There was one big TV show this past week, and it was in Cleveland, of all unlikely places. CNN, MSNBC and PBS broadcast the entirety of the Republican entrant in the Olympics of politics, while ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all broadcast the prime time speakers. The kick-off had been on CBS' 60 Minutes, which aired one of the most bizarre interviews we've ever seen with Donald Trump, his LGBT-hating/woman-hating VP pick Gov. Mike Pence (R-IN) and veteran reporter Lesley Stahl. The interview was done in Trump's gold-plated home, which provided a hella backdrop for a populist narrative. As we go to press, the Democrats are in Philly, and Hillary Clinton gives her acceptance speech July 28 in prime time, making not just American history, but world history.
We spent last week in the hospital, so now we know how high our blood pressure and heart rate spike when the GOP starts talking en masse with no rebuttal. Our previously anecdotal belief has now been validated by medical technology and science. Words we did not hear at the RNC. Neither Trump nor Pence believes in evolution or climate change. Trump famously said in May that the California drought would be fixed by his "turning on the water."
Our vantage point also made us acutely aware of how much is at risk from the Trump Train, including the Affordable Care Act, which has made health care accessible to so many LGBT people we know as well as millions of others. Yet nearly every speech called for the overturning of the ACA.
One thing that was unusual for a GOP convention was the utterance of LGBTQ and the word "gay." Proto-fascist billionaire creator of Pay Pal Peter Thiel became the first person to declare they were gay at a GOP convention in prime time on July 21, the peak night of the event. It's difficult to embrace Thiel, who describes himself as a "conservative libertarian," but there he was telling the world he was "proud to be gay" even as he supported a ticket with the homophobic Pence on it. CBS News anchor Gayle King spoke to Thiel on the floor. She seemed incredulous that a gay man could be pro-Trump. Four of the major talking heads were gay: CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon, former ABC News political director Amy Walter, now with PBS, and MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow. Lemon was the best we've ever seen him.
Trump had billed the convention as an extravaganza with celebrities and sports stars. Extravaganza was one word for it. We've never seen anything quite like it, and we have seen a lot of politics and a lot of TV.
Those celebrities Trump touted turned out to be less "star" than Clint Eastwood's empty chair in 2012. One of the D-listers was the still-smoking-hot Antonio Sabato Jr., former star of The Bold & the Beautiful, General Hospital, Melrose Place, Dancing with the Stars, and former underwear model for Calvin Klein. Sabato told ABC News that speaking at the convention had put his career at risk, but "So be it." Sab�to, who was born in Italy and may have grown up with a little too much Mussolini mythology, brought the house down. He told a Obama-hating crowd of 97% white delegates, "We had a Muslim president for 7 1/2 years. He also said that "our rights have been trampled and our security threatened" by the Obama Administration. He told ABC News from the convention floor that "I believe that [Obama's] on the other side, the Middle East. He's with the bad guys."
Openly gay actor and GLAAD Award winner Tuc Watkins (One Life to Live) took to social media after Sabato's speech. "On behalf of former soap stars nationwide, I'd like to thank Antonio Sabato Jr. for further cementing our collective reputation as a bunch of dunderheads," Watkins said on his Facebook page, adding the hashtag #VoteHillary.
Another former soap star and speaker at the convention, Kimberlin Brown (Bold & the Beautiful), who left full-time acting to become an avocado farmer in California, gave a tearful interview to Fox News, saying she'd been bullied online once her name was revealed as a speaker.
The "biggest" star to speak at the RNC was Happy Days alum Chachi: actor Scott Baio, who is best known these days for calling Hillary Clinton the c-word on social media and for his wife Renee's homo-lesbophobic rhetoric. The two tag-team troll Twitter often. Baio appeared on Emmy-nominated Tamron Hall's MSNBC program, where she called him out for misogyny in a brutal takedown after Baio spoke about his Christian faith at the RNC. "Did you think about that in church when you tweeted it out?" Hall asked. "You talk about religion coming back to this country and us having a moral barometer. Where was your moral compass when you put a photo of a woman that you disagree with politically and use that word and think that's fine?" Hall also called out Baio for misogynist tweets about Michelle Obama being unattractive. Baio said he was just joking. Hall asked, "But does joking about a woman that way make America great again?"
Speaking of the First Lady, who knew she'd be such a part of the GOP convention? The main speaker on the first night was Melania Trump, and the whole world knows by now Melania's plagiarism of Michelle Obama. On July 22, ABC's World News Now offered a simultaneous split-screen with both women speaking at the same time. Wow.
Speaking of FLOTUS, during the Republican festivus of white supremacy, she starred in one of James Corden's fabulous Carpool Karaoke segments on July 21. Corden, deservedly nominated for an Emmy, managed to convince the First Lady to participate. Together they sang Stevie Wonder and Beyonce. Then hip hop artist Missy Elliott popped up out of the back seat of the car and they all sang who else but Missy Elliott: "Get Ur Freak On." FLOTUS singing "Get Ur Freak On." What a time to be alive. We will miss her.
Hillary was the first FLOTUS who had an impact on us: not a background character but a woman with agency whom we saw on our TV screen doing more than choosing china patterns and ball gowns. Michelle Obama has been the first FLOTUS of the 21st century to have that same impact, and her presence has been so powerful for women and girls. The sheer joy and ebullience of her performance with Corden lifted some of the pall of the GOP convention. Corden needs to put out a DVD set of these Carpool Karaoke performances. They are each priceless in their own way, and Corden is always perfection. How is he not gay?!
