Last night, I watched Donald Trump’s one-hour-and-forty-five-minute speech to the Republican midterm convention. I watched it with the sound on. I watched it so you wouldn’t have to. If that moves you to send a contribution to the Prospect, please specify “Attention: Meyerson.”
A Trump speech is to a political speech as Fox News is to news. Both are defined by an insouciant indifference to fact—more precisely, a preference for fiction over fact when the fiction proves more advantageous to their interests. Trump has become more delusional than Fox, immersed as he is in the kind of fantasies of warrior greatness and studly virility common to 11-year-old boys who live on AI. He also has grown his hair (or someone’s hair) out, expanding upward as his cheeks expand downward.
Virtually the first words out of Trump’s mouth were entirely fictitious, not to mention gratuitously factious. He welcomed attendees to “the first-ever midterm convention of any party—the first ever.” In my On TAP two days ago, I documented the history of the Democratic Party’s midterm conventions of 1974 and 1978 (the only historically significant one), and its midterm conference of 1982. I did so because so few people were aware of them, so Trump’s misstatement is worth noting only because a normal White House staff would have checked that out and a normal president would be aware of their findings and would not have gone out of his way to ignore or contradict them. But Trump’s need to claim that everything he does is the “best ever” or the “first ever,” no matter how preposterous the claim, is irrepressible. (In today’s New York Times, Peter Baker reports that Trump has hailed himself as “the Greatest President of All Time” on his Truth Social posts.)
Last night, the Greatest President claimed for himself “the most successful two years in the history of the presidency.” The GP is capable of extending his generosity toward himself to others as well, so long as he needs those others to win election in November if he’s to hold his grip on Congress. To that end, he called Texas AG Ken Paxton “the greatest attorney general in America.” In Trumpworld, the lower your circle in Hell, the nearer you sit to God.
In Republican cloakrooms, fears lurk that some balky Americans won’t buy Trump’s claims that, as he said last night, “I’m bringing the prices way, way down,” and “Now we pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs.” Just in case some voters remain stubbornly resistant to those assessments, Trump promised that “prices right after the election will be plummeting.”
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Even that solemn vow paled alongside the offer Trump put before the electorate: that every American adult would receive a $5,000 payment from the government if and only if Republicans held control of both House and Senate in the upcoming midterms. This seems to run afoul of federal law 18 U.S.C. 597, which states,
Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
Our high court, of course, has ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for acts committed in his presidential capacity. We must assume that the three justices not appointed by a Republican will consider Trump’s offer as that of a candidate rather than officially presidential. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, if some of their Republican colleagues rule that since Trump was offering payment from the government’s coffers, and not, heaven forbid, his own, that his bribe could pass for officially presidential. (After all, the Court’s Republicans have been boosting Republican electoral campaigns for years—repealing the Voting Rights Act and such—by labeling these partisan acts as law. If they can get away with it, why can’t Trump?)
Later in his talk, Trump accused the Democrats of stocking public-school libraries with the complete works of Lenin and Stalin, but still later also noted that “I get along great with” Chinese President Xi. Apparently, neo-Stalinists, so long as they elevate themselves over both their government and their people, so long as they brutally suppress dissent in the manner of real tough guys, are Trump’s real peers.
