The party is over in Cleveland. The Republican Party is no longer the Grand Old Party. It is the party of Donald Trump. We endured his over-long rant on Thursday night and knew less when he was finished than was known when his daughter introduced her dear daddy. It was an hour and a quarter of stomach churning, silliness, sophistry, strutting and self-satisfied smirking.
And it was bad speech. Trump used Hillary Clinton’s name so often, you started to expect her to be in the wings, waiting for him to finish her introduction.
The speech even came as a surprise to many of the Republicans in the arena. They were not aware that they were promising day care along with promises to defeat the barbarians. They would cheer when he promised tax cuts but where much quieter when he got to promises that would obviously cost Americans a lot of money.
The speech had no basic theme. Trump used so many possible slogans that you were hard pressed to figure out which he preferred. The best was when he pointed out that he had bilked the system so often that he alone knew how to fix it. He really smirked at that one.
But speaking of a smirking Donald, did you follow when he was pandering to the religious and evangelical Republicans. There was no prejudice he was not willing to use. He reiterated his well-know bigotry against immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims. Mind you, his daughter tried desperately to show her daddy as a paragon of supporting women’s rights. It makes you wonder how low the polls might be for him with women voters.
Leaving no rock unturned, Trump assured his audience that he will make sure the Supreme Court has judges that share their biases. And he got the most cheers in the night when he told of his love-in with the National Rifle Association and his commitment to Second Amendment—right to bear arms.
It was very hard to tell what he was going to use a renewed and rebuilt American army to do. It is either to lead the next Children’s Crusade into the Middle East or to solve the problems of America’s inner cities or to keep Canadians and Mexicans at bay when he ‘walks away from the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
What he proved conclusively in Cleveland was that he should not be running conventions and he definitely should not be considered as a possible President of the United States of America.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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