Give them credit: the Republicans did a great job of relentlessly
conveying clear, unambiguous themes in their convention.
They communicated that Donald Trump did a masterful job
handling the coronavirus pandemic. They conveyed that Trump has done a
brilliant job of managing the economy, while Joe Biden and the Democrats are
committed to turning the United States into a socialist state. They repeatedly
reinforced their message that America under Joe Biden would be a terrifying,
lawless state in which protesters who advocate for the Black Lives Matter
movement would destroy the suburbs. Speakers echoed Eric Trump’s emphatic
assertion that in his father’s administration, “America became the envy of the
world.”
Clear, consistent communication is one thing. Clear
communication of preposterous falsehoods has another name: propaganda.
Yes, in today’s column we shall hand out our first “Golden
Goebbels Statues” for outstanding performance in the dark art of propaganda.
Our awards take their name from Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister of
Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, who is often viewed as the
pioneer and leading practitioner of a form of communication that leverages the
power and authority of mass media to distort, deny, or eradicate the truth in
service of a political end. Propaganda
is lying on the steroids of mass media.
Goebbels was a quotable fellow, and he was quite
forthcoming about the abject moral bankruptcy that served as the North Star for
his professional aspiration:
“That propaganda is good which leads to
success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not
propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”
Then there was this assessment of humanity:
“You can’t change the masses. They will always
be the same: dumb, gluttonous, and forgetful.”
And, of course, there is the propaganda theory of Hitler
himself, who articulated the idea of the “Big Lie” in his autobiography, Mein
Kampf.
“All this was inspired by the principle—which
is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force
of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily
corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or
voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily
fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often
tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale
falsehoods.”
The tactics of propaganda are well known. Go for the “Big
Lie.” Never admit to failure, responsibility, or wrongdoing. Find a scapegoat
to blame for all problems. Repeat, repeat, and repeat until the sharp lines
between truth and fiction are pounded into gray liminal spaces in which guilt
can be evaded and reality can be debated.
Thusly revealed: the apparent briefing plan for the 2020
Republican Convention. Take every known reality about the Trump administration
and offer an inverted version as undisputed fact, and assume the audience will somehow
be dumb and forgetful enough to buy it. The Republican agenda for their convention
was clearly to sell the five big lies noted above.
Welcome, then, to the 2020 Golden Goebbels Awards. Here are
the categories and the winners.
The Category: “Donald Trump did an amazing job
taming the global pandemic back when the pandemic used to be a problem.”
Our first statue, for “Outstanding Short Perversion of a
Devastating Truth,” goes to the brief film on Monday night that attempted to
portray Trump as the decisive, engaged leader whose hands-on management style
and bold actions saved countless lives back during that period long ago when we
used to be afflicted by the coronavirus. This is an actual quote from the film:
““From the very beginning, Democrats, the media
and the World Health Organization got the coronavirus wrong. One leader took
decisive action to save lives: President Donald Trump.”
We can agree that “one leader took decisive action” part,
but it was actually Andrew Cuomo. Allegedly decisive Donald spend February
through May spinning fairy tales that the coronavirus would “magically
disappear,” dismissing the urgent warnings and advice of scientists, overtly
abdicating all responsibility for managing the pandemic to the governors, not
wearing a mask, huckstering phony treatments as panaceas, musing publicly about
the efficacy of ingesting bleach, and pressuring states to prematurely re-open
for business, which triggered the carnage that has now surpassed 180,000 deaths.
The United States is now openly pitied as one of the nations that has handled
the pandemic least ineffectively. We have a mere 4% of the world’s population
but 22% of the COVID-19 deaths.
Goebbels would be in awe of this Big Lie in this
film.
The judges, however, do want to give a dishonorable
mention to the recurring efforts made at the Republican Convention to
pretend the pandemic was over… vanquished; a thing of the past. Best example:
invite 1,500 guests to the acceptance address to sit on chairs that have been
set out with no thought to social distance, don’t test everyone for COVID-19,
and don’t require masks. Why, you’d think that pesky pandemic was over!
Just imagine just how many drunken parties are going to be
hosted all across America next weekend, kissing off social distancing and
masks! Hey, we’re just doing what they do at the White House!
