Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Dana Milbank: Trump presented the mother of all fabrications on the White House lawn
Four years ago, when the United States was in the eighth year of an economic expansion and enjoying a time of relative peace and prosperity, Donald Trump saw only carnage.
“Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” he told the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, describing a nation full of “death, destruction . . . and “weakness.”
Now, America actually is in crisis: a world’s worst 177,000 dead from the pandemic, nearly 6 million infected, 6 million net jobs lost during Trump’s presidency, nearly $7 trillion added to the debt, and racial violence in the streets.
And Trump, accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for a second term on Thursday night, offered a most counterintuitive assessment: Everything is awesome!
He declared himself “proud of the extraordinary progress . . . and brimming with confidence in the bright future.” He said he accepted the nomination “full of gratitude and boundless optimism.” He spoke of “new heights of national achievement,” a “new spirit of unity.” [..]
But however unconvincing Trump’s upbeat assessment of the current environment, it may be his only option. Back in 1980, when presidential candidate RonaldReagan asked his famous question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” he said, “If all of the unemployed today were in a single line allowing two feet for each of them, that line would reach from New York City to Los Angeles,California.”
If we made a similar line today of all those on some type of unemployment relief, that line would cross the country five times.
Trump can’t ask Americans whether they are better off than when he took over because we all know the answer. The best he can do is pretend everything is hunky-dory, and hope people fall for it.
Paul Krugman: April Was Trump’s Cruelest Month
Covid-19 won when he tweeted LIBERATE MINNESOTA.
On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence peddled an extraordinary fantasy about Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. Pence’s tale of heroic, decisive leadership was so completely at odds with reality that pretty much the only words he spoke that weren’t lies were “a,” “and,” and “the.”
And most media organizations did, indeed, point out the falsehoods. [..]
If I had to pick a single day when America lost the fight against the coronavirus, it would be April 17. That was the day when Trump proclaimed his support for mobs — some of whose members were carrying guns — that were threatening Democratic state governments and demanding an end to social distancing. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” he tweeted, followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd amendment.” (That last bit reads an awful lot like an incitement to armed insurrection.)
In so doing, Trump, in his eagerness to see good economic numbers, chose to disregard warnings from health experts that returning to business as usual would lead to a new surge in infections. And while the Democratic governors he targeted mostly ignored his taunts, many Republican governors, especially in the Sunbelt, rushed to remove restrictions on restaurants, bars, even gyms.
The result was a vast national catastrophe.
Charles M. Blow: R.N.C. Rewrites Trump’s Racism — and America’s
The Black speakers have a job to do: erase history and cloud reality.
So far the Republican National Convention isn’t so much presenting a record of America and an administration as it is inventing one.
The speakers at the event haven’t admitted to the pathological pursuit of a white nationalist, white power agenda that has become a signature of Donald Trump’s presidency. So what we’ve heard bears little relation to the fullness of truth and is not the correct distillation of a record.
Instead, we have been feted to a parade of Black and brown faces that have sought to soften or even erase Trump’s overt history of racism to falsify an American story into one in which liberals are worse racial offenders than conservatives.
In this inside-out world, Trump has been an exemplar on racial inclusion and his defeat would usher in an era of racial division.
This is the Rip Van Winkle approach to campaigning: Just pretend that people were asleep the entire time you called Mexicans rapists, said Islam hates us, called Haiti and African nations shithole countries, separated migrant children from their parents and locked them in cages, tried to deport the Dreamers and attacked Black Lives Matter.
That is exactly what happened, particularly on the first day of the convention.
Amanda Marcotte: Mike Pence and Tucker Carlson encourage violence, while faking concern for “law and order”
Fox News host and veep pulled a classic bait-and-switch: Encouraging right-wing violence, then blaming “the left”
Under Donald Trump’s leadership, Republicans have figured out their election strategy for 2020: Actively incite and encourage violence, and then turn around and feign outrage while promising voters “law and order.” [..]
But while Trump’s provocations have backfired as often as not, his strategy of instigating violence and then blaming it on “the left” has started to spread among the Republican ranks and Fox News. Wednesday night, at both the Republican National Convention and on the party’s favorite propaganda network, the tactic of inciting violence under the guise of “law and order” was on full display.
Tucker Carlson, whose Fox News show is increasingly indistinguishable from white nationalist forums online, wasn’t even subtle about it. His opening segment on Wednesday night tried to turn Kyle Rittenhouse — a 17-year-old charged with murder after allegedly shooting three Black Lives Matters protesters, killing two of them, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night — into a hero. [..]
Unsurprisingly, then, the presence of the militia led to more disorder and violence, not less. And it’s truly rich for Carlson to claim some enthusiasm for “order” when he’s actively glorifying a young man who is accused of murder — whereas no BLM protesters in Kenosha have killed anyone, or been accused of doing so.
Vice President Mike Pence might have been more subtle with his rhetoric, but he was no less guilty than Carlson of encouraging right-wing violence in his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night.