Fear of violence and disorder in cities might persuade some centrist suburban women back into the Republican fold
When Democrats held their national convention in Chicago in 1968, the radical Youth International Party – better known as the Yippies – promised to send all of the delegates into a psychedelic trance by dumping LSD into the city’s water supply. Watching the Republican National Convention take place this week in and around Washington DC, I wondered if the Yippies had finally pulled off their prank. Some of the speakers’ descriptions of Donald Trump, his presidency, and the state of the country were so far removed from reality that you’d have to be in the grip of powerful hallucinogens to believe them.
In the alternate reality described by many of the Republican convention speakers, President Trump is a warm, empathetic human being and an exemplar of presidential conduct, not the narcissistic Twitter bully who consistently places familial and tribal interests over constitutional order and democratic norms. In the telling of his RNC boosters, the president acted with great speed and competence to vanquish the coronavirus – Trump’s chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow spoke about it repeatedly in the past tense in his convention address – when in reality the administration’s incoherent response has meant that US per capita death and infection rates are still among the world’s highest and the death toll has passed 180,000. Speaker after speaker praised the what Trump, in his closing address, called “the greatest economy in history,” despite the fact that the inability to contain the coronavirus has meant that unemployment is still above 10% and thousands of businesses have permanently disappeared.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2GaHDHw