The Category: “Donald Trump has created the
greatest economy of all time.”
The Republicans were in lockstep on this one, frequently
invoking the mantra that “in the first three years of his administration,
Donald Trump had created the greatest economy in history.” Now we can quibble with
that on face value, but the focus on the first three years tells all. Republicans
want to casually dismiss the catastrophic damage to our economy caused by
Trump’s incompetent management of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is sort of like a
surgeon saying that the heart valve operation was going great up until the point
when he accidentally sliced open the aorta.
Republicans take the position that of the carnage to our
jobs and our economy is all a function of the pandemic, ignoring the fact that
the economic impact of the pandemic has been far worse that it should have been
if Trump had competently managed the crisis. The scope of the pandemic is far
worse in the United States than all but a handful of developed nations.
Lost in all this is the fact that it was a dicey
proposition to claim that even the first three years of the Trump
administration were all that successful from an economic standpoint, given the
robust growth he inherited from the Obama administration, Trump’s own ballooning
national debt, and yet another failure of “trickle down” tax cuts to trickle
down.
The economy, of course, is a tricky discussion for
Republicans, who want to trash Biden as a “socialist,” conveniently forgetting
that it was the Obama Biden administration that rescued the economy from the
meltdown that occurred at the end of the prior Republican administration of
George W. Bush. It is particularly
ironic that several Republican speakers rather mysteriously warned that “Joe
Biden will take away your cars,” in that Obama and Biden were responsible for
saving the U.S. auto industry in the wake of the Bush economic meltdown.
All things considered, the idea that our current economy is
something Republicans should be proud of is pure Goebbels. Award the statue!
Category: “Black Lives Matter will destroy your
suburban home and community.”
Patty and Mark McCloskey probably would have been content
with the 15 minutes of fame they enjoyed after storming out of their expensive
home in St. Louis with a pistol and an assault rifle to ward off BLM
protestors, at one point aiming a gun directly at the peaceful parade
passing the McCloskey mansion toward the home of St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson. But the Republican Party ensured a far more
enduring notoriety by inviting them to be the poster people for white suburban
terror and rage.
Here’s a sampler from Patty:
“They (Democrats) are not satisfied with spreading the
chaos and violence into our communities, they want to abolish the suburbs
altogether by ending single-family home zoning. This forced re-zoning would
bring crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban
neighborhoods. These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near
you. So make no mistake: no matter where you live, your family will not be safe
in the radical Democrats’ America.”
Why on earth would the Republican Party chose to lionize
these two trigger-happy white suburban vigilantes as the symbol of their political party? Well, that tells you all you need to know about Donald Trump’s
re-election strategy: it is called basic instinct. Turn up the heat on
all of the ugly, despicable fears that your base holds about minorities.
What happens when Republicans endorse the conduct of two
trigger-happy white suburban vigilantes by putting them on national television
at their party convention? Do you think they might have given anyone ideas? Two
nights later, after yet another disgraceful shooting of a Black man by a white
police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a trigger-happy teenage vigilante
murdered two protestors and wounded a third.
And, of course, the Kenosha police chief just had to blame
the protestors for getting themselves killed. Kenosha Police Chief Daniel
Miskinis actually said this: "Everybody involved was out after the
curfew. I'm not gonna make a great deal of it but the point is -- the curfew's
in place to protect. Had persons not been out involved in violation of that,
perhaps the situation that unfolded would not have happened."
Yes, in Donald Trump’s America, Republicans venerate the
vigilante gun-toters who view peaceful protestors as an angry, threatening mob,
and tell the people who insist on protesting police murders that they
are the real problem.
Give Patty and Mark their statues, if only so that, however
briefly, they will put down their guns.
Category: “Achievement in Set Design and Stunning
Violations of the Hatch Act.”
Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows,
said this of the Hatch Act: “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares.” Mr.
Meadows, the fact that you think no one outside of Washington cares about
whether the Republican Party desecrates the property of the American people
proves that you are the classic Washington establishment insider who has
lost touch with how people outside the Beltway feel.
