Reprinted from Consortium News
Co-written by *Michael Winship
Donald Trump and Mike Pence during Day Three of the Republican National Convention.
(Image by (Photo credit: Grant Miller/RNC)) Details DMCA
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? "Another radical Islamic attack, this time in Pakistan, targeting Christian women & children. At least 67 dead,400 injured. I alone can solve."
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 U.S. 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).
No Lies, Only Falsehoods
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:
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