A little levity is called for. Everything is just. too. much.
"what digby sez..."
Month: August 2020
He has convinced himself that Biden is a drooling moron. But then everything does is projection so I guess that makes sense:
Still, it’s a disgusting accusation. There is no bottom:
“Nobody thought that he was even going to win,” Trump said. “Because his debate performances were so bad. Frankly, his best performance was against Bernie. We’re going to call for a drug test, by the way, because his best performance was against Bernie. It wasn’t that he was Winston Churchill because he wasn’t, but it was a normal, boring debate. You know, nothing amazing happened. And we are going to call for a drug test because there’s no way — you can’t do that.”
Q: “What do you think was going on?”
“I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be OK against Bernie,” Trump answered. “My point is, if you go back and watch some of those numerous debates, he was so bad. He wasn’t even coherent. And against Bernie, he was. And we’re calling for a drug test.”
Q: “Is this like a prizefight, where beforehand you have a test?”
“Well, it is a prizefight,” Trump answered. “It’s no different from the gladiators, except we have to use our brain and our mouth. And our body to stand. I want all standing; they want to sit down.”
Trump based his call entirely on his own observations and not on any actual knowledge of Biden’s actions. “All I can tell you is that I’m pretty good at this stuff,” he said. “I look. I watched him in the debates with all of the different people. He was close to incompetent, if not incompetent, and against Bernie, he was normal … and I say, ‘How does that happen?’
The first Trump-Biden debate, to be held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is little more than a month away. Trump gave no indication of when he would make his drug test request or to whom, but he appeared to know that there is little chance such a thing would happen. “I think it’s appropriate,” Trump said. “I don’t know that they’ll let me do it, but I think that they should do it.”
“Go back and watch his performances in some of those debates,” Trump continued. “He didn’t know where he was. And all of a sudden, he was not good, he was normal, and I don’t understand how. I don’t know if there is or not, but somebody said to me, ‘He must be on drugs.’ I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m asking for a drug test. Both candidates. Me, too. I take an aspirin a day.”
Did I mention that hes projecting?
If his grotesque comments sound familiar it’s because they are:
By the way …
A GOP apostate has some advice for Democrats. And he’s right:
He points to this article laying out this argument in detail.
Democrats simply have to close their ears to GOP shrieking and enact radical reforms. They have to. If they don’t we won’t survive because the next person to use the powers Donald Trump has exposed won’t be an unfit ignoramus.
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There’s a lot of concern about a new CNBC poll showing the race tightening in the battleground states. It might be. I really don’t know. But the polling averages in those states does not show such a tightening. And the poll above from Democracy Corps shows Biden’s lead there is actually growing.
Democracy Corps’ phone, mostly cell poll with 1,500 respondents in sixteen battleground states shows Joe Biden and the Democrats moving into the kind of lead it needs to deny Donald Trump the ability to disrupt Election Day. The poll was conducted after the selection of Senator Harris and the launch of the convention, but prior to the final night acceptance speech.
It shows Biden gaining 3-points in his margin over Trump, reaching 10 points (53 percent). The race showed Democrats stable with a 6-point lead in the generic congressional and up a point to an 8 point margin in the big five Senate contests. That suggests Democrats could win full control in November. That the others moved hardly at all, suggests the Biden gain is sustainable.
Biden’s gains are produced by his campaign finally concluding the primary, not the convention itself.The percentage of Sanders voters supporting Biden jumped from 73 to 89 percent; the percent of Sanders voters hit 10 on the enthusiasm scale jumped from 80 to 90 percent. Biden moved from a +4 point to a +18 point lead with white millennials.
Democrats more consolidated, anti-Trump and now at parity on enthusiasm. Biden is getting 95 percent of Democrats, while Trump 89 percent of Republicans; the percent of Democrats strongly disapproving of Trump has jumped to 87 percent and the percent of Republicans strongly approving is unchanged at 69 percent. That is a huge (18 point) gap in negative motivation; and Democrats and Republicans are equal on percent 10 following election extremely closely.
Biden has huge margins now across the Rising American Electorate, especially women. This is a very happy chapter for Biden’s performance with Hispanics (margin up from +19 to +32 points), white unmarried women (ahead by 19 points), white college women (margin up from +21 to +28 points), and white millennial women (up from +12 to +38 point lead). Biden has a huge margin with blacks, but among black men, Trump has double digit support.
