Before I forget, the ten new words added to the word cloud are: a*hole, dangerous, misogynist, racist, sociopath, demagogue, destructive, impeachable, megalomaniac, and unhinged. See above for final word cloud formed from my top 20 favorites words to describe Trump. Looks like destructive and idiot join incompetent and liar as the top words.

The contrast between the recent Democratic and Republican Conventions couldn’t be stronger or more telling. The RNC was all about Trump, while Biden cast a wider net to give exposure to many stalwarts and up-and-comers in Democratic politics. He gave coveted spots to many of the candidates he beat to achieve the nomination.

Trump and his surrogates doubled down with one of their best strategies: if you tell a lie enough times, at least some people are going to believe it is true. Trump strategists did a good job identifying his major electability issues (not too hard a job). Convention speakers were then carefully organized and prepped to magically sweep away all of his shortcomings in less than eight hours of speeches. At the end, a glowing picture was painted of Trump being so in touch with the needs of women, Black people, the LBGTQ community, immigrants, and other groups he has mercilessly excoriated for the past three and a half years. This strategy probably worked well with the rabid Trump base, but surely did very little to sway independents and Democrats not wildly excited about Biden.

Trump was quick to point out that all of the recent violent protests across the country were in “Democrat” cities. Listening to speakers assaulting Biden as being soft on crime one could almost imagine Joe Biden making secret trips to all of these hotbeds of protest in order to personally incite violence. This violence never would have happened if Trump was President. Oops! I guess it did happen under his watch.

Trump continued to ignore conventual etiquette by giving his acceptance speech from the White House, a probable violation of the Hatch Act. Pompeo made an appearance from Israel, in the middle of official business. Both instances are pretty tacky breeches of longtime campaign etiquette. To make things worse, his acceptance speech had 2,000 big donors sitting side-by-side with very few masks in sight. Trump is certainly leading by example when it comes to showing what it takes to slow the spread of COVID-19. A White House official blew off any concerns about this behavior by basically saying everyone is going to get infected eventually, so what’s the big deal.

The President continues to miss great opportunities to lead by example, call for unity, and empathize with people who are very different from him. Instead, he continues to double down on providing no leadership, or exaggerated claims and inept leadership in the case of getting the country through the pandemic. Instead of encouraging unity in the case of trying to battle systemic racism and listen to the Black Live Matter movement, Trump tries to address the issues as little as possible and stoke the fires of divisiveness. With regards to empathy, Trump certainly spends a lot more time figuring out how to improve life for his top 1% buddies, rather than understanding how hard the pandemic has hit the lower 99%, particularly people of color and those lower on the economic ladder than he’s ever thought about before.

I am sure a few heads rolled when it was revealed that the total TV and online audience for Biden’s relatively short speech was higher than for Trump’s relatively long speech. Even though Biden appears to be doing well coming out of the conventions, we should all be very, very scared. Closing in on election day in 2016, Trump was given little chance of winning. He did win. Although he lost the popular vote by over three million votes, he prevailed in the Electoral College by a substantial margin.

Please, please vote and help get out the vote, particularly in the swing states of North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, so this catastrophe doesn’t happen again.