Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last week, I kept hearing from political pundits and Republican spokespersons that the former president was about to deliver a message of national unity. They said that he had rewritten his acceptance speech, transforming it from a “barnburner” to an inclusive message for all Americans. There was endless speculation that a near-death experience had softened him. This was yet further proof, that after eight years of observing Donald Trump, that the most important thing to know about him is still not understood:
Donald Trump is mentally unfit for command. He meets all the criteria for Personality Disorder – which would be a mandatory psychiatric discharge from the military we allowed him to command for four years at great peril to our national security.
Most disturbing was the fact that many of these journalists (who had been broadcasting all of Trump’s crimes over these many years – everything from sexual assault to condoning and praising a violent insurrection) were hoping to witness a miraculous transformation of character.
When Donald Trump took the stage Thursday night and started his speech there was a brief moment where the hopes and dreams of national unity were hanging by a thread, but then the puppet master started to pull his usual strings. He promised that he would tell us about the shooting just this once, He even uttered the words “unity” and “one nation” under God. Then the onslaught began – the culmination of a carefully orchestrated convention emphasizing an America that is not united, but, under Trump, will be – as soon as the carnage is swept away.
The former reality TV host spoke of all the blood he shed in Butler, Pennsylvania, after in the past making a mockery of the blood shed by so many, including Senators John McCain, and Tammy Duckworth, and tens of thousands at Gettysburg, just miles away – blood shed for real unity. The previous night at the convention Trump had used the families of fallen marines in Afghanistan to trash the Biden administration despite the fact that it was Trump who surrendered to the Taliban and planned a withdrawal. These Gold Star families were not part of a sinister plot, their grief was real; they had no idea that they were pawns in a game to make Trump look like a caring Commander in Chief. What was lost in the telling was the fact that the Marines were killed in August 2021 but that they were not invited to Trump’s Bedminster Country Club in New Jersey to be honored until two years later in September 2023. Using grieving families for political messaging was an unprecedented abuse of our military culture by a former Commander in Chief. Foreign policy, even failed foreign policy, being a national loss with collective grief and blame.
The most offensive part of the former president’s acceptance speech was introducing the idea that the Almighty had intervened to save him so that he could lead the nation and fulfill God’s plans. Trump repeated this several times. He started slowly, almost humbly, “Blood everywhere, God on my side.” But the malignant narcissism soon took over and reached a crescendo, “I stand before you only by the Grace of Almighty God. Many people say it was a Providential moment.” The crowd was in tears as he told them that they were about to begin the four greatest years in American history and then he betrayed our unity, and the first amendment of our constitution, by declaring that “we are bound by a single faith.”
READ: Senator Josh Hawley: ‘Christian Nationalism Founded American Democracy’
His garish display of self-worship took many forms from giant portraits with blood on his face and fist raised in defiance, to his clarion call to fight, fight, fight. He gave a very detailed description of what they were fighting for, completely negating his sparse words of unity as he listed everything that was under siege by Biden, the left and the woke. His speech then morphed into his usual cornucopia of lie after lie after lie on every subject from the economy to foreign policy. To rationalize his numerous illegal activities, he said that “the Democratic Party should stop weaponizing the Justice Department and going after their political opponents. Democrats need to drop their partisan witch hunt.”
The entire convention was expertly choreographed to appeal to the working class, Evangelicals, and to the xenophobic among the audience. Trump and Vance appealed to the common man by having the stage dominated by professional wrestlers, country western stars, speeches and songs contributing to a massive hillbilly elegy worthy of his rags-to-riches choice for vice president. Many of the performances were distasteful, offensive, like the moment that Trump had the Firefighters uniform of Corey Comperatore, the one victim killed by one of the assassin’s bullets on July 13, brought on stage. Trump walked over to the uniform and kissed the helmet, reminiscent of this same gesture at CPAC, where Trump embraced and kissed the American flag and mouthed the words, “I love you baby.” To the audience, and probably to the Comperatore family, his actions were most likely taken as a sign of respect. But to stage it for public consumption was pure Trump showmanship and a mockery of something most families hold private and sacred.
READ: The Biden-Trump Debate: A Question of Patriotism
Trump continued his speech with a long list of promises that only he could solve, from his Southern border wall to ending the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. All of his statements ludicrous, i.e., finishing the wall “most of which we’ve already built,” to a world teetering on the brink of world war that he will solve quickly. “I will end every single international crisis … Ukraine and Israel wouldn’t have happened if I was President.”
He ended his speech with two promises for day one: “Drill baby drill,” his answer (and homage to former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin) to the “new green scam,” or what most of the world agrees is a crisis of global warming. And a promise to clear our borders of the criminals and escapees from prisons and insane asylums all over the world. He said that he would launch the largest-ever deportation operation. He declared that during his presidency “the world was at peace,” and that he had “eliminated human trafficking,” and “we defeated ISIS 100 percent.”
His scariest promise he saved for last: “We must put aside our disagreements and become one people…success will unite us.”
READ: Confronting a ‘Second American Revolution’ on the 4th of July
He lamented that we don’t have fierce people anymore “except people cheating on elections… the election result that we are never going to allow to happen again.” Harkening back to his inauguration speech, he told us the power of the MAGA movement but this time he gave it a national religious clarification:
“My journey with you was almost ended but nobody knows God’s plan … our movement is the greatest movement in the history of our country … No one will ever stop us.”
