Although there are doubts as to whether the president’s grand acceptance speech and a fireworks display Thursday in the White House would be appropriate for a pandemic-challenging crowd of more than 1,000 people given what proponents say are “unsurpassable” conditions for those who it’s in the way of Hurricane Laura.
The RNC has had some effective moments – particularly in highlighting the stories of regular Americans from lobbyists to farmers who say they have benefited from Trump’s economic policies. Democrats may have missed an opportunity to do no more to highlight such inspiring stories.
Asked about the connection between the suspect and the Trump rally in Des Moines earlier on Wednesday, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said the White House “is not responsible for the private behavior of people who go to rallies.”
Trump supporter if not, the suspect will be held accountable through a legal process. But the incident will certainly provoke more debate about the extent to which the president’s demagogic approach to racial tensions and violence is affecting the actions of impressionable individuals in a fleeting moment.
In another strange twist, shortly after Pence announced that “we will have law and order on the streets of America,” he acknowledged the sister of Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Federal Protective Service. the Homeland Security he said “was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.”
In fact, an American lawyer says the suspect in that case is allegedly linked to the extremist Boogaloo movement, a fairly broad group of heavily armed, anti-government extremists.
A platitude on race
Pence, speaking at the Baltimore fort, where a battle in 1814 inspired the British “The Star Spangled Banner”, chose to lay the blame for unrest on the Democrats while separating the protests from their cause.
“Last week, Joe Biden did not say a word about the violence and chaos that is overcoming cities across this country,” Pence said. “Let me be clear: the violence must stop – whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha.”
“We will always stand with those who stand on the thin blue line and we will not spoil the police, not now, not ever,” he added, delivering home the harsh message of the administration’s back office.
Pence also offered a platitude, but no answers for Black Americans – without addressing the historic discrimination they have suffered from law enforcement playing over and over again in agonizing cellphone videos, and that helped a national bill on race earlier this summer after the death of Minnesota man George Floyd who stopped breathing with a policeman’s knee on his neck.
“We do not have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with African-American neighbors to improve the quality of life in our cities and towns,” Pence said.
Conventions are about playing to the basics. And there is no doubt that many Americans avoid the Trump-Pence vision of a strong response of law and order to unrest in Biden’s support of Protestants who systematically view racism in law enforcement.
But that does not mean that what Pence said Thursday night is an honest representation of the truth. And for every hagiography aimed at the president, the convention has provided some real answers on how one would get better from the crisis if Trump won another four years.
It can be argued that the most important political developments in the country on Wednesday did not come at the RNC – but in the room where NBA players met in their bio-safe bubble in Florida and decided to launch a protest that the season of threatening the league. , It already seems like one of the most important declarations of civil rights by athletes in many years, following Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee-jerk protest.
The boycott drew a sharp new line in the presidential campaign.
Biden made a strong statement of support for NBA players – athletes that the president has said he will not see because of her activism on racial rights.
“This moment demands moral leadership. And these players respond by standing up, speaking out and using their platform forever,” Biden tweeted. “Now is not the time for silence.”
Obama, who warned last week in a speech by the Democratic National Convention that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy, also offered his support.
“I commend the players at @Bucks for standing up for what they believe in, coaches like @DocRivers, and the @NBA and @WNBA for setting an example,” Obama tweeted. “It will take all of our institutions to stand up for our values.”
Trump has seized athlete protests as ammunition in his broader culture war arguments that have seen him defeat the Confederate flag and statues of Southern Civil War generals warning that American history and heritage are being attacked.
A viral whitewash
Pence, head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, sought to recreate the president’s arbitrary response to the pandemic as a string of heroic performances, suggesting that Biden had a defeatist stance on the virus has shown.
In a whitewash of laziness and the president’s cavalier approach to contain the virus in February and early March, Pence stated that Trump’s move to block foreign nationals from China to enter the country in late January, “untold life “save and” bought us time to launch the largest national mobilization since World War II. ”
In fact, Trump is wasting precious time in February – when scientists and epidemiologists call on the federal government to devise a robust testing and detection program – by urging governors to map the course for each state. His restrictions on travel from China, which Pence exaggerated Wednesday night, came too late to make a big difference in case numbers in the view of many medical experts. Many of the cases affecting the spread of the virus were later returned to Europe before Trump imposed a travel ban in March.
Although governors begged the federal government to help by providing funding for testing and using the Defense Production Act to produce more personal protective equipment, Trump repeatedly delayed those moves and never proposed a coherent national strategy to stop the virus.
But Pence claimed Wednesday night that the federal government has now “coordinated the delivery of billions of pieces of personal protective equipment” and then made a wonderful promise that a coronavirus vaccine will arrive later this year. Most experts believe that a vaccine will not be ready until 2021 at the earliest.
“Last week, Joe Biden said ‘there will be no miracle,'” Pence said Wednesday night in Fort McHenry. “What Joe does not seem to understand is that America is a nation of wonders and we are on track to have the first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year.”
After three nights when Trump’s allies fired the president as a heroic figure who would be unrecognizable to many Americans, he will challenge voters to make his own case for re-election on Thursday night.
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