No Amount of Lies at The RNC Can Erase What Trump Did to America

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The reviews are in for night one of Republican National Convention:

“A fire hose of false claims”- The Washington Post

“Republicans made numerous false and misleading claims”- FactCheck.org

“A parade of dishonesty“-CNN’s Daniel Dale

“It’s all propaganda. There’s no truth to it. ” -MSNBC’s Dr. Vin Gupta on GOP’s claims regarding Donald Trump’s handling of COVID-19.

These lies were neither by accident nor ad-libbed. They were all scripted and are part of Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s scheme to literally rewrite recent history. They are telling us, “Forget what you saw and heard, just believe what we are telling you” on a range of issues from Trump’s horrific handling of Covid to the economy.

This is not even the first Trump has tried this approach. In July 2018, Trump told a group of veterans concerned about the economy, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Trump then added, “Stick with us,” meaning believe me over your own eyes and ears.

If only Trump had the Men in Black  “Neuralyzer” device to use on our country to erase his horrific mishandling of Covid, he could erase how he failed our nation. The list of what he would want to erase no doubt includes his refusal to fully use the Defense Production Act in March (as Joe Biden and other Democrats urged) so that we would have the testing and PPE needed for first responders and teachers need, his lies about the threat of the virus being the Democrats “new hoax,” and — after tens of thousands of Americans had already died from covid — his mockery of a reporter in late May for wearing a mask by accusing him of only doing it to be ”politically correct.”

Trump wants you to forget all of that by creating a world defined with “alternative facts.”  The problem for Trump is that we are still living through the nightmare Trump delivered upon us.

Thankfully, the RNC was being aggressively fact-checked, often in real time, Monday night.

For example, MSNBC medical contributor Dr. Vin Gupta stated, in reaction to the opening RNC video bragging about what a great job Trump did on Covid, “For all your viewers out there listening to this, for anybody listening to what the RNC is doing right now, it’s all propaganda. There’s no truth to it.”

Gupta then zeroed on one specific lie in the RNC video, saying “We didn’t have enough PPE for our nurses, our respiratory therapists, our physicians to care for Covid critically-ill patients across the country.”

And as the non-partisan Fact Check.org documented, the falsehoods by Team Trump spanned the gamut, from Trump’s false claim that Democrats wanted to get rid of postal workers to lies that former Vice President Joe Biden wants “open borders.”

Those efforts didn’t even include the information that was intentionally left out.

For example, the speech by former football star Herschel Walker in which he insisted that Trump is not a racist, which failed to address Trump calling Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate,” calling those marching at Charlottesville with  White supremacists “Fine people,” calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, or his recent racist dog whistle about keeping “low income” people out of the suburbs — just to name a few.

To be blunt, in normal times Trump’s lies might have been able to work. But these are anything but normal times. We are still losing Americans to covid by the hour. By the time the RNC wraps up Thursday, we will likely be at over 180,000 Americans dead in just six months. That’s 180,000 American families mourning the loss of a loved one — a beloved parent, sister, brother, grandparent.

Add to that the fact that we are in the midst of worst economic crisis since the Great Recession, with  nearly 30 million Americans still drawing some form of unemployment benefits as of last week. And despite Trump’s lies of a “Super V recovery,” the facts tell us otherwise. For example, last Thursday we learned that weekly first-time unemployment claims went up to 1.1 million from 970,000 the week before.  For perspective, the worst weekly unemployment claims on a weekly basis before this recession was 695,000 in 1982.

Trump has to lie. He has nothing else to run on. He didn’t even get Mexico to pay for the wall he promised at just about every campaign event of 2016. Worse, he has incompetently handled the COVID-19 crisis, and doesn’t even seem to care about the health and economic suffering so many Americans are experiencing.  Try as he desperately may, Trump simply can’t erase what we are living through. It’s something that none of us will ever forget.  And that’s no lie.

Dean Obeidallah, a lawyer, hosts SiriusXM radio’s The Dean Obeidallah show and is a columnist for the Daily Beast and a CNN.com Opinion Contributor.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.