Trump promised an “uplifting and positive” RNC. That didn’t last long.
President Donald Trump opened the 2020 Republican National Convention on a very dark note, delivering a rally-style speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, that began with him teasing the idea of serving more than two terms and ended with him warning that Democrats intend to steal the election. “If you really want to drive them crazy, you say ‘12 more years,’” Trump began, as the audience chanted “12 more years!” back at him. “Because we caught them doing some really bad things in 2016. Let’s see what happens.” Trump returned to the theme of a stolen election at the end. “Be very, very careful,” he concluded. “Don’t let them take it away from you.” Trump vowed Sunday night on Fox News that the RNC would be “very uplifting and positive,” yet the speech he delivered on Monday suggested it will be anything but. Trump is trying to turn his greatest failure into a success story The coronavirus continues to kill around 1,000 people per day in the US, which has been more ravaged by the pandemic than almost all comparable countries. With more than 177,000 total deaths, the US has 22 percent of the world’s total despite having just 4 percent of the world’s population, and the country hasn’t had a day below 30,000 new confirmed cases in more than two months. Trump has done little in response but try to shift blame and bluster. Lately, he’s resorted to twisting statistics out of context to make a misleading case that the US’s economic recovery has largely already happened (despite unemployment being over 10 percent), and that other countries like Japan and New Zealand are currently enduring similar outbreaks (never mind that new case numbers in those countries are extremely low in comparison to the US). On Monday, Trump tried to spin the US coronavirus response into a success story, while offloading all blame for everything that has gone wrong onto governors. “Many of the governors were totally ill-prepared. Nobody wants to say that, but it’s supposed to work that way: federalist,” Trump said, ignoring that governors lack the resources and jurisdictional authority to handle a pandemic that has spread like wildfire across state boundaries.
