Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu
CNN
America faced three crises on Wednesday night: A monstrous hurricane tore towards the southern Gulf Coast. The US Covid-19 death toll neared 180,000. And a small Wisconsin city had become the latest theater of a national crisis.
But inside the bubble of the Republican National Committee, a different reality prevailed.
Speaker after speaker piled praise on the President, portraying the man who pursued a policy of separating migrant children from their parents as a leader of deep humanity. Trump may have once boasted he could grab women by the genitals because he was famous, but on Wednesday night at the RNC, he was a champion of women. One acolyte put him on a par with the Founding Fathers, though he constantly tears at the limits of Constitutional norms. And another seemed to forget his lashing out at immigrants from “s***hole” countries, praising him as more progressive on race than Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
There were passing mentions about the Category 4 storm on the US south coast, notably by Vice President Mike Pence, who spoke from the historic fort in Baltimore where a battle with the British inspired the US national anthem. But Pence whitewashed the administration’s response to the pandemic– one of the world’s worst – and punted on America’s racial reckoning. “We will have law and order on the streets of America,” he said, vowing to stand with police. He didn’t mention Jacob Blake – shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And he ignored the shooting deaths of two people there, linked to a teenager
