First of all, I updated yesterday’s post to include the initial list of falsehoods in Trump’s RNC acceptance speech as compiled by CNN, and read off on TV by its fact-checker in the minutes after the speech ended.
For today, I’ll set aside the news today about Biden stepping down, and catch up on a few more items about this past week. Beginning with the subject of Republican lies.
NY Times, David French, 21 July 2024: One of the Republican Convention’s Weirdest Lies [shared link]
To bolster their case, Republicans misled America. Speaker after speaker repeated the claim that America was safer and the world was more secure when Trump was president. But we can look at Trump’s record and see the truth. America was more dangerous and the world was quite chaotic during Trump’s term. Our enemies were not intimidated by Trump. In fact, Russia improved its strategic position during his time in office.
If past performance is any indicator of future results, Americans should brace themselves for more chaos if Trump wins.
The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was “Make America Safe Again.” Yet the public mustn’t forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump. According to the Pew Research Center, “The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.”
With further details about the world situation, then and now. Concluding:
Trump is hoping to win the presidency in part through appealing to so-called nostalgia voters, and so far it seems to be working. Millions of Americans appear to have forgotten the bad times in Trump’s term or excuse his failures. It will be up to the Democrats to remind Americans of the aspects of the Trump years that they’ve blocked from their minds — a period that began with alarms about war with North Korea, included a war scare with Iran, and ended with Russia advancing as we retreated. It was a term that began with low crime rates and ended with the worst murder spike in generations and the Capitol under siege.
In the television show “Ted Lasso,” the titular character — a folksy American football coach who manages an English professional soccer team — tells his team that goldfish have the shortest memories in the animal kingdom. “Be a goldfish,” he tells them, urging them to forget their mistakes, and play with confidence. While a short memory can be a virtue in sports, it’s a terrible trap for voters. It makes you vulnerable to lies.
Trump wants you to be a goldfish. He wants you to empty your mind of the past so that he can fill it with his own “alternative facts.” The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed. The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans’ memories don’t improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears.
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Once again, I’m not arguing politics, exactly; rather, I’m fascinated about human nature. How is it so many Trump fans are indifferent to his lies? Do they not remember, or do they not care? And to what extent does the truth matter, except academically? Human society works through certain common agreements about how the world works, including beliefs about things that don’t physically exist, like money — here again I’m harking back to Harari. Humans live in a subjective, imaginary world. And it’s been working for quite a while.
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Shorter items for today.
Pete Buttigieg points out the obvious about J.D. Vance.
Salon, Kelly McClure, 20 Jul 2024: “It’s not that complicated”: Pete Buttigieg on why a gay billionaire is backing JD Vance, subtitled “When asked to weigh in on Peter Thiel’s reasons for supporting Vance, Buttigieg broke it down plainly: Money”
This has been obvious for decades: the wealthy support Republicans because Republicans give the wealthy tax breaks. Republicans pretend to support the religious values of evangelicals, and broader Christians, only to get votes. But when it’s convenient for them, as in this year’s Republican platform, they will easily compromise the hard-line positions, like on abortion, that the evangelicals want.
It’s super simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican party that tends to do good things for very rich men.
This Salon piece has a video. From his appearance on Bill Maher’s show.
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The opportunism of J.D. Vance.
LGBTQNtion, 19 Jul 2024: J.D. Vance’s former trans friend speaks out about how he turned hateful, subtitled “He delivered baked goods to his trans friend after their gender-affirming surgery. Now he’s calling LGBTQ+ people ‘groomers.’ ”
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Paul Krugman on J.D. Vance.
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 18 Jul 2024: J.D. Vance Puts the Con in Conservatism
J.D. Vance once feared that Donald Trump might become “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s Trump’s running mate. But never mind that history. Trump and Vance have a lot of things, including this, in common: They’re both con men who despise their most avid supporters.
Indeed, Vance, despite stiff competition, may be the most cynical major figure in modern American politics. You never know whether Trump believes the false things he says; Vance is smart enough to know that he has pulled off a monumental political bait-and-switch.
And if the Trump-Vance ticket wins, there’s a fairly good chance that, given Trump’s evident lack of interest in the details of policy and — yes — his age, Vance will, one way or another, end up running the country.
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And this, from a former governor of Maryland.
Washington Post, Larry Hogan, 19 Jul 2024: Opinion | Project 2025 shreds American values, subtitled “There is no clearer example of the threat to our way of life.”
As the details of Project 2025 have become better known, Trump has distanced himself from it.
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And finally for today, this ironic item.
Salon, Kelly McClure, 20 Jul 2024: “The Grindr Super Bowl”: Gay dating app saw influx of users during Republican National Convention, subtitled “Over 1,000 Grindr users reported an outage in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area while the RNC was underway”
Grindr of course is a gay hook-up app. In a sense, it’s replaced the need for going to gay bars. To be fair, I have to wonder, wouldn’t Grindr get a lot of traffic anytime many people gather for any kind of convention? The article here implies that in this case it was unusual, and perhaps ironic.
The 2024 Republican National Convention was a veritable sausage fest, by all accounts, with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte reporting in her on-site commentary, “Trump’s GOP is no country for MAGA women,” that mostly young men, not women, turned out to show their support for Donald Trump, JD Vance and all the other conservative big names this election year. But, according to reports from Newsweek and several other outlets, these young men were turning out for other men in a multitude of ways while visiting the Milwaukee area.
Grindr, the gay dating app launched in March 2009 — which quickly became the largest and most popular gay mobile app in the world — received outage reports from over 1,000 users in the Milwaukee area around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that collects online service status information, as reported by Newsweek, with the outlet adding intel from an anonymous user who noticed way more profiles than usual.
Now, is this simple hypocrisy? Republicans, ostensibly in support of traditional family values, while nevertheless being human, pursue their urges. George Santos responded:
“Let me tell you something: just come out of the closet boys. Come on, it’s fun. You can be gay and conservative,” he says in the video. “But look, Grindr is already outing you anyway based on the hits and guess who is in town? It’s all you conservatives.”