Melania Trump has her own story, she didn't need to borrow from FLOTUS. But the series of doubling-down interviews with Republican strategists, from Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, who denied any plagiarism, to Chris Christie, who said it was just a little bit of plagiarism, to Sean Spicer, who said Michelle borrowed the words initially from an episode of My Little Pony, was astonishing. Newt Gingrich said if the speech was indeed FLOTUS', then Melania did a better job than Michelle of delivering it. Which prompted Jimmy Kimmel to say, "So it's not plagiarism, it's a cover."
Other highlights included Ted Cruz's refusal to endorse Trump because Trump said his father killed JFK, and Cruz, the leader of the Tea Party, being booed off the stage. The myriad Trump children giving sycophantic speeches was creepy, especially since Tiffany is not accepted as part of the family. There was unctuous Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who claimed Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who terrified us by saying "I made another pledge that Obama would not fill [the Supreme Court] seat. That honor will go to Donald Trump next year."
Gov. Mary Fallin (OK), who hates gay people so much she barred all national guardsmen in her state from getting spousal benefits just so she could deny them to same-sex couples, was given pride of place the final night. Gov. Christie, fresh from not being chosen as VP, gave a rambling speech about Hillary and led the crowd in a chant of "Lock her up," which became a mantra. The entirety of the convention was the indictment of Hillary that Trump had wanted but didn't get. No plans, no policies, just Hillary is Satan and everything's going to be tremendous.
Then there was Ivanka, who sounded like a Hillary supporter with her calls for equal pay for women, fully-funded child care and non-gendered workplaces. Ivanka claimed her father is "color blind and gender neutral" in her introduction to Trump's acceptance speech. It was perhaps the most blatant lie of the entire convention. Until her father spoke, of course.
But the meat of the convention was Trump's speech, and we came away from that much like Van Jones on CNN: "It was a psychopathic, Mad Max moment." At one point a female protestor from Code Pink was forcibly removed, picked up and carried out while Trump kept reading the Teleprompter: "I have no patience for injustice." On a split screen. Irony died in front of us.
Garry Kasparov, chess champion and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, noted, "I've heard this sort of speech a lot in the last 15 years, and trust me, it doesn't sound any better in Russian."
The American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein said, "If Leni Riefenstahl were alive, Trump would hire her to film this speech. Then not pay her."
Chuck Todd, host of Meet the Press, said, "I thought it was an extraordinarily dark speech." NBC News contributor and Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace said, "We are now represented as a party by a man who believes in protectionism, isolationism and nativism. The Republican Party that I worked for for two decades died in this room tonight."
CNN contributor and The View co-host Ana Navarro, a native Nicaraguan as close to a moderate Republican as they make these days, went ballistic after Trump's speech, saying it "does nothing but bring out the darkness in America. I'm embarrassed of my party. He sounded like a fearmonger. This is not Republicanism."
Trump mentioned the LGBTQ community, something no other GOP presidential candidate has done. Seth Meyers noted on his show, "He said LGBTQ like he was giving Pat Sajak letters for Wheel of Fortune ." It seemed apparent Trump had never uttered LGBTQ in any other context before. But when he said he would protect LGBTQ people from Islamic terrorism, from "hateful foreign ideology," the crowd cheered, to which he retorted, "As a Republican, it's so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said." But the key word is "foreign." Because it's the domestic attacks on LGBTQ that impact us daily. Trump used Orlando to manipulate LGBTQ voters. And to further demonize Muslims.
Trump's running mate is known for his anti-LGBTQ stance, and the Republican Party platform cites a series of anti-gay policies, reading in part, "Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values." So Trump's protection for LGBTQ people is from ISIS only, not his own party or his running mate. And when Trump says repeatedly that there will be no more political correctness, we know that means no attention to identity politics–race or gender or sexual orientation.
Van Jones expressed our feelings best on CNN when he said, "I've never felt this way in my life. I have read in history being in moments where there's some big authoritarian movement and some leader that's rising up, and I felt that way tonight, and it was terrifying for me. This speech divided the country. It terrified me."
The 76-minute speech, the longest in modern convention history, depicted an America most of us would not recognize, where those of us who are not straight white men might feel demonized. We heard pundits say from dawn til dusk on July 22 that Trump was less extreme in his speech and more disciplined, but that's not true. He blamed Hillary Clinton for all that's wrong in the world today, and blamed people of color and Muslims for all that's wrong in America. He claimed the mantle of the "law-and-order candidate," which set off the iconic music from TV's longest-running drama in our head along with fears of dictatorship.
ABC's political director George Stephanopoulos noted, "Trump labeled Clinton the candidate of death, destruction, terrorism, weakness and mass lawlessness." CBS' Norah O'Donnell noted that Trump said "violence" 11 times and "terrorism" nine times, but didn't say hope once.
The view from Cleveland was entirely different from the view from Philadelphia, where a picture of a more diverse America reigned as delegates reflected the demographics of America and TV cameras didn't have to search for the less than 1% of black delegates in the arena. On July 28 the Democrats end their convention, and a few days later the real Olympics begin.
There may or may not be a break from the political drama as the world's athletes convene in a Zika-infested, corruption-ridden Rio, but at least we know for a couple of weeks we can focus on the sleek bodies of swimmers, runners and gymnasts, and a competition in which no lives are at stake, and where misogyny is left behind as women and men compete on one of the few equal playing fields in the world. For that, you know you really must stay tuned.