Seeing “Trump Pence” video screens in front of the White
House, and fireworks that spelled out “Trump 2020” over the Washington Monument
was grotesque; it is experienced by those who oppose Trump as someone spitting
on some of the most revered symbols of our national pride. And yes, our tax
dollars were used for Donald Trump’s political rally.
For many, the politicizing of the White House and the
Washington Monument was actually the worst moment of the week. The fact is that
many Americans are now sadly accustomed to watching Trump, Pence and the rest
of them spew ignorance, stupidity, and falsehoods on cable news. What we had
not yet seen was the visual of Trump pretending that the White House and the
Washington Monument were his toys.
These are the types of non-verbal yet powerful visual
messages that Goebbels applauded.
Republicans, take this statue to eternally commemorate the decomposition
of your dignity.
Category: “Most Unhinged Performance in an
Unsupported Diatribe.”
We knew that awarding a single “Golden Goebbels” in this
category was going to be a challenge, given that the nominees included Matt
Gaetz, Pam Bondi, Jim Jordan, Jeannette Nunez, Dana White, and a host of people
named “Trump.”
Sure, there were some pretty whacky quotes throughout the
four days, many laden with irony. Nunez thinks that it is the Democrats who
want to “dismantle the Constitution,” and Joni Ernst noted that Democrats would
“ban animal agriculture and eliminate your cars.” Huh? Mitch McConnell
said that Democrats want to tell you “how many hamburgers you can eat,” which
sounds nuts but at least explains the Senator’s own great rotunda.
Donald Trump, Jr., gave a good run at this award, with his
notable quote that “It’s almost like this election is shaping up to be church,
work, and school versus rioting, looting and vandalism, or, in the words of
Biden and the Democrats, ‘peaceful protesting.’” This had to have been the
first time that “church, work, and school” were used in a sentence associated
with Donald Trump, except perhaps in the recently released audio tapes of
Trump’s sister, who touches on Trump’s barrenness in all three areas while
revealing for the first time that Trump had someone else take his SATs so that
he could get into Penn.
But we cannot consider Donald Trump Junior’s nomination in
this category until the drug tests are in.
It seemed that Kimberly Guilfoyle had this statue locked up
on Monday night. Guilfoyle’s wild-eyed zeal, awkward gestures, and fanatical
raving hinted at thespian training under Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little
Mermaid. Unmindful of rhetorical excess, Guilfoyle said that Democrats
“want to destroy this country, and everything that we have fought for and hold
dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what
you see and think, and believe, so they can control how you live.” Guilfoyle’s hissy fit is a sure fit in the history
of histrionics.
But you just cannot hold Rudy Giuliani down. Rudy, clearly
eager to win this statue, went full conspiracy theory on us. He overtly
asserted that the BLM protestors deliberately started rioting and looting in
order to help Democrats defeat Donald Trump:
”It seemed, for a few brief shining moments, Democrat
and Republican leaders would come together with a unified proposal to reduce
police misconduct. This possibility was very dangerous to the left. They had a
president to beat and a country to destroy, and although an agreement on action
against police brutality would be very valuable for the country, it would also
make President Trump appear to be an effective leader. They could have none of
that. So Black Lives Matter and Antifa sprang into action, and, in a flash,
they hijacked the peaceful protests into vicious, brutal riots.”
What I really love about Rudy’s quote is that he is the one
who says that all this might “make Trump appear to be an effective leader.”
Don’t worry, Rudy… nothing can make that happen.
So, sure, crazy Uncle Rudy, it was all a plan! An insidious
plot! A vicious scheme to take down Donald Trump! Man, Rudy was scary with
those eyeballs popping… he was soooooo method, channeling
Humphrey Bogart’s Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. “Ah, but the
strawberries… that’s where I had them!”
May I have the envelope, please! The winner is the
terminally unfiltered former mayor of New York City.
You know, all kidding aside… I lived in New York City on
9/11. It is a tragedy to see what a shriveled and craven shell of a human being Rudy Giuliani has become.
Category: A “Lifetime Achievement Grahammie” –
named for South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham -- for “Hypocrisy and
Sycophancy in a Supporting Role.”
How can you not give this one to Mike Pence?
