Having been to many political conventions over the years and watched many more slumped on the sofa bed in my home bunker, and now having watched two mostly remote events courtesy of Republicans and Democrats, I have finally isolated the element that has historically made these occasions so maddening and unpleasant: people.Specifically, I have in mind the people who go to political conventions.
In the end, history may record that the most revealing thing about President Trump’s rally in Tulsa last night was the way it was covered by the all-news networks. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News had plugged the event as if it were the Pro Bowl. The anchors and reporters vamped for hours with pregame analysis and on-the-scene color shots as the big kickoff approached. And then the moment arrived and the time for commentary ended and … only Fox went ahead and aired the rally.
In the fall of 2016, a journalist popularized a catchy binary to describe the bizarre behavior of Donald Trump and the effect he had on his rapturous followers.Supporters of the then–Republican presidential nominee, Salena Zito wrote, take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Meanwhile, his detractors, including most of the mainstream press, “take him literally but not seriously.
This week began with angry Trump, but, don’t worry, it ended with the president as a happy man.There he was Monday evening, jaw set in the familiar simian rictus, marching from the White House across Lafayette Square, with a cloud of flunkies and Secret Service agents trailing him. His path had just been cleared of inconvenient citizens by phalanxes of cops using tear gas in hopes of making the president’s walk in the park as pleasant and uneventful as a walk in the park.