“Biden has had so much taken from him, and his humanity never faltered; Trump was given everything, and learned nothing,” tweeted Sam Adams, a senior editor at Slate, summing up the message underlying the Democratic nominating convention that ended Thursday night with literal fireworks.
“The terrible, crippled caricature of masculinity [Donald] Trump embodies has cost us all so much,” Adams added.
The less-subtle theme of the convention was more obvious: our democracy is on the line.
Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered an acceptance speech that, frankly, I didn’t know he had in him. “Give people light and they will find a way,” he began, quoting civil rights icon Ella Baker.
Biden invited the country to leave behind the “season of darkness” ushered in by the acting president, pledging if so honored to be a leader for all Americans. He pledged to help rescue its soul and to beat back the deadly pandemic that will forever brand the Trump administration a wretched failure.
Where his opponent speaks of mayhem and carnage, Biden offered hope:
On this summer night, let me take a moment to speak to those of you who have lost the most.
I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes.
But I’ve learned two things.
First, your loved ones may have left this Earth but they never leave your heart. They will always be with you.
And second, I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose.
As God’s children each of us have a purpose in our lives.
And we have a great purpose as a nation: To open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. To save our democracy. To be a light to the world once again.
It was one of the best speeches in memory. Watch it below.
But even as Julia Louis-Dreyfus mocked Trump and 13-year-old Brayden Harrington (like Biden, a stutterer) “put on a clinic of courage and guts for the country,” the sitting president spoke by phone with Sean Hannity and issued more threats against the election.
Would Trump have people monitoring polling places to prevent fraud and see “whether or not these are registered voters, whether or not there’s been identification to know that it’s a real vote from a real American,” Hannity asked. “Real American” being familiar GOP code for white and Republican.
“We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to have, hopefully, US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals (sic),” Trump replied. In fact, this will be the first presidential election since the 1980s that Republicans can do some of that without pre-approval of a federal judge. They mean to make the most of it.
A Daily Beast report dismissed the statement as an empty threat:
Marc Elias, an election lawyer at the forefront of Democrat lawsuits on voting, tweeted in response: “Not without a legal fight he won’t!” According to CNN, election law experts say Trump has no authority to deploy law enforcement officials to monitor elections, but his campaign could hire off-duty police as “poll watchers.”
Far-fetched? More bluster? He may have no authority to do it. But that has not stopped Trump and his enablers before. Who imagined he would throw the U.S. Postal Service into chaos to hinder voting by mail?
Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie“) was a top GOP campaign consultant for four decades. In a Politico interview this week, Stuart warned that Republican leaders’ “inability to imagine Trump” is how they (and we) ended up with Trump. People are slow to believe it can happen here:
STEVENS: Look, in July, Trump was already talking about suspending the elections. What do you think he’s going to do in October? Tell me what’s wrong with this scenario: It’s November 1, he’s losing, there are reports of voter irregularities in Florida, like there always are, and he sends those guys in camouflage into Miami-Dade County to seize the ballot boxes. Who’s going to stop him? The county security guards? They’re not going to phone ahead. What are the courts going to do? Order another election? Throw out Dade County? I don’t know. Who would object? [Attorney General William] Barr would go right along with it. The inability to imagine Trump has always been his greatest advantage.
So don’t fail to imagine what Trump might do to turn the election to chaos, Democrats. Prepare for the worst. Plan ahead. Trump plans steal the election while he has you tied up in court. Florida is just an example. Throw enough states’ elections into chaos into December and the presidential choice falls to the House of Representatives where the vote is by a majority of state delegations. Republicans currently hold a majority of the House’s state delegations.
Thursday began with the arrest of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in Connecticut aboard a mega-yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire. Bannon and three others are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering in their We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. A rogues’ gallery of Republican operatives including — Kris Kobach, Erik Prince, Tom Tancredo, Sheriff Dave Clarke and former pitcher Curt Schilling — have their fingerprints on that scam.
A federal judge in New York on Thursday threw out Trump’s challenge to a Manhattan grand jury subpoena for his tax records.
Documents obtained by NBC News show 11 of the president’s most senior advisers were involved in approving the plan to separate children from parents at the border. Even legal entrants. There were not enough resources to ensure parents and children could be reunited, they knew:
No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration “fell on deaf ears” inside the White House, one of the officials said.
Then came the Biden speech even some Fox News personalities acknowledged was a masterstroke. The day that started out bad for Trump got worse as it wore on. It was a prelude to a day of reckoning.
Expect Trump and his enablers to behave like cornered animals.
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