Last Saturday, Donald Trump narrowly escaped an assassin’s bullet. Two days later, delegates gathered in Milwaukee to officially make him the Republican nominee for president.
From what little we know about the shooter, it’s possible that his motivations had less to do with politics than a desire to shoot someone famous and go out in a blaze of glory.
But no one at the Republican National Convention (RNC) seemed to be capable of remembering that. Ben Carson, for example, rattled off the trials the former president had endured, saying that “first they tried to ruin his reputation,” and later “they tried to imprison him,” and then “they tried to bankrupt him” and “they tried to imprison him,” and most recently “they tried to kill him.” In this telling, Trump was shot not by a twenty-year-old registered Republican with unclear motives but by a shadowy They.
In his speech on the fourth and final night, Hulk Hogan actually ripped off his shirt while ranting about how “they took a shot at my hero, and they tried to kill the next president of the United States. Enough was enough!” At one point in Trump’s own seemingly endless speech at the close of the convention, he singled out this performance by “the Hulkster” for special praise.
Peeling away these layers of theatrics and conspiracism, though, what was the political content of the convention? I watched more hours of it than a mental health professional would advise, and the main theme of those hours, beyond the personal greatness of Donald Trump, seemed to be that Joe Biden had “opened the border,” and this was the main cause of rising crime and Americans dying of fentanyl overdoses.
Speaker after speaker repeated these claims — despite the fact that these…
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Auteur: Ben Burgis