Here is one of the most self-righteous, pious-in-the-sky people on the planet, and yet will not utter a word of objection about a man
who violates most of the Ten Commandments before lunchtime. Mike Pence stands behind Trump,
gazing with rapt devotion at a man who holds the Bible as cheap prop in
a photo-op, is a serial adulterer, and who orders children to be separated from
their parents and housed in cages. Mike, I’m certainly not as devout as you
claim to be, but I’ve read enough to know that what Jesus thought was most important was to protect the weak, shelter the poor, and care for the most
vulnerable among us.
So, Mike: next time you fix your loving eyes on Dear
Leader, you ought to check your Deuteronomy. The commandment immediately
following “I am the Lord thy God” is the one that says “Thou shalt have no
other gods before me.”
(Side note to anyone who is offended: If you think that people have
no right to question another peson's faith, I tend to agree with you. But at this very same Republican Convention, Lou Holtz said that Joe Biden
was a “Catholic in name only.” I have never been a big fan of “an eye for an
eye,” but it applies. Exodus and Leviticus.)
Category: The Grand Golden Goebbels goes to…
Let’s give Donald Trump his due. It is true that he created
the “Space Force.”
He did correctly characterize one accomplishment of his
administration.
But that’s just about it.
Donald Trump was at his most dangerous on Thursday night.
He had clearly been told that he could not veer one word from his teleprompter
text. When he is in full prompter mode, he looks frustrated and even bored, but
compared to his usual howitzer-mouth madness, a teleprompter forces him to
sustain a posture of vaguely presidential comportment. That’s what makes it
scary. Goebbels would approve.
But you really should visit https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/901381398/fact-check-trumps-address-to-the-republican-convention-annotated
to see the good job that NPR did in fact-checking Donald Trump’s convention
address. It is a calm, restrained, and relentlessly dispassionate line-by-line
analysis of a monumental achievement in propaganda.
Let me only touch on some of the topics that are the most
painfully egregious, starting with one of the biggest dilemmas for those who
chose to play the game of propaganda. The very first rule of propaganda is constant
repetition: repeat your big lie often enough and loud enough, and people
start to believe it.
For example: “We will build a wall, and Mexico will pay for
it!”
That was the defining campaign promise for Donald
Trump’s 2016 campaign. It was the essential mantra. It was so profoundly
identified with his campaign that when two years went by and it became clear to
hyper-conservative Anne Coulter that the wall was not getting built, she penned
the famous headline “Gutless President in Wall-less Country.”
In his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Trump declared “We
have already built 300 miles of border wall, and we are adding 10 new miles
every single week. The wall will soon be
complete. And it is working beyond our wildest expectations.”
So it is actually, uh, five miles of new wall
that has been built. In three years.Yes, the math is tricky on this one: you can add ten miles of wall every week, but in the past four years you have actually built five miles of wall.
And – BTW
-- Mexico did not even pay
for that. No, Mexico’s willingness to
underwrite the wall did not come up once this week, because Mexico has not paid
a dime.
Promises kept? Donald Trump has barely accomplished
anything on the single biggest promise he made in the last election.
Trump quickly doubled down on the core themes of his convention:
that Joe Biden is a socialist under whose leadership crime and violence will
flourish:
“At no time before have voters faced a clearer
choice between the parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas.
This election will decide whether we save the American dream or whether
we allow a socialist agenda to demolish
our cherished destiny. Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding
Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and
criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we
will defend the American way of life of whether we will allow a radical
movement to dismantle and destroy it.”
We heard Trump’s ugly provocation of further racial
division in our country by false accusations that the BLM movement is based on
violence and destruction, when the vast majority of BLM marchers are
from the ranks of the clear majority of Americans who believe that the BLM movement
is justified. As if to sicken us even more, Trump has the audacity to say that
he has done more for Black Americans than any president since Lincoln. It is a
disgraceful contention for a racist to make, quite apart from the perverse
deceit to pretend that Trump has done more for Black Americans than Lyndon
Johnson or Barack Obama, just to name two of the most obvious examples.
The hypocrisy is epic. Trump ridicules Biden on the economy
and law and order, yet on other occasions, Trump has tried to skewer Biden for his
support of the excessively harsh 1994 Crime Bill. And, of course, Biden – as
Obama’s VP – helped rally the country out of the economic carnage left by the
Bush administration.
