"Whatever Trump Wants" -- Twitterman Tries To Boost Cawthorn

My favorite thing about the Republican National Convention in Charlotte so far -- it's not their "high-risk" gathering in the same room of some 326 official state delegates (six from each state) with assorted functionaries and facilitators, nor the shocking surprise that they intend to renominate Donald J. Trump this very morning -- it's their decision not to write a party platform for 2020. Well, to be fair, they submitted three words: "whatever Trump wants." 

Dudes! You really want to proclaim your total lack of any anchor holding you to A Rock? You want to announce to the voters that you hold nothing in particular sacred any more? Oh, I know you said the 2016 Platform is readopted for 2020 -- and those are your positions still, thank you very much, and "You may go now" -- depart in peace and don't notice that the old 2016 platform contains statehood for Puerto Rico and that little plank on Crimea that got edited to make it more advantageous for Russia. 

We pretty much knew it all along, that you're a colony now under imperial rule. You used to believe -- stoutly and without equivocation -- in certain tenets of foreign policy, of monetary policy, of personal responsibility. Then Trump arrived. Whatever Trump didn't like, you had to not like too, and how humiliating is that, shedding conviction like a snake sluffs skin?

(The 2020 Platform of the Democratic Party was controversial too because -- as usual -- the Democrats wanted to write too much rather than nothing at all, so there were arguments to the death. Progressives gave up the most. The Biden moderates wouldn't adopt "Medicare for All," but tried to placate the progressives: "We are proud our party welcomes advocates who want to build on and strengthen the Affordable Care Act and those who support a Medicare for All approach." The Bernie Sanders camp was actively involved in drafting the platform, and they decided to lose gracefully, a boon.)

Cawthorn met Trump at a July fundraiser
for the president. Still photo from
video published by The Sun.
Cawthorn is seated to the left.

I know well enough that party platforms are wallpaper and nobody pays them any attention except for partisans like me looking for ammunition. It's still a bad look for a major political party to shirk the responsibility of declaring "These Are the Values We Know, We Know."  

Trump will be in Charlotte at noon to accept the nomination, and then he plans to travel to the 11th Congressional District to give young Madison Cawthorn a boost in his campaign to take Mark Meadows' old seat. Trump's been petting Cawthorn like a new mascot. The lad's been given a speaking slot on the convention program. I look for him to play the victim to get past the awkwardness of being called out publicly in recent days for claiming acceptance to enter the Naval Academy when he was never accepted there, and the serial testimony of several young women who've said that Cawthorn pushed himself on them as God's gift to their gender.

Cawthorn's Democratic rival, Col. Moe Davis, has come on strong and relentlessly. Davis has not been afraid to confront Cawthorn's character flaws, his lack of experience even at holding down a job, his willingness to become a partisan puppet. Cawthorn looks increasingly like a would-be Lothario surfer trying to get next to important people.

Trump's actually landing in the small town of Mills River in Henderson County, where Democrat candidate for the state Senate Brian Caskey is also a town commissioner. Caskey tweeted: "I’ve been invited, since I am the Mayor Pro Tem. If you see me in photos, I’ll be the one wearing the
@JoeBiden mask." I'll be watching Caskey's tweets this afternoon.