Dark and Scary Night

Donald Trump’s Dark and Scary Night

The GOP presidential nominee's acceptance speech was a litany of fear and resentment, a dog whistle to disaffected white Americans.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

The GOP’s new big dog blew the whistle Thursday night for nearly an hour and a half and it was loud and shrill enough to reach the ears of every angry, resentful, disaffected white American. The tone was divisive, dark, dystopian and grim.

Here was the alpha dog of the von Trump family, baying at a blood-red moon that the hills are alive with the sounds of menace.

According to Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, this land is rapidly becoming as bleak and dangerous as one of those twisted, vicious kingdoms in Game of Thrones, a place filled with violent crime and despair, a smoldering ruin overrun with foreigners out to take our jobs and terrorists bent on destroying our villages.

It’s mourning in America.

And only he can save us.

This has been his message all year: I alone can fix it. Remember his tweet on Easter morning?

He alone has the potion. He alone can call out the incantation. He alone can cast out the demons. It’s a little bit Mussolini. A little bit Berlusconi. A little bit George Wallace. And a lot of Napoleon in a trucker’s hat. “I am not an ordinary man,” Bonaparte once said.” I am an extraordinary man and ordinary rules do not apply to me.”

So he will do it all alone, this Trump. Until he has the US military to carpet-bomb on his orders, and the nuclear codes at the ready beside his bed at 3 a.m., and the 101st Airborne at the southern border, ready to act — as long as Mexico pays for it.

This was a convention pledged to serve and protect the little guy, but as Rachel Maddow pointed out on MSNBC, it was officially addressed by five — count ’em, five — billionaires, including Trump and one, Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, who has said that woman’s suffrage was a bad idea and wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Boy, was he in the right place.

Thiel was one of the Thursday night speakers leading up to the official coronation of King Donald as the Republican Party’s standard-bearer. Introduced by daughter Ivanka, who without a trace of irony lauded her dad’s “kindness and compassion” (except of course for all those women he has verbally abused and minorities he has slandered and even the fellow candidates he mocked), Trump announced, “Here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth and nothing else… I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper.”

But as Washington Post fact checkers Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee noted:

“The dark portrait of America that Donald J. Trump sketched… is a compendium of doomsday stats that fall apart upon close scrutiny. Numbers are taken out of context, data is manipulated, and sometimes the facts are wrong.

“When facts are inconveniently positive — such as rising incomes and an unemployment rate under 5 percent — Trump simply declines to mention them. He describes an exceedingly violent nation, flooded with murders, when in reality, the violent-crime rate has been cut in half since the crack cocaine epidemic hit its peak in 1991.”

He said 58 percent of young African-Americans are unemployed — and the dog whistle signals, you know what that means — but the number’s actually about half that. He insists we’re one of the highest taxed nations in the world — we’re nowhere near — and that we have “no way to screen” refugees, which is just not true.

The speech went on and on like that and the crowd inside the convention hall ate it up, their bitterness and frustration spurred on by Trump’s own sputtering, red-faced outrage. The legacy of Hillary Clinton, he said, is “death, destruction and weakness.” She proposes “mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness.” As for Barack Obama, “The irresponsible rhetoric of our president, who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment for everyone.”

By the way, of the 2,472 delegates at the convention, only 18 of them were black, the lowest percentage in over a century, according to History News Network and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. With Trump at the helm, Republicans will soon have purged their party of any memory of its own past. “Lincoln” simply will have been the name of a town car.

As columnist Eugene Robinson said about Thursday’s speech, “Frankly, this was a message, at least to my ears, to white America: Be afraid. I will protect you.” It’s not for nothing that as convention officials projected tweets from Trump supporters on the hall’s video screens during his speech, one of them turned out to be from a notorious white supremacist account.

Can anyone imagine Donald Trump breaking into Amazing Grace at the service for black worshippers in Charleston, SC, gunned down in their church by a white supremacist? There certainly was not a grace note in his speech. And — sorry, Ivanka — not a single note of “kindness and compassion.” No touch of humility.

Watching, we could only think of Augustus, during the first century B.C., in a time roiled by corruption and the wealth of empire, who terminated the government and installed himself as emperor, careful to preserve all the forms of the republic while dispensing with their meaning.

Or, as the less august, but funnier folks at The Onion tweeted while the smoke from Trump’s cannonade lingered into the night, “Thanks for joining our live coverage of the RNC. This concludes democracy.”