Trump has lost his working class hold – both men and women. Few noticed how much Trump lost working class voters in the mid-terms (margin down 13 points with women and 14 with men). But Trump has lost further ground in this cycle – 6 with the women and 4 with the men. That means Biden is only losing white working class women by 8 points in the battleground. It also means Trump’s red-meat, base strategy is not moving the men where he won by 48 points in 2016.
Biden has slipped with white baby boomers and dropped sharply with the white silent generation. This is a significant drop, though obviously, more than offset by his gains with millennials —and there are a lot more of the latter. Nonetheless, it could be a reaction of older voters to the ticket and the convention; it could be Trump getting an audience on crime where Biden has only a modest advantage.
Biden does not have a strong emotional bond with voters. Biden still has a net-negative overall image, with only 28 percent “very warm” feelings for him. More voters are intensively negative. He does not get an intense response with millennials; in fact, he does much better with older voters. He has a net -17 image with white working class women – double his vote margin.
The progressive issue moment.Voters want bolder on health care; tax wealth more than high incomes; and opposed to border wall.
The Republican Party is imploding. It is shedding voters and now 18 percent say, they used to identify as Republican. Biden is winning two-thirds of these voters who are very favorable about ACA. Biden is getting 17 percent of GOP moderates and 8 percent of Catholic conservative Republicans.
I don’t mean to suggest that everything’s just fine. You all know that I believe Trump and his cronies will stop at nothing to steal this election if they can. I expect them to pretend the outcome is dubious regardless. If he loses he will be the president-in-exile until the 2024 election in which he will either run again or pass the baton to Junior. So I’m not sanguine about any of this.
But it does appear, at the moment, that Biden’s position is stable. Whether that translates to a win in November is still unknown. But there is no reason to panic that voters are suddenly deciding that Trump’s a very stable genius after all.
Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his Homeland Security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants.
That afternoon, at a meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat-ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel like it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams.
Developed by the military as a crowd dispersal tool two decades ago, the Active Denial System had been largely abandoned amid doubts over its effectiveness and morality. Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Homeland Security Department on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president. Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of Homeland Security told an aide after the meeting that she would not authorize the use of such a device, and it should never be brought up again in her presence, the officials said.
Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department, said Wednesday that “it was never considered.”
But the discussion in the fall of 2018 underscored how Mr. Trump’s obsession with shutting down immigration has driven policy considerations, including his suggestions of installing flesh-piercing spikes on the border wall, building a moat filled with snakes and alligators and shooting migrants in the legs.
That story reminds me of this post from a decade ago which someone reminded me of recently:
The Political Utility Of Force
Published by digby on March 7, 2010
It looks as though the mainstream media have finally decided to take a look at tasers. CNNs report yesterday focused on the possibility of heart attack from tasering, which is obviously a problem — since people are having heart attacks when they are tasered.
It’s likely that it will be the civil courts that end up restricting the use of these weapons if it ever happens — we’re way too far down the torture road already to confront the constitutional and moral reasons why they are antithetical to a free society. But nonetheless, I do see this as a civil liberties question. I just don’t believe that police should be allowed to inflict pain on citizens unless they are physically threatened themselves, period. And the evidence is overwhelming that these weapons are used far more often to force compliance in non-violent situations.
This issue may become even more controversial quite soon. This article in Harper’s by Ando Arike called “The Soft-Kill Solution — New Frontiers In Pain Compliance” (subscription only) will send a chill down your spine:
Not long ago, viewers of CBS’s 60 Minutes were treated to an intriguing bit of political theater when, in a story called “The Pentagon’s Ray Gun,” a crowd of what seemed to be angry protesters confronted a Humvee with a sinister-looking dish antenna on its roof. Waving placards that read world peace, love for all, peace not war, and, oddly, hug me, the crowd, in reality, was made up of U.S. soldiers playacting for the camera at a military base in Georgia. Shouting “Go home!” they threw what looked like tennis balls at uniformed comrades, “creating a scenario soldiers might encounter in Iraq,” explained correspondent David Martin: “angry protesters advancing on American troops, who have to choose between backing down or opening fire.” Fortunately—and this was the point of the story—there is now another option, demonstrated when the camera cut to the Humvee, where the “ray gun” operator was lining up the “protesters” in his crosshairs. Martin narrated: “He squeezes off a blast. The first shot hits them like an invisible punch. The protesters regroup, and he fires again, and again. Finally they’ve had enough. The ray gun drives them away with no harm done.” World peace would have to wait.
