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BACK IN 2020, Alex Thomas of The Daily Dot wrote that “Donald Trump’s most innovative quality is undoubtedly his ability to bestow nicknames upon his political opponents.” While Thomas did not know then of Trump’s prowess as a poet, he can be forgiven for that oversight because he correctly observed that Trump’s skills in onomastics — the science of names — are formidable.
The lineup of the Tuesday evening speaker fest provided a great example. There was Lyin’ Ted Cruz and Little Marco Rubio. Sleepy Ben Carson and Ron DeSanctimonious. Even the Birdbrain (Nikki Haley) took the stage to speak in support of Donald Trump and his vision for America.
You could chalk their presence up to the adage that politics make strange bedfellows, but in this amped up and highly choreographed atmosphere, the parade of nicknamed former opponents had, to my eye, a deeper and much more on-message purpose:
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It is a glorious summer day in Milwaukee, bright and drenched with sun and the humidity has relented. I spend much of the day walking around and talking to people.
The official materials estimate that there are 50,000 people at the convention (including 15,000 members of the media); there is so much to hear and see just walking around.
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Ghosted
I go a park in the area that is closed to general vehicular access. Here trucks that display political messages are allowed to park between making their appointed rounds. It is a rare area of non-partisanship. Pro-Trump and Anti-Trump trucks coexist, apparently peacefully. Most of the trucks are mobile billboards with a bright video feed on their sides and an accompanying political soundtrack.
I chat up the driver of a truck that is disseminating a targeted message in favor of the separation of Church and State. He has pulled over and is looking for instruction about the route he should drive, but is having trouble connecting with his supervisor. He asks me where he can connect with others who are meeting up to drive in a caravan. I can’t help him but propose that I come along with him as a ride-along observer. He isn’t quite sure what I am saying.
“I will just ride with you and get a feeling what the experience is like. We can talk as we go.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“I am a member of the press,” I offer, as if that would make everything above board.
I show him my credentials but he still looks uncomfortable and unconvinced. He is about to say no when I take all my credentials — the Secret Service one that has my photo and identifies me as a Bay City News Reporter, the Daily Pass to the Convention, the Media Perimeter Access Pass, and my regular press card — and thrust them into his hands. “Ask your supervisor. I’m with the press, just covering the convention.”
He takes the bundle — they seem like a tangle of charging cords with their lanyards all twisted together — and disappears into the truck.
After five minutes or so he comes back and returns the credentials. He asks for my phone number which I quickly provide. He disappears again.
When he returns he says, “Okay, I will call you when I get approval.”
I thank him and turn on my phone’s ringer so I won’t miss the call, but sadly it never comes. I don’t know if my bona fides were found to be wanting or if the phone number was a trick he learned in a bar, but I was definitely ghosted.
Unscripted
I meet a man named Maurice K. Jenkins who is asking for money on the street. He is 61, emaciated, and when he opens his mouth he is missing a couple of the key teeth in his smile. He has a small stack of typed sheets in his hand and he offers me one. It has his photo and begins with “Peace and Blessings everyone. My name is Maurice Jenkins and I have been having a difficult time …”
He tells me that many years ago he was diagnosed with HIV and developed AIDS. He survived that with medical care but now has esophageal cancer. He had been living on the street for months and has only recently been able to obtain a place to live. I give him a dollar, he wishes me well, and I head on my way.
But then it strikes me that I am listening to the stories of all sorts of people at the convention — delegates, lobbyists, operatives, fundraisers, etc. — and many of those stories seem to come from scripts, I should get this man’s take on what is happening. Whatever else, it wouldn’t be scripted.
We sit at a picnic table in the shade. I ask his background. He said he taught young kids for a community based nonprofit organization in Wisconsin and Michigan for nearly 20 years and then became a corrections officer. He lit up and laughed, “Oh man you take me back, I used to write plays and put on plays.”
He also told me about legal troubles, providing so much detail that at one point I stopped him to be sure he knew he was talking to a reporter on the record. He said there was no point hiding anything.
I asked for his views on the election.
“So let me tell you how I feel about the whole United States government as it is right now. Both parties need to have their heads examined. It’s all me, me, me, me. It’s not about us no more. They are like the word compromise is a bad word.”
“Both parties need to have their heads examined. It’s all me, me, me, me. It’s not about us no more. They are like the word compromise is a bad word.”
Maurice K. Jenkins, Milwaukee resident
I asked what he thought about the candidates. “Donald Trump … he’s a narcissist … I never met him but he doesn’t have the best interest of this country in mind. Joe Biden, the same thing.”
He said he liked Reagan. He was “the best president of all time.” He liked Reagan’s no-nonsense style. He still remembers how Reagan handled the air traffic controllers strike.
He is angry the country is sending billions to Ukraine and Israel but two weeks ago the Supreme Court affirmed “a law that said homelessness was a crime.”
Even though he has a place to live now, a few months ago he was homeless.
He said that most people look at homeless people as “scum of the earth.” He said that many are educated even though some are strung out on drugs. He paused for a minute and then added, “Most people use drugs to medicate the pain that they’re feeling.”
He said, “I used to love the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court used to be an unbiased party. Now it is so political.
He said that he didn’t like politicians because “nothing has changed for my people in this country.
He paused for a minute. Then he asked, “how do I encourage my son and my grandkids to vote and say your vote counts when it doesn’t count for us?”
“We can vote all day long … we are still going to be the bottom of the totem pole. We are still going to have the highest unemployment rate, the highest death rate by law enforcement. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge, it doesn’t matter.”
A chip off the ol’ blockchain
I go to a session where Congressman Brian Steil of Wisconsin and a group of industry people are speaking about blockchain. The promotion materials promise that “Republicans are set to lead America into a crypto future.”
Steil is a member of the House Financial Services Committee and his pitch is that the government should regulate blockchain to provide “guiderails” for the industry and when that is done Congress should step back and let private industry take over and innovate. He explained that federal regulation is needed because otherwise it will be regulated haphazardly and that will ultimately drive the industry offshore.
Steil said his goal is to keep the industry in the United States. He said the Republican party is the party of “independence and innovation.”
A speaker named Jim Harper prefaced his comments by saying he wasn’t political but he offered the observation that “Trump has found crypto and the crypto community has followed him.” He said Biden hasn’t really noticed, but his administration has “alienated the crypto community.” As a result, he said, blockchain is now political.
I hadn’t given much thought to whether blockchain was a political issue but it made sense, if only because it seems that now everything is a political issue.
Harper said he was inspired by the promise of crypto as a store of value outside of the control of government. He wondered why “there was so little outrage about inflation,” particularly since inflation hit harder at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
Another panelist, Nick Longo, an investment manager at Fortuna Investors, built on that point by saying that inflation is a “theft of invested assets.” This led him to make the bold claim that he knew how the government could solve the funding problem with Social Security.
He said that many public pension funds — state and local governments — are underfunded. They have a hard time catching up because fixed income investments mostly have low returns and the pension funds are subject to rules limiting investments in equities.
He said Bitcoin had an annual 60 percent return over the last 10 years and while he saw that leveling out at a lower number going forward, he was confident that pension funds — and the Social Security trust fund — could address all their funding issues just by investing in Bitcoin.
Of diction and dictators
I make another pass by Red Arrow Park where trucks with political messages can park. This time I find seven trucks, each with an identical sign on all three working sides of their vehicles.
They all say “Dictator On Day One.”
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Parked in a row, the trucks make quite a statement, but I have gotten so turned around after three days of convention hype and rah-rah and choreography that I can’t figure out what it is intended to say.
Of course, I remember the controversy last December when Trump told Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one.” But my problem is I couldn’t tell whether the people who put the message on these trucks were protestors who thought that a dictator — even for a day — was frightening, or pro-Trumpers who thought it was a grand idea.
I stood there looking at the trucks trying to puzzle it out. For a minute it seemed pro-Trump to me and then it seemed anti-Trump. I saw a woman was standing on the sidewalk and taking pictures. I sought her input.
“Are they saying it’s good or bad?” I gave her a big smile but she didn’t respond. That was odd in Milwaukee where people are friendly.
She was looking at the credentials hanging from my neck.
I explained I was with the press, but she still wasn’t forthcoming. Then I explained I was with Bay City News in San Francisco and she saw my backpack with STANFORD on it.
That seemed to relax her a bit. She was wearing a cap with another California school.
She explained that the trucks were anti-Trump.
We talked for a few minutes and at the right time I asked why she had been so guarded at first.
She said, “you never know. Somebody could pull out a gun.”
Parables payable
I meet a genial man in a Trump hat. He said his name was Tony Buldoc. I ask what he was doing at the convention. He said he lived in Minnesota and had driven up on a whim. He wanted to see what was going on and talk to people. He said he told his wife at dinner last night that he was thinking he would go. She asked when and he said “after dinner.” Then he drove five and half hours to get to Milwaukee. He was walking around and seeing what he could see, though he didn’t have credentials and was disappointed that he couldn’t get inside.
We were both looking at a large mobile sign delivering a political message about the need for the separation of Church and State. He asked me if that is something that is needed. I said that it is in the Constitution and I prepare to get a lecture on Christian values.
He surprises me.
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He takes out his phone and shows me a photo of something that he has drawn. It is a cross and on it there are seven circles, six of which have the symbol of a different religion. The last circle is empty and he explains that he left it empty sort of like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier so that it represented all the other thousands of religions that he could not draw on the cross.
He told me that a few years ago he had a tax issue and went to the taxing authority to get caught up. He owed $2,600. He said he had a brain injury years before and doesn’t use computers or credit cards anymore. So he brings $2,660 in cash — enough to cover the taxes with a little cushion — only to learn that they won’t accept the payment because his driver’s license is expired. Fortunately, the driver’s license office is downstairs and he goes down there and gets his license reinstated. But he has to pay a fee — $66 — and when he gets back upstairs, he is $6 dollars short.
They won’t cut him a break.
He doesn’t want drive 40 miles home and then come back so he goes out on the street to panhandle. He is an unlikely looking panhandler but he stops the first person and asks if he could by any chance spare $6 — he said he would send him $20 in the mail — but gets rejected.
Then he sees two ladies in Muslim dress. He goes to them and says, “Excuse me, would you happen to have $6? I came up short on my tax bill and … I’d be happy to pay you back $20 or more, you know, whatever you want.”
He paused a minute, remembering. He says that one of them “just opened her hand, and it was a $5 bill and a $1 bill …”
He went on, “I said, well, I’d write down your address or whatever. And she says, no, that’s not necessary. She said, my religion tells me that if I have the ability to help a fellow human being, that it’s my responsibility to do that without asking for payment in return.”
He said, “She got a little emotional and she said to me, you don’t know how much we appreciate you letting us come to your Christian country and practice our religion freely.”
“I said to her, you know, I’m pretty sure that it says, ‘In God We Trust,’ not in Christ we trust, and everybody is welcome here. So what’s represented in that cross is that.”
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He tells me that he thinks that the politics of the parties are a problem. “We don’t have to hate each other and cancel each other and go after each other that way. We can still disagree. I think most of us really want the same stuff. In the end, it’s just how we get there that’s different.”
I ask him if his views are shared among his friends and the people he hangs out with.
He says, “No, I don’t fit in anywhere. You know, I’m truly that little person that doesn’t fit in.”
Bay City News staff writer Joe Dworetzky is in Milwaukee to report on the daily drama and curiosities he will encounter at the Republican National Convention.
The post Day 3: Fanfare for the common folk — Taking the pulse of America outside the convention appeared first on Local News Matters.