Unsurprisingly, the first night of the Republican National Convention (RNC), which kicked off on Monday, was full of lie-riddled nonsense. Fact-checkers from numerous outlets published point-by-point takedowns of many of the lies. As The Washington Post fact-checking team put it, the “first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention was a fire hose of false or misleading claims, mostly drawn from President Trump’s arsenal of falsehoods.” Some of the examples highlighted in a CNN fact-check included the nonsensical lie that Trump has kept every single one of his campaign promises, the lie that Democrats as a whole want a government takeover of health care, the lie that Democrats want to “abolish” the suburbs, and more. It’s as if Republicans didn’t even care about reality.
‘At times, the speakers and prerecorded videos appeared to be describing an alternate reality: one in which the nation was not nearing 180,000 deaths from the coronavirus; in which Mr. Trump had not consistently ignored serious warnings about the disease; in which the president had not spent much of his term appealing openly to xenophobia and racial animus; and in which someone other than Mr. Trump had presided over an economy that began crumbling in the spring.’
Saying that the speakers seemed to “at times… be describing an alternate reality” seems like a generous understatement.
Some of the signposts of that alternate universe in which the Republican convention speakers seemed to be operating included their touting of low unemployment rates from months ago as if the U.S. isn’t still struggling through staggeringly huge levels of unemployment and related economic calamity that have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s failure to effectively respond to the Coronavirus pandemic. As CNN noted, “Multiple speakers… touted the low unemployment rate America has witnessed under the Trump administration… [which] ignores the economic destruction caused by the coronavirus pandemic.”
The signposts of the nonsensical alternate universe go on from there — during his speech, Trump Jr. claimed that “Trump’s policies have been like rocket fuel to the economy and especially the middle class,” but as CNN notes, “middle class income grew in the final years of the Obama administration but has stagnated under Trump,” and of course, there’s that major problem of months of huge unemployment. During the most recent full week for which a report was available as of Tuesday, the total number of unemployment claims across the country spiked to back over 1 million. For 22 weeks in a row, unemployment claims per week have been above the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 claims that was set in 1982.
Again — it’s as if Trump and the Republican speakers simply do not care about basic reality. They are fully committed to their political ideology — there’s little to no turning back for them. At the altar of Donald Trump’s ego, they have sacrificed basic decency, truth, and so many more qualities that might be taken for granted in other contexts. There is little to no reason to take Trump and his political allies as serious people in any sense.