The article goes on to discuss the impending use of a variety of “non-lethal” pain inducing weapons by government authorities. I knew about these weapons and have written about them quite a bit. But this article gets to the rationale behind using them:
As communications advances in the years since have increasingly exposed such violence, governments have realized that the public’s perception of injury and bloodshed must be carefully managed. “Even the lawful application of force can be misrepresented to or misunderstood by the public,” warns a 1997 joint report from the Pentagon and the Justice Department.
“More than ever, the police and the military must be highly discreet when applying force.” It is a need for discretion rooted in one of the oldest fears of the ruling class—the volatility of the mob—and speaks to rising anxieties about crowd control at a time when global capitalism begins to run up against long-predicted limits to growth. Each year, some 76 million people join our current 6.7 billion in a world of looming resource scarcities, ecological collapse, and glaring inequalities of wealth; and elites are preparing to defend their power and profits. In this new era of triage, as democratic institutions and social safety nets are increasingly considered dispensable luxuries, the task of governance will be to lower the political and economic expectations of the masses without inciting fullfledged revolt. Non-lethal weapons promise to enhance what military theorists call “the political utility of force,” allowing dissent to be suppressed inconspicuously.
And here’s where the taser comes in:
The next hurdle for non-lethality, as Colonel Hymes’s comments suggest,will be the introduction of socalled second-generation non-lethal weapons into everyday policing and crowd control. Although “first-generation” weapons like rubber bullets and pepper spray have gained a certain acceptance, despite their many drawbacks, exotic technologies like the Active Denial System invariably cause public alarm. Nevertheless, the trend is now away from chemical and “kinetic” weapons that rely on physical trauma and toward post-kinetic weapons that, as researchers put it, “induce behavioral modification” more discreetly. One indication that the public may come to accept these new weapons has been the successful introduction of the Taser—apparently, even the taboo on electroshock can be overcome given the proper political climate…
Originally sold as an alternative to firearms, the Taser today has become an all-purpose tool for what police call “pain compliance.” Mounting evidence
shows that the weapon is routinely used on people who pose little threat: those in handcuffs, in jail cells, in wheelchairs and hospital beds; schoolchildren, pregnant women, the mentally disturbed, the elderly; irate shoppers, obnoxious lawyers, argumentative drivers, nonviolent protesters—in fact, YouTube now has an entire category of videos in which people are Tasered for dubious reasons. In late 2007, public outrage flared briefly over the two most famous such videos—those of college
student Andrew Meyer “drivestunned” at a John Kerry speech, and of a distraught Polish immigrant, Robert Dziekanski, dying after repeated Taser jolts at Vancouver airport—but police and weapon were found blameless in both incidents. Strangely, YouTube’s videos may be promoting wider acceptance of the Taser; it appears that many viewers watch them for entertainment.
I have sometimes wondered if the Taser people didn’t put those out themselves, just so people would become desensitized to seeing it. Certainly the news reporters who “bravely” submit themselves to it (without any threat of arrest, of course, or other violence at the hands of authorities)go a long way toward making these things seem benign.
It’s all part of the great normalizing of torture in our country, a slow but steady erosion of the moral consensus that people in authority cannot force others to submit to their will using physical pain. Police brutality wasn’t fought only because it caused lasting injury. Many people, after all, survived the beatings they took by police. It was determined that it was illegal for police to use pain (“excessive force”) to get people to comply. Shooting people with electricity is inflicting excruciating pain and should, therefore, by definition be called excessive force. Instead, in true Orwellian fashion it’s touted as a alternative to excessive force and praised for the fact that it can be used on anyone with few ill effects. Huzzah, a torture instrument that everyone loves.
What the Harper’s article suggests is that this is an ongoing effort on the part of the ruling elites to normalize the use of these new weapons using a sophisticated propaganda campaign to both downplay the ugly effects of government oppression in the age of Youtube and TV, while at the same time desensitizing people to the use of these weapons by using them constantly. I have joked before that perhaps they should just implant all of us at birth with a device that could shock us from a remote location, thereby saving the authorities from even having to be in the same space. It sounds ridiculous. But when you read things like this, you have to wonder:
Taser’s distributor has announced plans for a flying drone that fires stun darts at criminal suspects or rioters.
