After reading the transcript (I could not bring myself to watch it live) of President Trump’s keynote address for his party’s Midterm Convention, I have a slightly different take than most observers, and shared it at New York:
To understand Donald Trump’s stem-winding speech on the first night of the Midterm Republican Convention that nobody but him wanted to hold, you need to appreciate that the president really does believe the stuff he says about his accomplishments.
He’s not just trying to sell America on his dizzying narrative of national greatness totally destroyed (before his arrival) then restored and improved then totally destroyed again and, most recently, restored again to unimaginable heights. He’s sold on it himself. The president looks in gilded mirrors all day and sees a world-historical figure who should be basking in the grateful adulation of his subjects. Instead, his job-approval ratings are chronically terrible (which he knows, for all the talk about fake polls) and despite all he’s done to tilt the playing field via money and gerrymandering, his party is probably cruising for a bruising in November. So he went to Dallas and surrounded himself with people as grateful and excited as everyone should be, and treated himself and his superfans to another recitation of his unparalleled success story.
He could have probably wrapped up and sat down after these initial comments about the choice Americans face in the midterms:
“The choice in this election is very, very simple. Democrats are asking you to vote for their failed far-left agenda. It’s never worked, that destroyed your finances and delivered you four years of disaster, bedlam, and death under sleepy Joe Biden. And I’m asking you to let us finish the job we began with the greatest two years in the history of the presidency. This has been the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency. And together we will turn a two-year comeback into a 250-year lead.”
To state the obvious, it is impossible to imagine any previous president daring to say such words out loud, no matter how intensely the narcissistic fires burned in his heart. Nor is it plausible that someone in the White House speechwriting shop did not observe the unsettling similarities of “250-year lead” to “Thousand-Year Reich” and other totalitarian claims of a leader representing a permanent change in a nation’s destiny. But only if you accept that Trump means what he says does his overall approach in Dallas begin to make sense.
But his brilliant success across the whole range of human endeavor can only be fully comprehended as compared to the incredible depravity of the opposition. So the president deployed another battery of lies and exaggerations about the opposition party, who have, he says (making this up out of whole cloth) a “manifesto” that includes vows to “abolish the police,” “abolish prisons, abolish the United States Supreme Court, abolish the United States senators.” The “Dumocrats” also “want to abolish oil and gas” and “take away health care for our veterans.” Because no Trump speech is complete without a bit of overt racism, he also claimed Democrats “wanna steal your money for reparations” and “give it to the people that hate our country.” One of “their top congressional candidates” says he “hates family households” and “wants to destroy the American way of life.”
The lies and exaggerations about himself and the opposition go on and on and on, but nestled in the midst of it is one new proposal, or rather a fresh variation on a very old Trump impulse:
“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in, in history, we’ve never had anything like what’s happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
At a time when many Republicans (not to mention bond markets) are fretting about deficits and debt, here’s Trump with a giveaway proposal that would cost upward of a trillion dollars. Now the president famously loves giving taxpayer dollars directly to Americans so long as they understand he’s responsible for their good fortune. But the proximity to the election makes this contingent offer of free cash look unpleasantly like a bribe to voters, only costing a lot more than the half-pints of whiskey legendarily awarded to voters in rotten boroughs back in the day.
But I think there’s something else going on that is less a matter of corruption than of human nature. As he so abundantly shows in this and every other recent speech, the president is exasperated by his lack of popularity. And as his regularly mocking references to “affordability” concerns (made again in this speech, where he once again calls the issue “fake”) illustrate, he is sincerely baffled, perhaps even angered, by the ingratitude of Americans who fail to understand their incredible luck in living under his beneficent rule.
Historian and Clinton White House adviser Sidney Blumenthal recently argued that Trump’s real midterm message is one of “unrequited love.” He’s onto something. Trump’s $5,000 offer comes across like the action of a frustrated dad whose surly teenage children only approach him with their hands out. “You want money? Okay, here’s money!” says Dad, opening his wallet sadly and tossing bills at his ungrateful kids. Trump wants, and clearly thinks he deserves, love and respect from all Americans. But if he has to buy their loyalty to remain head of the household, he will. After all, the very perpetuation of the American family is at stake.
How true your summing up was spot on, Thank you for sharing.