It really seems more like a cult (or a sick and perverted fan club) meeting to praise its leader -- telling lie after lie to keep "dear leader" happy. Reality and facts are not present, and aren't wanted. Facts are not needed by these sycophants, or their leader.
Here's part of how Ezra Klein puts it at Vox.com:
“If you really want to drive them crazy, you say ‘12 more years,’” Trump said as he opened the convention. The crowd happily chanted “12 more years.” It drove me a little crazy, but mostly left me tired. It’s a performance of provocation hiding a convention that had nothing to say, only enemies to fight, social changes to fear.
What is there to say upon hearing Trump described as “the bodyguard of Western civilization?” It’s not an argument so much as a loyalty oath, an offering cut from the speaker’s dignity and burnt for the pleasure of the Dear Leader himself. But the outrageousness is the point. Protest and you’re triggered — just another oversensitive lib who can’t take a joke. Ignore it and you’re complicit. To care is to lose.
The Republican Party on display Monday night didn’t represent an ideology or a governing agenda. It was a personality cult, and a tired one at that. Republicans, in a break with tradition, refused to write a party platform. They chose, instead, to recycle their 2016 platform. But the delegates agreed that if they had met to fashion an actual agenda, they “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration,” and as such, “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”
They also called “on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration.” And here, I want to fulfill their request: The RNC’s support for President Trump and his administration could not possibly be stronger. I have covered American politics for two decades and never have I seen a party more ferociously committed to supporting whatever it is their leader tells them to support.
The problem for Republicans is that the main thing Trump has told them to support is himself. There are no detailed policy proposals, much less a coherent ideology or set of governing principles. And so speech after speech followed the same template: How was America going to stop the coronavirus? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to revive its economy? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to ensure domestic harmony? By reelecting Donald Trump.
The contradiction at the heart of the convention, of course, is that Donald Trump is currently president. I’m dead serious. How would reelecting Trump resolve these crises that Trump has proven unable to resolve — and has, in many cases, worsened — in office? No one even took a shot at that Rubik’s cube. Instead, the speakers awkwardly talked around the fact of Trump’s incumbency. He was presented, strangely, as both incumbent and challenger; the man who had fixed America’s problems, but also the man needed to fix an America beset by more problems than ever. . . .
The falsehoods flew thick. . . .
The core of Trump’s agenda has always been untethering American politics from factual reality, and among Republicans, at least, he’s been startlingly successful. The convention is a loyalty test for Republicans, and a reality check for the rest of us.
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