I urge you to buy the magazine and read the whole article if you have an interest in this subject. I’m becoming more hopeful that people may wake up to what this really means to an ostensibly free people. This article is a good start.
Yeah, that was uhm… premature. Ten years later we have Donald Trump in the White House. If you think he won’t use this stuff in a second term, you haven’t been paying attention.
The New York Times:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly modified its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus.
Experts questioned the revision, pointing to the importance of identifying infections in the brief window immediately before the onset of symptoms, when many individuals are thought to be most contagious…
A more lax approach to testing, experts said, could delay crucial treatments, as well as obscure the coronavirus’s true spread in the community. Case numbers remain persistently high across much of the United States, though they have been falling in recent weeks, to an average of about 43,000 new cases a day from a peak of more than 66,000 a month ago. Many of the states that saw the largest outbreaks in early summer are now reporting sustained progress, including Arizona and Florida. But parts of the Midwest, as well as Hawaii and some U.S. territories, are still seeing increases in new cases.
“This is potentially dangerous,” said Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician in Palo Alto, Calif. Restricting testing to only people with obvious symptoms of Covid-19 means “you’re not looking for a lot of people who are potential spreaders of disease,” she added. “I feel like this is going to make things worse.”
Prior iterations of the C.D.C.’s testing guidelines struck a markedly different tone, explicitly stating that “testing is recommended for all close contacts” of people infected with the coronavirus, regardless of symptoms. The agency also specifically emphasized “the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission” as an important factor in the spread of disease.
A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN. “It’s coming from the top down,” the official said of the new directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yeah:
It’s a political truism that a second-term election campaign is a referendum on the incumbent. And when you have President Trump’s terrible approval rating, the strategists all say that his only real hope is to refocus the electorate on Joe Biden and make voters disapprove of him more than they disapprove of Trump.
Trump doesn’t really require such advice since insulting and degrading his political opponents is what brings the most joy into his life in any case. He would do it even if he didn’t have to. And the Republican convention has featured speakers from both nights who have painted a vivid picture of the dystopian hellscape that awaits America if it makes the mistake of voting for the Democrats this November.
But so far, Republicans have not had much success in creating a new image of Biden himself. Trump and his followers have been saying that he’s a doddering old man for months, but for all the norm-busting of this convention, they haven’t really gone there, at least not yet. They did feature one speaker on Tuesday night, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who served as one of Trump’s defense lawyers at his impeachment trial, who tried to make the case that Biden and his family are corrupt criminals. I’ll be surprised if that left a mark, particularly considering that several of Trump’s previous campaign officials have been charged or convicted of crimes — one of them just last Friday. (This week, the New York attorney general announced an investigation into the Trump Organization that includes subpoenas for Eric Trump.)
Mostly, the GOP seems to have settled instead on a sweeping MAGA-style indictment against Democratic voters as a bunch of socialists and anarchists who are waging a violent assault on everything dear to God-fearing Americans. It would seem they have decided that Joe Biden isn’t enough of a bogeyman to push what Trump calls the “suburban housewives” back to the safety of the Republicans, so they need to scare them to death with visions of antifa and MS-13 stealing into their neighborhoods in the dark of night.
This claim was made explicit in the appearance on Monday by Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who wielded guns at Black Lives Matter protesters who were marching down their residential street. As it happens, the McCloskeys don’t actually live in a suburb — the protests were heading to the mayor’s house, which is near theirs — but they were supposedly speaking for all those terrified white homeowners in cul-de-sacs. The problem is that it’s 2020, and suburban America isn’t just affluent white people who live in McMansions but rather a highly diverse racial and ethnic mixture, as has been true for years.
The “suburban housewives” aren’t freaked out by antifa or Black Lives Matter. They’re freaked out by the COVID pandemic and the terrible economy, by the fact that their kids can’t go to school and by the global shame of our president’s crude, racist behavior. At least until we got to Melania Trump’s alternate-universe speech late on Tuesday night, nothing at the Republican convention has addressed any of that.
So if Republicans aren’t going hard after Joe Biden and aren’t discussing any of the issues that are consuming Americans’ lives in this weird moment of pandemic and economic chaos, what are they talking about? Well, they are talking about their Dear Leader — and when I use that term I’ve never meant it more literally. This RNC isn’t really a political convention at all. It’s a cult meeting.
