If you had asked me before this year's lockdowns, I would have been hard pressed to think of a nastier week than that of the 2016 Republican National Convention. Not so much because of any particular incident (the worst thing that happened to me was ruining a pair of shoes), but because of the vibes. Cleveland, a city I have always loved, looked like the set of Children of Men — a maze of rent-a-gates and make-shift steel barriers; cops in video game armor, people in suits walking aimlessly muttering to their digital devices, drunks, teenagers in MAGA hats quoting dodgy-sounding crime statistics, crazed taxi drivers, Newt Gingrich looking pissed off, John Boehner emerging like Mephistopheles from the dark of a seemingly abandoned warehouse to light a cigarette.
As it happened, there were no real crowds except in the Quicken Loans Arena, no serious protests, and certainly no violence. But you could feel it. Heck, you could smell it: the burning rubber, battery acid, bloody metallic aromas. Something could have happened.
Excellent company (and a lot of drinking) made the 2016 RNC bearable. Four years later, many of our major cities look as if they are preparing to host the long-waited visit of the Padishah Emperor to their humble corners of the galaxy. The added element of masks somehow makes things even more menacing. Donald Trump was in his element in Cleveland back then, and it's hard not to think he would have been this time: a villain from a forgotten mid-'80s cyberpunk film, his face, pouting and grotesque, projected at 100 or 1,000 times the size on to some enormous screen, his voice, with its unmistakable undertone of relish, emerging unseen out of speakers as he denounces the implacable enemies of the Solar Federation over the sounds of laser fire and random explosions.
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This is why I am so baffled by Trump's decision to cancel this year's convention, which had been scheduled to take place in Jacksonville just before Labor Day. (It was originally slated for the same week, but in Charlotte.) Holding the convention in the middle of a pandemic that has metamorphosed into the worst season of urban unrest since 1968 (which had its own memorable political convention) would have been a challenge of almost indescribable proportions, with distinct security, public health, and logistical dimensions to which I cannot imagine anyone being equal. The whole thing would have been a nightmare.
Trump would have loved it. Especially if, as virtually everyone expected, there were going to be protests and counter-protests, antifa teenagers dressed in parodies of Spanish Civil War militia costumes duking it out with equally stupid-looking Reddit fascists, riots, fires, looting, constant sirens. It would have been his chance to make the pitch he is convinced the American people want to hear about "law and order."
I say "convinced" because it is clear that not everyone on Team Trump agrees with him. Instead he will address his supporters virtually in what one imagines will be the most widely viewed feedback-laden Zoom meeting of all time.
Why would he retreat from his would-be apotheosis at the convention when he remains willing to send federal agents to Portland and Chicago over the objections of local and state authorities? It makes about as much sense as his bizarre about-face on the subject of wearing masks in public. But this has been his pattern throughout the last two or so months: a curious admixture of indifference, fury, and exaltation worthy of his role as our postmodern senescent emperor.
