biden’s policies would “stop our economic recovery cold,” failing to note that the pandemic has already accomplished that.
CNN said Trump Jr. and other Republican speakers “made more misleading and false claims” in one night than Democrats did over their whole convention last week.
Biden, said Trump Jr., has “pledged to repeal the Trump tax cuts, which were the biggest in our country.”
Fact-checkers quickly took issue with that, noting that while Trump’s tax cuts, which mostly benefited the superrich, amounted to less than 1% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product — far smaller than Ronald Reagan’s nearly 3% cut in 1981 — and less than two tax cuts passed under Barack Obama, reported the Washington Post.
Whatever the content of his address, Trump Jr.’s delivery was straightforward, even poised. This was in dramatic contrast to a bleak and angry speech by his longtime girlfriend, the former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle.
Standing rigidly and shouting, screaming, into the unresponsive auditorium for six minutes, Guilfoyle accused Democrats of seeking “to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom.”
Among several Republican speakers who sought to portray the mostly peaceful but occasionally violent Black Lives Matter protests of earlier this year as still threatening to ordinary Americans, Trump Jr. suggested, wrongly, that “rioting, looting and vandalism” remains widespread across the U.S.
He also accused Democrats of trying to “cancel” the Founding Fathers by tearing down statues and monuments as part of an effort to “forget the people who built our great nation,” reported The Hill.
He failed to mention that most of the statues and monuments attacked by protesters were those of Cofederates who fought the Civil War to preserve slavery in America.
Ignoring the genuine threat of the pandemic, which has killed nearly 180,000 Americans, he said the Democrats are using it in a “double standard” to block Christians from worshiping in their churches.
Trump Jr. closed with a striking flight of fantasy, reminiscent of his father’s apparent belief that America can somehow “return” to the largely imaginary world of his postwar youth — when all-white neighborhoods enjoyed life without seeing systemic racism and injustice, the suffering of the unemployed, gun violence or epidemics.
“Imagine the life you want to have,” hesaid, “one with a great job, a beautiful home, and a perfect family. You can have it.”
And all you have to do, he said, is to re-elect Donald Trump.