It’s bad enough when Trump holds cabinet meetings where everyone around the table is expected to thank him for his superior leadership. Sometimes they even thank God for sending him to us. I guess we’ve gotten used to seeing his staff and other members of the administration start every speech with a few words about his superior guidance and direction. This is obviously the sick deal they’ve made with Trump and their consciences.
But there’s something incredibly creepy about the way Trump is using the grandeur and power of the White House itself (which is totally unethical, by the way — what else is new?) to greet average citizens so they can tell him to his face how wonderful he is and thank him for his greatness. These scripted episodes designed to make it seem like he actually has human feelings ended up being a loyalty ritual.
In Trump’s meeting with frontline workers, a nurse was moved to say this:
I am so in awe of your leadership. Honestly, I know many people have said often interesting things but it takes a true leader to be able to ignore all that stuff and take what is right and not be offended by all the words being said. You really do show that positive spirit to us and as nurses I appreciate that.
The president smiled beatifically. In an earlier time he would have held out his hand for her to kiss his ring.
Even worse, in a similar meeting with a group of former overseas hostages who have been brought back to the U.S. during Trump’s term, they went around in a circle to thank him for his benevolence in bringing them home. It wasn’t about them. It was all about him as usual.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of the meeting he took with victims of gun violence in which he had written notes reminding him to say, “I hear you”
On Tuesday he pulled a similar White House stunt, pardoning a man convicted of bank robbery before the cameras and later, as the New York Times put it, “using the majesty of the White House for blatantly political purposes, Mr. Trump appeared during the convention’s second hour as ‘Hail to the Chief’ played and strode to a lectern where five immigrants were waiting to take the oath to become citizens.” This from a man who salivates over the death penalty, cruelly separates families at the border and attempted to ban all people of the Muslim faith from immigrating here. These people were props for the cult leader to present his alleged benevolence to the masses.
And as you’ll recall, before the convention, the platform committee of the RNC gave up the ghost and just said that whatever Trump wants to do is fine with them. There is no agenda and no ideology. There is only Donald Trump, day by day, saying and doing whatever takes his fancy.
Essentially, the first two nights of the RNC have comprised dark warnings about invading hordes of merciless strangers, contrasted with glorious paeans to the greatness of Donald Trump, the mythic (and I do mean mythic) hero of our time. As Monday night speaker Natalie Harp put it:
You have used your strength to make America strong again. Sacrificed the life you built to make America proud again. And risked everything to make America safe again.
I think this observation captures where the Republican Party is today: Culture-war grievance at the bottom facilitating corruption at the top, wrapped up in a cult of personality. To be fair, those first two items are standard-issue modern conservative politics. It’s that last innovation that Donald Trump brought to the party.
This is just getting started:
Kenosha Police said early Wednesday morning that two people had been shot and killed and a third injured during protests over the shooting of Jacob Blake; authorities were looking for a man armed with a long gun.
He walked right past the police. With the weapon slung in front of him. With his hands in the air. With bystanders screaming that he had just shot multiple people. But he was not black. He may as well have been invisible.
Social media posts contain multiple images and video of the alleged shooter. It is not clear what happened, although the shooting seems to have broken out near people vandalizing a car lot. Social media posts suggest there were multiple armed groups on the ground: some in support of people protesting the shooting Sunday of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police, and some claiming they came armed to protect other people’s property.
The shooting occurred about 11:45 p.m. local time in an area where protests have occurred since Sunday night. After declaring an emergency curfew on Sunday, county officials extended it Tuesday night.
Jacob Blake, who was shot shot multiple times by police in Wisconsin, is paralyzed, and it would “take a miracle” for him to walk again, his family’s attorney said Tuesday, while calling for the officer who opened fire to be arrested and others involved to lose their jobs.
The shooting of Blake on Sunday in Kenosha — apparently in the back while three of his children looked on — was captured on cellphone video and ignited new protests over racial injustice in several cities, coming just three months after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police touched off a wider reckoning on race.
Kenosha police, this armed militia man said, welcomed help from white vigilantes:
“We appreciate you guys. We really do,” police in an armored vehicle said after tossing bottles of water to a group of armed men.
Minneapolis police arrested 11 people early Tuesday after people there protesting the Blake police shooting in Kenosha tried to breach the Hennepin County jail.
People were going to die. That much has been clear since racial tensions exploded this summer after the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd. People have died.
