In the last few months, up until a couple of weeks ago, I had been wondering what the Republican strategy would look like for November. Will they try to distance themselves from Trump, so in the very likely defeat he doesn't pull them down all the way down? That seemed at least possible. Maybe switching the candidate altogether? That was no longer an option. Had they had any intention of getting rid of Trump, they were offered the chance by the impeachment. They could have even come out of that situation as principled statesmen (and women) who used the embarrassing incumbent to drive the conservative agenda (tax cuts and the like) but drew a firm line at criminal activity. They blew that chance, and I bet some of them will passionately regret it. So in the end, I was mostly expecting them to dial down, to push black Republicans forward, things like that. I wasn't expecting the fierce doubling down. I was naive, I suppose.
The economy is in the gutters. There is not a week when Trump doesn't blurt out something idiotic and vile that harms him. The pandemic still kills a thousand people a day. So Trump and his party decided that the only way to victory is a desperate, no holds barred attack on Biden. Let's do everything we can to make people believe that Biden is a blood-thirsty anarchist hell-bent on destroying America as we know it!
That's an uphill battle, mostly against their own former efforts. The Trump team has been laboring for a year now to depict Biden as a doddering old fool. "Sleepy Joe" is not the moniker that was meant to put the fear of God in the law-abiding citizens. Second, urging people to believe that riots will rule the streets in Biden's America and Trump is the way to restore law and order, asks for suspending one's rational faculties to an extreme degree. Riots are ruling the streets now, in this very moment, in Trump's America. Not to mention voters put Trump in the White House exactly to destroy the established order, to shake up things, to disregard the norms. He was the chaos candidate then and he is the chaos president now.
Nevertheless, this is their plan. The crazier the riots, the better for Trump. Let's stoke racial tensions and hatred. The GOP is an almost openly racist party now. Not that their members are racists, I think most of them are not, but they behave like one. The moment Kamala Harris was announced to be Biden's running mate, Trump launched an ugly warmed-up birther attack. In a not-very-coded language, they try to scare suburban voters with the invasion of low-income (that is, black or Hispanic) neighbors. To press the point, they attach Cory Booker's name to it for the only reason that Booker is black. They are trying to make a national hero of a 17-year old white vigilante, who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha. The half-witted couple who pointed guns at BLM protesters were invited speakers at the Republican Convention.
The Convention was, by the way, in the White House, which is literally illegal. Breaking the law was combined with breaking norms, too. Secretaries of the state have traditionally kept themselves out of party politics, but it didn't stop Pompeo from giving a heartfelt love-speech to Trump. As a flagrant show of unapologetic nepotism, every member of the Trump family and their dogs (or rabid girlfriends) presented themselves. The naturalization ceremony was just a part of the show. Republicans decided to not even have a platform now. We simply want what the dear leader wants. Half of the speeches were about praising Trump, some even went so far as describing him as a most empathic and caring person.
The convention wasn't particularly outrageous in the context of the past four years, but the gestures were still striking because they were so small time. Showing off by breaking a minor law, shameless ass-licking, pandering to the far-right. All for basically one reason - to please Trump. Apart from politics aficionados, no one watches the conventions, and those have already made up their mind.
For the public, though, the line of communication is shocking. Trump publicly and repeatedly encourages voter fraud by telling his supporters to vote twice, by mail and by person. He threatens to defund the postal service to make voting by mail harder. He refuses to denounce, and his sons openly embrace, QAnon, a crackpot conspiracy-theory movement. His team put doctored videos of Biden on social media. And he, whenever he can, encourages and escalates violence. Nothing like this has ever happened in living memory. I think we can't even register the scale of the waste Trump lays on America and the world as well.
As for the moderate conservative media, anodyne reprimands are the most the National Review is capable of churning out, in the vein of "[...] it’d be even better if the president didn’t purport to have powers that he doesn’t." The rest of their time they half-heartedly spend on trying to see Biden as the vessel of the far-left or musing on the dangers of socialism. Or on the moral degeneration of abortion-supporters. In. Every. Single. Issue. Bunch of cowards and pretentious dicks. I've [expletive] stopped reading them.
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