This is an opinion column.
The world’s worst infomercial is on TV again, and awful salespeople have a bargain for us.
Monday night, Sen. Katie Britt stood before the Republican convention hall to sell us on some things.
That groceries, housing, and utilities cost more than they did four years ago. True, inflation moves in only one direction, although souls seem to have gotten cheaper.
That our economy is weak and in decline — despite the United States having the strongest growth and lowest inflation among G7 countries, a success economists are still trying to understand.
That it’s time for change — despite neither party offering anybody new. Change means staying with what we’ve got or going back to what we had. (Except, of course, for Mike Pence, who was nowhere near the convention hall, nor to be spoken of ever again.)
“And Donald Trump is the change we need,” Britt told the crowd to tepid applause — despite Britt taking months to reach that conclusion, the last of Alabama’s congressional Republicans to do so.
Katie Britt was there to sell us something but she had already made her bargain.
She held out as long as she could and doing so got two speaking roles on national TV this year, and a VIP seat in the Trump family box. If not for her disastrous State of the Union rebuttal, it might have earned her even higher billing, but that position Monday went to the hillbilly elegist, J.D. Vance.
And perhaps no one made a bigger bargain than he.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, once called his running mate cultural heroin and warned a friend he might be America's Hitler. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)AP
Vance is on record calling Trump a liar and warning a friend that Trump could be America’s Hitler. He once warned that evangelical support for Trump hurts Christianity, and under the headline “Opioid for the Masses,” he once argued in the Atlantic that Trumpism was cultural fentanyl.
“It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers,” Vance wrote in 2016. “It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.”
Today Vance peddles that drug.
To make amends for telling the truth, he pledged to Trump what Trump values most, his undivided devotion and absolute obedience.
Trump is a salesman and a deal-maker, and his principles are no less negotiable. As the RNC prepared the convention hall, the former president made his latest pitch to someone ostensibly an opponent — Robert Kennedy Jr.
In a telephone call recorded and leaked to the public, the salesman pitched Kennedy on backing him. Trump, who once and rightfully counted Project Warp Speed among his administration’s greatest achievements, now embraced Kennedy’s anti-vax beliefs.
“And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically,” Trump said. “I’ve seen it too many times.”
If it seems Trump was forfeiting a legacy too cheaply, it’s worth remembering that a thing is worth what someone else will pay for it, and Trump values most what he gets from these deals.
Subservience.
These folks we’re watching on TV this week were willing to bargain away their beliefs, their principles and their identities for the opportunity to sit next to power, under the foolish hope that a little might fall out of his pocket, like change in the couch cushions, they can dig for when he leaves the room.
He’s much too stingy for that.
This is the man who spoiled America’s 224-year run for the peaceful transfer of power.
This is a man who left Washington, D.C., smelling like tear gas.
This is the guy who just watched as his most faithful followers punched out capitol windows and ransacked his enemies’ offices.
This is the charlatan who did nothing as those same folks demanded the life of his last vice president to punish Pence’s disobedience.
When Britt spoke from the podium Monday, she thought she was criticizing the Biden administration.
“This is too high of a price to pay for an administration that has brought us to such lows,” she said.
Britt should be more careful. The deal she made has dangerous clawbacks for telling the truth.
Just ask Mike Pence, wherever he is.
