The Weekly Sift

I don’t usually put a cartoon in the Teaser, but this Garth German drawing was too spot-on. Last week, the Trump shooting was still so fresh that not much was known about it. Then J. D. Vance was announced as Trump’s VP and the whole circus of the convention started, culminating in Trump’s record-long 90-minute acceptance speech, which had the laundry-list quality of a bad State of the Union.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s support among elected Democrats continued to slip, with a new defection or two almost every day. Then Sunday, he announced he’s leaving the race and endorsing Kamala Harris. Now all eyes are on her, and the TV talking heads barely have time to mention Trump, who suddenly looks very old.

It’s a lot to cover, but I have one advantage over CNN and MSNBC: I try to stick to what I know, and nobody knows much at this point. So I’ll edit out all the maybe-this-maybe-that and see what’s left.

Here’s what I have planned: For my sins, I watched the full 90 minutes of Trump, and I think the mainstream media completely missed his point. They saw two speeches: the call for national unity that they predicted and wanted to see, followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric. I saw one speech: It was all about unity, but not the kind of unity the media had imagined. Throughout, Trump was calling for his enemies to surrender to his domination. Then we can be one unified nation, he promised, and stop wasting our energies fighting each other.

The Germans have a word for that kind of unity: gleichschaltung, which is pretty much untranslatable. It’s an old engineering term, but they coined its political usage in the 1930s, for some reason.

So the featured post “The Two Kinds of Unity” will flesh out that interpretation of Trump’s speech. Everything else will wind up in the weekly summary. The featured post should appear between 9 and 10 EDT, and the summary before noon.