What started as farce continued as farce. Trump emerged without Pence. He spoke, alone, at a podium adorned with Trump’s name, but not Pence’s. And then Trump proceeded to talk about himself for 28 minutes. There is no other way to say this than to say it: it was the single most bizarre, impulsive, narcissistic performance I have ever seen from a major politician.
.. I can tell you that he rambled, but that doesn’t do it justice. He spoke about Hillary Clinton, about himself, about his victories. He talked about crushing the Republican establishment in the primaries and talking to a buddy building plants in Mexico. He bragged about the beautiful hotel he is building in Washington, DC, and patted himself on the back for his foreign policy foresight over the years.
Every five minutes or so, he seemed to remember, just for a moment, like a man trying and failing to wake from a dream, that he was there to introduce Mike Pence, and so he would say something like, “now back to Mike Pence,” but then he would slip back again, and tell another anecdote about himself
.. Even when he did mention Pence, he often managed to say exactly the wrong thing. “One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity, I have to be honest,” Trump admitted midway through his speech, at the moment another candidate would have said “I chose Mike because he’ll be a great president.” Trump then segued into a riff on how thoroughly he had humiliated the Republican establishment in state after state. Thus he managed to turn Pence from a peace offering into a head on a pike, a warning to all who might come after.
How Trump’s adversaries lost it all in Cleveland
‘Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered,’ said one negotiator who tried to deal with the GOP insurgency.
.. In exchange for dropping some of his most divisive proposals – a ban on lobbyists serving on the RNC and a plan to weaken the power of the national GOP chairman – Cuccinelli would get concessions on a package of reforms to the 2020 presidential primary process, as well as on a change to the terms of RNC members.
.. the RNC pulled out of the talks when, according to three sources involved in the final negotiations, Cuccinelli conceded that he couldn’t guarantee the support of his faction – even for a more favorable version of the agreement.
.. He sought a proposal to provide closed-primary states with a 25 percent bonus in their delegate pool at the national convention. The RNC countered by proposing a 15 percent bonus to states’ at-large delegate pools.
.. former Congressman Doug Ose, one of Trump’s supporters on the committee, repeatedly invoked procedural motions that permanently ended debate on the most divisive subjects, catching Trump’s opponents off-guard and ensuring that the committee proceedings moved apace.
.. After a five-hour delayed start, they decided – with little warning – to continue meeting late into the night Thursday, while most of Trump’s opponents were preparing to recess and continue debate on Friday.
“Why give them a whole day to regroup, refresh,” said one RNC official. “Once you press the attack, you don’t let off.”
.. Now Cuccinelli is threatening to disrupt Monday’s convention proceedings by encouraging delegates to vote down the rules passed by the committee, when they come up for a final vote. That would throw the convention into chaos on the day delegates are expected to formally nominate Trump.
Trump, The Man and the Image
His words increasingly signify his confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
The result ain’t oratory. Still, the words entertain, wound, outrage, delight, bemuse, stupefy. More than a year into Trump’s candidacy, they also signify the speaker’s confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
.. The praise Trump elicits from voters for his “authenticity,” for “telling it like it is,” elides the fact that he is committed to hiding his human side from the world and, for that matter, from himself. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he confessed to one of his biographers, Michael D’Antonio.
.. A man in touch with his emotions would recognize that in regard to this circumstance his emotions are mixed.
One remarkable revelation was an account published online, in March, by Stephanie Cegielski, the former communications director of the Make America Great Again super pac. Cegielski told of being informed by colleagues, in March, 2015, that Trump would be running for President, with the goal of polling at, say, twelve per cent, and finishing second in the delegate count. (“A protest candidacy.”)
.. At some point, it will hit his followers that they’ve been sold out by a huckster who coveted their votes only for the sake of his colossal self-regard. And that, all along, he had nothing real to offer.
Being Honest About Trump
His language remains not merely sloppy or incendiary but openly hostile to the simplest standards of truth and decency that have governed American politics.
.. Jeb Bush knows what Trump is, but still feels obliged to say that he would “feel sad” if Trump lost.
.. To their great credit, the editors of most of the leading conservative publications in America have recognized Trump for what he is, and have opposed his rise to power. Yet the habit of hatred is so ingrained in their psyches that even those who recognize at some level that Trump is a horror, when given the dangling bait of another chance to hate Hillary still leap at it..
.. The Times, to take one example, ran a front-page analysis criticizing Trump for being insufficiently able to exploit a political opening given by the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail, with the complaint seeming to be that Trump just isn’t clever enough to give us a good fight—to be the fun opponent we want. If only he had some more skill at this!
.. Trump is unstable, a liar, narcissistic, contemptuous of the basic norms of political life, and deeply embedded among the most paranoid and irrational of conspiracy theorists. There may indeed be a pathos to his followers’ dreams of some populist rescue for their plights. But he did not come to political attention as a “populist”; he came to politics as a racist, a proponent of birtherism.
.. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania ..
.. What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners.