Why are Republicans pretending that Trump is a nice guy?

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

One of the most baffling things about last week's virtual Democratic National Convention was the bizarre insistence upon what a nice man Joe Biden is. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought that the most important issue in the 2020 presidential election was whether the eventual president was the kind of person who will remember your birthday.

At the time I suggested that this line of argument was, if not mistaken, at least irrelevant. Surely no one who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 did so because he was under the impression that the former Celebrity Apprentice star was going to send you flowers after you have a bad day.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.