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Never has a changed man seemed so completely and thoroughly exactly the same.
After days of promises from Republican “insiders” and media talking heads that Donald Trump, post assassination attempt, would be dialing down the rhetoric, softening his speech, calling for unity and proving that he’s a “changed man,” Trump took to the RNC stage and … was exactly the same as always.
Only longer. More boring. And somehow weirder.
In a speech that ran on and on and on for more than 90 minutes, Trump played all of the old, tired bits about “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and the “late, great Hannibal Lecter,” and tried again to convince everyone that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him (despite zero evidence).
He praised autocrat Viktor Orban and then criticized George W. Bush. He said Kim Jong Un missed him and he said Joe Biden was terrible.
He also lied. A lot.
He lied about immigration numbers, complete with a chart that misrepresented what the immigration numbers were when Trump left office. He lied about manufacturing jobs. He lied about oil production. He lied about COVID being used to “rig the election.”
None of that is a surprise, of course. This is what Trump does, what he’s been doing his entire life.
He lies. All the time, about pretty much everything. He lies when the truth will do. He does it so much that we have become somewhat immune to it, even as we continue to hold other politicians – even within the Republican Party – to a more traditional set of standards.
Somehow, all of the lying and purposeful acts to mislead people – like with the immigration chart – is just Trump being Trump. And maybe it would be, if at the end of his speech, he wandered off stage and went back to his hotel and his day job as host of a reality TV show where he fired Carrot Top for poorly running a fake waffle company.
But this is the leader of the free world. Literally the most important position in the world.
It shouldn’t go to a delusional, incompetent narcissist who just four years ago attempted a coup to remain in power despite a free and fair election being conducted that ousted him.
Let’s be honest here: There is nothing but bluster and Obama and Biden holding up Trump’s campaign.
The only reason he can begin to fool anyone into believing that he was remotely successful as president is because the guy before him – President Barack Obama – laid a foundation that was impossible to spoil and the guy after him — Biden — so quickly fixed his incredible bungling of the pandemic. The only thing Trump did was hand out tax breaks – temporary ones for working folks and big, fat permanent ones for the ultra-rich – and have the good fortune to leave office before the economic effects of his pandemic mishandling could be realized.
If you doubt this, tell me what else he did? What other policies did Trump and Republicans implement that aided the economy – in any way?
You can’t do it because there are none.
The dude held 15 infrastructure weeks and didn’t manage to fill a dang pothole in any town in America.
In the meantime, in Alabama alone, Joe Biden and his infrastructure plan has funded thousands of miles of road improvements, thousands more miles of broadband expansion and repaired more bridges than I even knew we had. That plan, along with others, also dragged us out of a recession left behind by Trump and created thousands of Alabama jobs.
Not that it matters.
Because Alabama conservatives have bought into the con man’s spiel. And as the old saying goes, it’s so much easier to con a man than to convince a man that he’s been conned. So, there were Alabama’s delegates, screaming proudly that this state was nominating the biggest con man to ever grace a political stage.
By the end of the night, and the merciful end of that forever-speech delivered by Trump, a bit of harsh reality seemed to have settled over the RNC. As attendees checked their watches between yawns, there appeared to be a realization that, despite reports otherwise, this was the same old Trump with the same old grievances and the same old spiel.
And he’s still got the same old problems with women voters, who don’t really care for being told they can’t make their own healthcare decisions, or that IVF isn’t legal anymore or that birth control might soon be illegal. And his VP pick saying that women should stay in abusive marriages probably doesn’t help much either.
It seems impossible that Republicans could blow this shot at the White House, as Biden and Dems seriously consider making an unheard change at the top of the ticket. And yet, they’ve selected the one person within the party’s upper echelon who could lose to Biden/whoever the Dems pick.
Thursday night was a stark reminder of that fact, as Trump’s loony-bin stories and obvious lies reminded a nation why they had enough of him the last time around. All that would have been required, on the heels of Saturday’s assassination attempt, was a toned-down, more introspective, kinder candidate, who legitimately spoke of unity and a stronger America together.
Instead, Republicans sent a con man to do a competent man’s job.
