Here lies Donald Trump
After “profoundly” accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency Thursday night, (the word he so artlessly groped for and failed to find was “solemnly”), Donald Trump went on to tell a series of lies. It is my wearily disgusted duty, with the assistance of the CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, to discredit some of those lies.
But first, it’s worth noting that the “Law and Order” president once again made a mockery of the law by using the sacred house of Abraham Lincoln as a backdrop for his infamy. As Adam Schiff put it, “The law prohibits using taxpayer resources to promote a campaign. Period.” Perhaps this particular incarnation of the myth of American exceptionalism in the form of Donald Trump is best explained by, when it comes to obeying the law, Donald Trump will always be the exception.
So if you’re an American taxpayer who doesn’t want to contribute money to Donald Trump’s campaign, I’m afraid you already have. Money from your taxes goes to maintaining the White House and the Washington Monument and both were enlisted (or dare I say “prostituted”) in the promotion of Donald Trump’s presidency. In short you have a right to be pissed off at the misuse of your very own tax money.
Anyway, in his 70 minute acceptance speech Trump made at least 20 “false or misleading claims,” according to Daniel Dale of CNN. These include claims that Joe Biden says he will take down the border wall. Biden has explicitly said the opposite, that he will not take any part of the wall between Mexico and the United States down, and intends to maintain border security between the two nations. What he did say is he will not continue with Trump’s idiotic and expensive and ineffective border wall.
Speaking of the border wall, Trump also claimed in his speech that he has built over 300 miles of his new wall. In fact he’s only added five miles of the new wall to date. There has been routine work on three hundred miles of existing wall. That work probably would have been done anyway.
Trump took credit for the Veteran’s Choice bill, when in fact it was Barack Obama who signed that into law in 2014. Trump bragged about a job gain of 9 million. But that gain followed a job loss of 22 million due to Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. It isn’t a gain at all, it’s an anemic recovery that is far from adequate and far from complete. Trump said he will “continue” to lower drug prices when in fact drug prices have increased during his presidency. Trump claimed he opened the embassy in Jerusalem for $500,000 when in fact it cost over $20 million. (Of course, this is a pittance compared to the $140 million Trump has spent on his own golf trips thus far.) Trump denounced “cancel culture,” as if that’s something evil and insidious, yet last week Trump abused his authority when he tried to instigate a boycott of the Goodyear Tire company because they banned MAGA campaign gear at work, and he’s fired or publicly shamed or attacked people and companies that disagree with him many times over the years.
In short, Trump’s bloviating acceptance speech was filled with his typical hypocrisies and false claims about things he has done in his presidency while criticizing Joe Biden for things that never happened or things Biden never said. In other words, lies.
Yet no amount of blustering or bloviating or lying will distract us from the fact that Donald Trump’s incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic is directly responsible for the deaths of 185,901 Americans (as I write this). The absence of masks and social distancing at his unlawfully staged rally in front of the White House is proof that Trump has given up on the pandemic, or, as one White House source put it, “everybody’s going to get it [the coronavirus] anyway.”
So if you’re not righteously angry that your tax dollars are being misused to promote the re-election of this monster, or that this Nuremberg-variety Trump rally posing as a convention is also a new and deadly vector for coronavirus, then now is your chance. The time and effort you’ve spent keeping yourself and your family and your neighbors safe from coronavirus has been squandered by the man who is also using your tax dollars to promote another four years of his dangerous presidency. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.
There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.