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Just for the record, the violent crime rate in America has been in decline for three decades, despite an uptick in homicides this year, and the vast and overwhelming majority of racial-justice protesters who've taken to American streets in the last few months have demonstrated peacefully. Not that you'd know it from the sprawling images of fire and destruction that exploded out of the Republican National Convention on Monday night, an event that was billed in the lead-up as a more optimistic and positive exhibition than the Democratic counterpart last week. The attempt to paint Joe Bidena fairly conservative Democrat on policing issuesas a Trojan Horse for Marxist anarchist revolution who will abolish the police and suburbs left little room for positive vibes.

The event was buoyant on one score: here, the Covid-19 pandemic was under control, apparently because the president took it seriously(!) when no one else did. This was kaleidoscopic propaganda: the president repeatedly and consistently downplayed the threat, said the coronavirus would simply go away, praised China's initial response, and dismissed Democrats and the media as alarmists for heeding the warnings of public-health experts. His signature policy response"banning" travel from Chinadid not actually ban travel for tens of thousands of people, and besides, the virus was actually coming over from Europe. The United States now has nearly a quarter of the world's cases and nearly 22 percent of the deaths spread across just over four percent of the world's population. But that was another element of the positivity here: the 175,000 Americans who have died scarcely merited a mention.

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The outing was nearly as bizarre as it was counterfactual. Elsewhere in the festivities, it was suggested that under a President Biden, "we'd be lucky if we could see any doctor," which is certainly a novel claim. There were a couple of semi-normal speakers, like Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, who demonstrated what the party might look like if it backed nearly all Trump's policies but could keep its freak flag at half-mast in public. But mostly, it was a reminder that one thing we'll likely look back on and marvel at about this era is the towering mediocrity of many of the people elevated to the highest echelons of public life. High up on that list are the various Trumpian spawn and their spouses, all of whom seem to be marauding the country making the case for both the big guy's re-election and anti-nepotism policies.

There doesn't seem to be anyone in this orbit who will point out when something is going on that is insane, which may be how this pre-taped speech from Kimberly Guilfoyle, significant other to Donald Trump, Jr. and well-compensated Trump campaign surrogate, made it on air.

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Jesus, what a time to be alive. Though I do think we can all agree that "human sex drug traffickers" should not be allowed to cross our borders, even if that is a great band name. Guilfoyle cycled through the new greatest hits collection, echoing the other speakers in warning that the country is turning into a violent apocalyptic burning wastelandbut also it's the best country in the world and Democrats only talk about its flawsand encouraging viewers to re-elect the incumbent president who is overseeing this surge in firey End Times riot-looting, but also making everything great. She did so in a way that was somehow uniquely unnerving, her volume rising all the time until it hit a genuinely frightening crescendo. All the while, she was both irate and cheerful, a neat visual summation of this movement's relationship to the reactionary grievance that is its animating force. The anger, in the end, feels good.

But Guilfoyle's was not to be the only bizarro performance from the extended Trump clan. Her boyfriend, Donald Trump, Jr., emerged later to make the case for my fatherand for the idea that there was quite a scene in the green room backstage. If Guilfoyle was energized, Junior brought the weeping eyes and fast-lane delivery and jerky hand movements as he warned the audience that they would be CANCELLED by the Democrats.

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This is indeed another novel attack: that Democrats oppose "church, work, and school," presumably because they share public-health experts' concerns about people gathering indoors for long periods of time when the virus is raging out of control. Instead, they support "rioting, looting, and vandalism," a claim made throughout last night's proceedings that, despite running against what Joe Biden has actually said on the topic, does sound scary. So does the notion Biden intends to defund the police, even though, much to the chagrin of the actual left, he wants to boost police funding. So does the notion that he wants to abolish the suburbs, which the president has basically admitted is a crude attempt to fear-monger his way towards clawing back some support among suburban whites.

Meanwhile, you can't help but feel Junior could liberate himself from this whole sad mess if he'd just go Kendall Roy for a minute. When he did his best impression of the Talking Heads staging an infomercial"Imagine the life you want to have, one with a great job, a beautiful home, a perfect family."it was hard not to sense his pain.

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In all, the night was another showcase of the now bedrock Republican belief that if you say something loud enough and often enough that enough people come to believe it, it might as well be true. (In Guilfoyle's case, this was quite literal.) It was a kind of quantum vision of the country, where it is both teetering over the edge into the chaotic abyss and the greatest it's ever been, and the guy in charge is only responsible for the good parts. His opponent, who currently exercises no actual power in any jurisdiction, is nonetheless responsible for the apocalyptic destruction. ("Democrat" cities are a hellscape, especially if you haven't been to one recently.) That's how the incumbent is now running on a platform to restore "law and order" to a country he's already in charge of.

It's a fool's errand to try to speculate whether it will work, but there's plenty of evidence that human beings are unable to accurately process the threat of crime in their personal lives. They hugely overrate it. Republicans have basically abandoned their former talk of how the protests following George Floyd's killing reflected legitimate grievances, and that those people causing property damage were just a minority giving everyone else a bad name. Now, just as the president almost never talks about immigrants except for violent gang members, you'll rarely hear talk in these precincts about peaceful protesters. Everyone's a violent anarchist Marxist now, coming to destroy your suburb. The president and his lackeys will once again test the limits of what people will choose to believe.

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Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle Said It All Very Loud and Very Fast So All of It Must Be True - Esquire