Friday Open Thread [7.22.16]

Andrew Sullivan, like myself, read Trump’s draft speech around dinner time, after it was leaked by a Republican to Hillary’s campaign (which by itself should strike panic into the hearts of the Trump campaign). Here is his take before seeing it:

It’s a remarkable piece of oratory, cannily crafted, framed by massive lies and distortions, crammed with incoherence, and yet, I’m afraid to say, scarily potent. It invents a reality – that the U.S. is in a state of chaos, lawlessness and soaring crime; that the world is careening toward catastrophe – and then makes a classic argument for a strongman to set things straight.

This is a very new departure for politics in a liberal democracy. We’ve never heard an appeal from a major party platform to junk traditional democratic norms, and cede power to a new tyrant, whose magical powers will somehow cause almost every problem in the country to disappear. In this election, the very basis of liberal democracy is on the ballot. The fears I expressed last May about the popularity of tyranny in a late-democracy have, I’m afraid, only been fanned by events since.

The speech is entirely about fear, to be somehow vanquished by a single man’s will to power. Its core message is what America was founded to resist. Its success would be an abolition of the core promise of this country for two centuries – that self-government is incompatible with the rule by the whims and prejudices and impulses of a man on a white horse.

It can happen here. It is happening here. No election has been more important in my lifetime.

His reaction after delivery:

I have to say I’m relieved. This was a terrible presentation of what read like a powerful speech. It seems screechy, unmodulated, and yet also plodding. Mussolini never had a Teleprompter.

I agree completely. During the hours between reading it and 10:30, I drank. Heavily. It read like a fascist masterpiece determined to take what existing fear there is and stoke it so as to change America beyond any democratic (small d) recognition.

But it was delivered like a 75 minute primal scream. If one piece of shit complains about Hillary’s voice ever again, I will punch them directly in the face, and then continue the pummeling on the ground.

However, it was still a dark, dystopian, fascist speech. It will do more to unify those who believe in liberalism or progressivism than anything Clinton, Sanders or Obama could do alone.

Richard Wolffe on the demise of Roger Ailes and the Republican Party: “We are witnessing the Great Unravelling of the Republican party. Its ideological intellectuals openly disdain and plot against the party’s nominee. Its elected officials are too busy to show up to their own party’s convention.”

“And now the conservative echo chamber itself is collapsing across the mainstream media it surely dominates.”

“The rapid demise of Roger Ailes at Fox News Channel is as seismic an event as Trump’s nomination. For Ailes ruled over a conservative media and political empire that stretched far beyond cable television.”

Ezra Klein: “Tonight, Donald J. Trump will accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States. And I am, for the first time since I began covering American politics, genuinely afraid.”

“Donald Trump is not a man who should be president. This is not an ideological judgment. This is not something I would say about Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio. This is not a disagreement over Donald Trump’s tax plan or his climate policies. This is about Trump’s character, his temperament, his impulsiveness, his basic decency.”

“He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash.”

Preemptive bedwetter warning: highly likely Trump gets very good reviews for his speech (low expectations) and he gets a bump in the polls

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) July 21, 2016

Joe Klein: “I’m not sure I know how to write about this election anymore without seeming imprudent. I came into this year believing that our government was desperately in need of conservative reform and restraint. I came to those views watching the corroded incompetence of the Department of Veterans Affairs and also in the belief that Democrats had been too unwilling to look at and think clearly about the failures of the welfare state. I had some problems with Hillary Clinton too—from her support for the invasion of Libya to her foolish personal behavior, accepting big-money speeches from Goldman Sachs because, she said, she ‘wasn’t sure’ she was going to run for President. But I would never question her essential decency; indeed, she is one of the most thoughtful politicians I know. And the Democratic Party, for all its politically correct smugness and silliness, has never surrendered its soul to the extremists lurking on its left.”

“The Republican Party, by contrast, has become a national embarrassment. Donald Trump is a national embarrassment. This election will be the greatest test, in my lifetime, of the wisdom of our people and the strength of the democratic project.”

This is a thing that actually happened pic.twitter.com/vZZAHf21U6

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) July 22, 2016

David Brooks:

But this is not a normal convention. Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution.

The only speaker here who clearly understands this is Ted Cruz. He understands that the Trump phenomenon is probably not going to end the way a normal candidacy ends. It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained.

Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.

The coverage of Trump's speech is actually quite brutal and pointed. Widely notes his red-faced ranting and authoritarian overtones.

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) July 22, 2016

Good. I was sure the press would fawn over it.

Actually I KNOW WHY this speech seems so, so, so much more off-putting than normal.

Usually Trump is funny. Likable, even.

Not today.

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) July 22, 2016

“He sounded like some two-bit dictator of some country you couldn’t find on a map.”

— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted by The Week, on Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

Dan Balz: “There were no echoes of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America,’ George H.W. Bush’s ‘kinder and gentler nation’ or even George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism in Donald Trump’s speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination here Thursday night. Instead, in both theme and target audience, Trump offered a powerful echo of Richard Nixon almost 50 years ago.”

“Trump’s speech proved once again that he would continue to throw out the traditional campaign rulebook that might dictate softer language and broader appeals. Instead, he offered his grim portrait of the country and a law-and-order message in the hope of summoning an army of disaffected and forgotten voters large enough to topple the political status quo in November.”

James Poniewozik: “What the speech lacked in unpredictability, it made up for in volume and direness. Mr. Trump near-shouted much of what he had to say, and what he had to say was frightening.”

The Death of the Republican Party https://t.co/6cY7SH5oAu

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) July 22, 2016

That was a common theme last night. Meghan McCain and Nicole Wallace and Anna Navarro, Republicans all, said the same thing. We now have a Democratic Party and a fascist Nationalist Party.

Another:

As a lifelong Republican, I hope that Trump loses in a landslide & the GOP comes to its senses. My @latimes oped: https://t.co/b3tuKAWLWL

— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) May 8, 2016