We also have to give Trump credit for his stamina: it’s
tough to bend, twist, obscure, and deny the truth in a non-stop soliloquy of an
hour in length. Trump forced the largely unmasked, insufficiently
socially-distanced, and largely untested crowd to patiently sit through his lengthy version of his
achievements, implicitly demanding that they accept – at significant risk to
their personal health – his need to believe that the threat of COVID-19 has
passed. The medium is the message, and the sub-text was plain as day: the
pandemic must no longer be a problem, because no one here at the White House
wears a mask or maintains social distance.
Of course, it was Trump’s own version of his handling of
the COVID-19 pandemic that most shamed this convention. Trump loves to talk
about his ban of travel from China, which was of a Swiss cheese design that allowed thousands of people into the United States. He does not have much to say about his actions in February through April, the months when his apathy, delay, willful
ignorance, failure to engage, demeaning of the medical community, passing the
buck, and overt denial of responsibility allowed the coronavirus to stampede through our population. It was his abdication of leadership that
allowed a serious health crisis to mushroom into the deadly plague that has
killed 180,000 Americans.
Trump will never admit that he was asleep at the
wheel, refusing to wear a mask while hawking phony cures, taunting
Governors to pressure them to re-open their states for commerce on the hope
that the economy would recover before election day.
The Big Lies. They were all on display at the Republican
Convention…
…That Donald Trump did a great job handling the
coronavirus.
…That no one could have predicted the impact of the virus,
and that nothing could have prevented the overwhelming impact of the
coronavirus. (Clearly, no one at the White House read the "pandemic response plan" prepared by the Obama administration).
…That, therefore, Trump is not responsible for the cratered
economy that resulted from his incompetence.
…That Black Lives Matter is a movement based on violence,
lawlessness, looting, and will result in the invasion of and destruction of the
suburbs.
…That Joe Biden is a socialist, and that the Democratic
Party is bent on destroying America.
…That America is more admired in the international
community than before.
In the end, perhaps the biggest of Donald Trump’s “Big Lies” is the one he told the
day he was sworn into office: that he would “preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution of the United States.”
No, there was no mention in this Republican Convention of
the recent Republican-led Senate Committee Report confirmed the Mueller Report
findings of extensive contact between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence
to interfere with the 2016 election. No mention of using the Department of
Justice to blunt the impact of investigations into Trump, and no mention of the
DOJ being directed to investigate Trump’s enemies. No mention of defying
separation of powers, refusing to cooperate in Congressional oversight, no
mention of using the power of his office to demand that Ukraine slander Trump’s
political opposition as a condition for receiving military aid. No mention of
the Hatch Act, the Emoluments clause, no mention of rampant nepotism, no
mention of evading Congressional approval by making “temporary” appointments.
No mention of being the only President ever impeached in his first term in
office. No mention of the Constitutional right of the free press to seek truth,
only a shameful refrain that opposing views are “fake news.”
Some may object to the theme of this piece as offensive,
believing it is unfair to draw parallels between the atrocious horrors of Nazi
Germany and the Trump White House. Let me be clear. The intent here is not to
make a broad equation of the two regimes. Rather, we focus on one specific and
important area in which they operate in a remarkably similar way: the reliance
on propaganda to eradicate, conceal, deny, and cover up ugly truths in order to retain power.
And yes, read that statement for the warning it is. A state
that employs propaganda at every possible step is a state that seeks
authoritarian control over its people. Unwilling or unable to stand the
scrutiny of truth and the light of day, authoritarians attempt to control
content, imagery, and messaging with the goal of sapping the people of their
ability, right, and power to control their government.
You’ll recall Josef Goebbels’ definition of “successful”
propaganda: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad
which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be
intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”
It remains to be seen whether the Republicans fooled anybody but
each other in their four day orgy of deceit.
But it is certainly clear what their game plan is for now
until election day: a five-inch fire hose of deception intended to drown out
the reality of their failures.
May I have the envelope, please?
The Golden Goebbels goes to Donald Trump and the Republican
sycophants who worship the idols of falsehood.
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