GOP Convention Pretended COVID Was Over While Creating Super-Spreader Conditions
He lied about testing, again. He lied about the China travel ban, again. He lied about the pandemic dead, again. He lied about supporting Black people, again. He lied about protecting coverage for pre-existing conditions, again. He lied about Joe Biden and Barack Obama, again and again. He lied about petroleum, the police, the military, the border wall, immigration in general, NATO, the economy, veterans… for more than an hour in the hot COVID night of Washington D.C., Donald Trump breathed in oxygen and exhaled fiction.
The man was a blacksmith’s bellows of shaded falsehoods and outright lies, again, as he broke the law on the White House lawn Thursday night. With his death cult of cheering, sweaty, unmasked, shoulder-to-shoulder devotees arrayed before him, Trump painted a bleak portrait of the nation in chaotic hues of his own failed stewardship, all blood red, Klansman white and cop blue… except none of it was his fault, of course.
There were about 1,500 people packed into that fascist square of time, and if COVID was in the audience with them, there will be a measurable body count from the affair before the children find out there can be no Halloween. Sorry, sweetie, but the president of the United States made the virus bad again. We can’t trick-or-treat this year.
COVID, the ongoing national racial justice uprising, vivid environmental damage and economic ruin are the legacy of Trump’s first term as president, but according to his people, the economy is doing wonderfully, there is no climate disruption, Black Lives Matter protesters are harming society, and COVID is over.
That last viciously self-serving lie, on the heels of the super-spreader festival at the White House, comes with a particularly damaging twist of the dagger. CNN’s Jim Acosta spoke with a senior White House official about the flagrantly dangerous lack of COVID protections on display during Trump’s nomination acceptance speech.
According to Acosta, the White House official “brushed off those concerns about the lack of social distancing at the president’s speech tonight, saying, and quote, and get this, this quote might blow you away, ‘Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.’ Those are the words coming from a senior White House official about the concerns being raised about this being a possible super-spreader event tonight.”
It is the mass consensus of COVID science that allowing the virus to burn unchecked through the populace will cause hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. Yet this appears to be the stated policy of the Trump administration as they strive for a second opportunity to grind the nation further into the dust.
According to a Friday report in the Charlotte Observer, two attendees and two support staffers for the convention in that city have been diagnosed with COVID-19. The wolf is loose, again, to the surprise of nobody who has been paying the slightest bit of attention lo these last seven months.
One day before his nomination acceptance speech, Trump was asked by The New York Times to lay out his agenda for that second term. “I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate we want to get done,” he answered.
Let ‘em die. That is the agenda, on the streets and in the hospitals, and not even a slice of cake as a parting gift.
Jacob Blake, paralyzed perhaps for life by the seven bullets pumped into his fleeing back by Kenosha police, spent Thursday handcuffed to his hospital bed. Meanwhile, Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement, the Brennan Center’s report on the “Blue Lives” that spent the last four days getting a tongue-bath at Trump’s convention, landed a few hours before Trump’s acceptance speech. The report warns:
The harms that armed law enforcement officers affiliated with violent white supremacist and anti-government militia groups can inflict on American society could hardly be overstated. Yet despite the FBI’s acknowledgement of the links between law enforcement and these suspected terrorist groups, the Justice Department has no national strategy designed to identify white supremacist police officers or to protect the safety and civil rights of the communities they patrol.
Let ‘em die?
No.
Let’s resist.
All day today, thousands of people will gather in Washington D.C. to note the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The estimated crowd size was double what it is now, but COVID concerns have severely and properly limited attendance by people from areas deemed “hot spots.” Thermometer check-in stations will be widely available, masks will be required, and social distancing will be diligently practiced.
“The families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner and Jacob Blake will join Reverend Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III on Friday at the Commitment March: Get Your Knee off Our Necks,” reports CBS News. “The march, organized by the National Action Network, calls for racial justice and police reform. Sharpton first announced plans for the march during a memorial service for George Floyd, the 46-year-old father who died at the hands of police in Minneapolis in May.”
The Republican National Convention is over. The long quest for justice, freedom, accountability and hope has only just begun. Tell a friend.