I think this New York Times recap gets the job done:
President Trump and his political allies mounted a fierce and misleading defense of his political record on the first night of the Republican convention on Monday, while unleashing a barrage of attacks on Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the Democratic Party that were unrelenting in their bleakness.
Hours after Republican delegates formally nominated Mr. Trump for a second term, the president and his party made plain that they intended to engage in sweeping revisionism about Mr. Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, his record on race relations and much else.
And they laid out a dystopian picture of what the United States would look like under a Biden administration, warning of a “vengeful mob” that would lay waste to suburban communities and turn quiet neighborhoods into war zones.
At times, the speakers and prerecorded videos appeared to be describing an alternate reality: one in which the nation was not nearing 180,000 dead from the coronavirus; in which Mr. Trump had not consistently ignored serious warnings about the disease; in which the president had not spent much of his term appealing openly to xenophobia and racial animus; and in which someone other than Mr. Trump had presided over an economy that began crumbling in the spring.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, praised his father’s management of the virus, one of several segments asserting an unsupported narrative that the president had been a sturdy leader in a crisis even as polls show Americans believe he has handled the pandemic poorly.
“As the virus began to spread, the president acted quickly and ensured ventilators got to hospitals that needed them most,” the president’s son said, making no mention of the millions of Americans sickened and killed or the complaints from governors that they were not receiving the necessary equipment. “There is more work to do, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
It was part of a vehement address the younger Mr. Trump delivered that framed the election as a choice between “church, work and school” against “rioting, looting and vandalism.”
The scorched-earth rhetoric and knowing references to phrases like “cancel culture” would not have been out of place during a Fox News prime-time segment. By that measure, the arguments might help lure some wavering Republicans, uneasy with the president’s handling of the virus, back to Mr. Trump. But it was far from clear that the programming would appeal to any undecided voters.
It won’t. But that’s not the point. They re trying to get their feral base so riled up that they can scare people into not voting at all and if that doesnt work they are setting the conditions for that base to refuse to accept the results of the election no matter how badly Trump loses.
I don’t think you can judge this convention by normal standards. They aren’t trying to persuade anyone to vote for them. They’re setting the stage for something dangerous in November.
Asfor the production, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. But that’s because I assumed they’d try t be creative which they didn’t. The videos were mostly just their ads I’ve seen dozens of times on TV already. And the speeches were all in the same set, with a wall of flags that evoke certain feelings of the 1930s. The cutaways were all to Washington monuments. It wasn’t thrilling, but it wasn’t a trainwreck either.
The speeches, were the type of thing you see on Fox every day. So that’s who this was for. Interestingly, Fox News cut away more frequently than the other networks throughout the evening so that Tucker and Hannity could talk about how great it all was. I think that says something …