Throwing armed civilians into the mix just makes things worse, whatever “side” they are on. This is as insane as the clowns who frequent bars where people regularly get shot, so they bring pistols in case they might need to defend themselves after several beers.
But it is darker than that. Donald Trump and RNC convention speakers are conjuring for their dwindling, white base images of cities in flames across the country and black mobs committing mayhem from sea to shining sea.
Donald Trump & Co. say Sleepy Joe and his citified, woke-topian, MS-13 radicals mean to imprison them in their four-grain-elevator towns and reduce them to unchurched, Marxist, burned-out, gun-free wasteland of socialist anarchy.
Just the suggestion of that, the suggestion of loss of white control once led to a reign of white terror. It led to the KKK and to decades of lynchings. To white mobs in Wilmington. And in Tulsa.
Trump is preparing to go scorched earth is he loses control, and he has white men with guns ready to take to the streets. They are already there. And in too many places, events suggest, the police sympathize.
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Trump’s psychotic imagination:
You thought what happened on-screen during the first night of the Republican National Convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind the scenes.
Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on this episode of The New Abnormal to share the eye-watering tales of what Trump is really like when the cameras are switched off.
The national security official couldn’t get through a meeting “without him doing 20 tangents, becoming irascible, turning red in the face, demanding a diet Coke, spewing spit,” Taylor explained. “Literally out of goddamn nowhere, he’d be like, ‘You know, who’s just my favorite guy? The MyPillow guy. Do any of you have those pillows?’”
When it came to the issue of the border wall, Trump would be dreaming up “sickening” medieval plots “to pierce the flesh” of migrants, rip all the families apart, “maim,” and gas them, Taylor claims. “This was a man with no humanity whatsoever,” Taylor says. “He says, we got to do this, this, this, and this, all of which are probably impossible, illegal unethical,” Taylor recalls, but he was writing them down as the president spoke. “And he looks over me and he goes, ‘you fucking taking notes?’”
He wanted to “pierce the flesh” and “maim” people? Ofcourse he did. Didn’t anyone listen to the way he talked in the 2016 election?
Trump repeatedly proclaimed that he loved waterboarding, and promised to do “a lot more than that” as president. He insisted that torture works, adding that “if it doesn’t work they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.” He hinted broadly that he would even consider beheading, because his entire “strategy” to combat ISIS was to be even more brutal than they were.
Trump also promised to “go after” the wives and families of terrorist suspects saying, “I guess your definition of what I’d do, I’m going to leave that to your imagination.” He often repeated a tall tale about Gen. John J. Pershing summarily executing Muslim insurgents during the Spanish-American War:
“He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood. And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person he said “You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.” And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, OK?”
I must have written 20,000 words on Trump’s sociopathic rhetoric during the campaign. It is who he is and always was. Anyone who voted for him had to know exactly what they were getting. It’s not as if he tried to hide it.
The first night of the Republican National Convention was down in total viewership on both the 2016 edition, and the opening night of this year’s Democratic National Convention.
In total, just under 16 million people tuned in for night 1 of the RNC across the cable news and broadcast networks. That represents a 29% dip from the opening night four years ago, which drew around 22.5 million pairs of eyeballs. For comparison, the first night of last week’s DNC drew 18.7 million viewers (which was itself down 27% from 2016).
Looking at the networks individually, Fox News unsurprisingly came out on top by a mile, drawing 7.1 million viewers in the 10 to 11 p.m. time slot. CNN placed second with just over 2 million viewers, followed by ABC with just under 2 million. NBC drew 1.7 million viewers to its coverage, followed by MSNBC with 1.6 million, and finally CBS with 1.5 million.
Fox News also dominated the key news demographic of people aged 25-54, in which the network scored 1.6 million viewers. That’s around 1 million more than its closest rival CNN, which delivered 600,000 in the demo.
The fact that the 2020 DNC and RNC are on course to be substantially down on the last edition isn’t necessarily surprising given that much of this year’s convention is pre-taped and that television viewership as a whole has declined significantly in the last four years.
That explains why Tucker and Hannity broke away all night long to comment on how good it was. That’s in order to avoid showing how dull it was.
The Democrats tried to mix it up and turn it into a real TV show since the live event wasn’t available. Trump is making his into a live event anyway — without any of the energy and spontaneity. I doubt the ratings are going to get better. After all, he’s all over the thing already. It’s hard to imagine there will be much excitement about hearing from him at the end.