US election: Republican Convention\'s apocalyptic and surrealistic messages

The four-day Republican Convention ended on July 21 endorsing Donald Trump. The Convention articulated the message with which Donald Trump had hit the campaign trail over a year ago, which was that unless Americans elected him the President, the country would be humiliated and destroyed by its enemies that are both at home and abroad.
He and others who spoke at the Convention identified Hillary Clinton as the enemy at home and raised the slogan "lock her up" to energise their supporters. They identified ISIS and the Jihadists as the enemies abroad that Donald Trump promised he would raze to the dust if he was elected the President.  By locking Hillary Clinton at home and razing the ISIS/Jihadists, Donald Trump and his backers in the party were confident that the United States would regain once again its lost pristine glory that they believed the United States had lost under President Obama's watch of which Hillary Clinton was a part as Secretary of State between 2009-2012!
The European countries, the United States' major allies in world politics and together the protectors of the western civilisation, were generally aghast with the messages that emanated from Cleveland. They concluded Donald Trump was "authoritarian"; his messages were "dark and terrifying"; "apocalyptic" and "bleak" where he portrayed himself as "the saviour of a country on the edge of the apocalypse." Russia's leading dailies had no reports on the Convention.
Going to the Convention, Donald Trump had told CNN that "most of NATO's 28 member countries are not making the requisite financial contributions for their common defence, and the US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves." With such attitude towards Europe, he did not need to say anything about the rest of the world. Perhaps he left his right-wing base to assume that the rest of the world would just prostrate before President Donald Trump, in both fear and awe.
Thus while the Republican Convention, led by Donald Trump, was busy fear mongering on issues of law and order, terrorism, immigration, the economy and taxation, those looking at the Convention seriously from the outside were all busy checking facts. The conclusion left Americans other than those energized by Donald Trump and his fellow fear mongers wondering where the United States was headed. They also concluded that not all the fears that the Convention tried to raise were false but that generally, the country was nowhere near the "apocalypse now" predicament that Donald Trump and his campaign considered necessary to put fears in the hearts of the electorate and elect him as the next President of the United States.
RECORDS OF ROLAND REAGAN: President Obama used the two terms of Ronald Reagan to deflate Donald Trump's case that America was in crisis on crimes and law and order. Obama said that the "idea that American is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn't really jibe with the experience of most people." He added that notwithstanding "an uptick in murders in some major US cities… the violent crime rate today was still far lower than when Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s."
On the rate of illegal border crossings on which Donald Trump was creating a great deal of xenophobic zeal, President Obama said that "today's rate of illegal border crossing is only a third of what it was during the Reagan administration, and lower than any time since."
On Muslims and Muslim immigrants, no one really noticed that Donald Trump's trump card in using Islam and Muslims for energising his extreme right supporters who had launched his campaign was not used in his acceptance speech.
Instead, the Republican candidate stated at the Convention that as President, he would tighten immigration in such a manner that immigrants from countries where there was radical Islam-based terror would not be accepted. As far as legal immigrations were concerned, there was already in place one of the toughest immigration regimes anywhere. It could be improved any further only by stopping immigration altogether.
There were appeal and merit in his tax plan, though. He promised the largest tax cuts among all candidates, including Hillary Clinton, who entered this year's contest. But when put to serious analysis setting aside the populist appeal, two things were evident. First, the tax breaks were complicated and there was no reason for country's overwhelming majority of middle-class and poor citizens to rejoice. Second, the tax breaks would "reduce federal revenues by US$ 9.5 trillion over its first decade" and unless there were large-scale spending cuts "it could increase the national debt by nearly 80 per cent of gross domestic product by 2036, offsetting some or all of the incentive effects of the tax cuts."
The problem in believing what Donald Trump promised was also a major one because of the fluid nature of those promises that were susceptible to changes to suit him without the need for explanation. In fact, if Donald Trump were to apply on himself the principles based on which he destroyed the credibility of his opponents, he and credibility would be poles apart. Thus his wife stated upon alighting in Cleveland on the day she spoke at the Convention that she herself had written her speech. When it was later revealed that the operative texts of the speech were copied from Michelle Obama's 2008 speech, the reaction from Donald Trump and his campaign was one of surprise about the media making such a big deal of a small matter!
DISUNITY AMONG TOP LEADERSHIP: The Convention was also disastrous and surreal for many other reasons. The Republicans and the Democrats traditionally come together to show their unity without which their candidate would have little chance of winning. In the Republican Convention, the themes that it tried to set under Donald Trump's charge notwithstanding, the message that it sent most clearly was the utter disunity among the party's top leadership. Two past Republican presidents, two past presidential candidates and Governor John Kasich in whose State of Ohio the Convention was held stayed away because they thought Donald Trump was an unfit candidate. That either of the parties would some day face such a predicament was something that they would not have dreamt even in their worst nightmares.
Senator Ted Cruz who believed that Donald Trump was a disaster for the party and the nation nevertheless went to the Convention. He dared Donald Trump and his supporters who booed him like he was the reincarnation of Hillary Clinton who somehow had found her way to the Convention and asked the Republicans and the nation to follow their conscience and not vote for Donald Trump!
Thus the question before the American voters on November 08 would be whether they were prepared to trust Donald Trump that his own party's top leadership did not trust. Further, whether they would believe as he wanted them to believe that the country was faced with an apocalyptic predicament with facts not proving so notwithstanding many serious problems in the country. Above all, whether they would be prepared to place their trust in a candidate who fitted into the mould of the classical narcissist who told them that he would fix every ill in the country and make the world accept the United States as its leader without giving the faintest idea how.
One would like to believe that the American voters would see the reality before them and that they would vote according to their conscience as Ted Cruz had asked them. Nevertheless, one neither won nor lost a democratic election until the last vote was cast and counted. Thus Donald Trump, notwithstanding the apocalyptic messages of doom and disaster out of Cleveland, could still become the next President of the United States.
The writer is a retired Ambassador.
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