Before the pandemic stopped everything they made movies out here in Hollywood, and continuity errors were always a worry. No one films in sequence. Some short scenes take days to film, to get things right. And things change. Costume designers, production designers, prop masters, and make-up artists take quick reference photographs of the actors and sets at the beginning and end of each day’s shooting. Everyone has to check each day’s clothing, sets, props, and make-up against a previous day’s. Yes, this is tedious, but necessary. No one who watches the final product should wonder where that bottle of gin suddenly came from or why that guy’s hair is suddenly parted on the other side. Someone has to pay attention to these things. Otherwise, your production becomes a joke. All you have are blooper-reels.
Donald Trump is a show-biz television guy. He should know this, but on the second night of the Republican National Convention there were continuity issues. The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim reports that someone was not paying attention:
The Republican Party’s choreographed coronation of President Trump at its convention this week was quickly upended Tuesday by controversial remarks – both new and in the past – by its speakers, including one who encouraged her Twitter followers to read an anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy theory.
Oops. That was not in the movie that the Republicans thought they were making:
Mary Ann Mendoza is an “angel mom,” a term used by immigration restrictionists for mothers whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants. She has been a regular presence at the White House for events advocating limits on immigration and is on the campaign board of Women for Trump.
But earlier Tuesday, she promoted an anti-Semitic Twitter thread from a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory who claimed that in 1773, a Jewish goldsmith summoned other businessmen to his home and proclaimed that if they pooled their money, “it was possible to gain control of the wealth, natural resources, and manpower of the entire world.”
Mendoza, who was to talk about her police officer son who was killed in a car crash, shared the Twitter messages, writing, “Do yourself a favor and read this thread.” The thread includes nearly every anti-Semitic trope there is to prove there’s a Jewish cabal set on taking over American government. It includes a link to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the fabrication from Tsarist Russia that was popular in Nazi Germany and with Henry Ford. QAnon is pretty much just an update of that – Jews drinking the blood of gentile babies and grinding up their bones to make their Passover bread and whatnot – but this time add Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks to the mix.
There was nothing surprising here:
Mendoza in 2018 tweeted something similar about a wealthy Jewish family controlling the world: “The Rothschilds have used their globalist media mouthpiece to declare that Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the New World Order!”
Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for the president’s reelection campaign, confirmed that Mendoza’s video remarks were pulled from the convention lineup on Tuesday and that they will not run this week. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether Mendoza would remain on the campaign board of Women for Trump.
Someone wasn’t paying intention. In Hollywood, this sort of continuity-check falls to the Script Supervisor. The Republicans didn’t have one of those:
“We are deeply troubled by Mendoza’s tweets and comments that trafficked in vicious anti-Semitic messages,” Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in a statement. “While we mourn the horrible loss of her son, her views clearly disqualify her from addressing the Convention. We are pleased that Convention officials took prompt action to make sure the Convention reflects who we are and our values as a party.”
Mendoza’s son was killed in 2014 by a drunk driver whom she said was living in the United States illegally.
But it was too late for any of that:
The QAnon conspiracy theory has gained traction in recent weeks. A backer of those views won the GOP nomination in a Georgia congressional district earlier this month, and the president has declined to disavow those views, saying supporters of the baseless theory are people who “supposedly like me.”
Adherents of the conspiracy theory believe Trump is secretly battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and run a child sex-trafficking ring. The FBI has identified QAnon – which dates to at least fall 2017, when a self-proclaimed government insider identified as “Q” began posting on Internet message boards – as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
But Trump has professed ignorance about details of the theory. When told by a reporter at a White House news conference last week that the core of the QAnon view is that Trump was saving the world from a “satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals,” the president responded, “Is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?”
Hey, there could be a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals out there. One never knows. Donald Trump is not making things easy for his production team, and there was this:
Separately, controversial past remarks disclosed Tuesday dogged another convention speaker who has been chosen to highlight the president’s record on abortion issues.
The 19th, a new news outlet focusing on gender and politics, unearthed recent tweets from Abby Johnson, a prominent opponent of abortion rights, that said she supports reviving household voting, which would allow only the head of a household to cast a vote in elections.
Calling her own views “anti-feminist,” Johnson said in her tweets from May as well as Tuesday night that the husband should get the “final say” in how the household votes in elections…
Johnson’s speech went off as scheduled.
But she didn’t say that good Christian women should let their men vote for them. She spoke about abortion. The convention production team dodged a bullet there, and hoped no one would come across this:
One of the Republican National Convention’s top speakers said in a recent video that it would be “smart” for a police officer to racially profile her biracial son, because “statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
“I recognize that I’m gonna have to have a different conversation with Jude than I do with my brown-haired little Irish, very, very pale-skinned, white sons, as they grow up,” Abby Johnson, a prominent anti-abortion activist, said in a 15-plus-minutes video posted to YouTube in late June, after weeks of nationwide protests against the police killing of George Floyd.
That’s because the kid is a threat:
“Right now, Jude is an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy,” said Johnson, whose husband blogged, in 2015, about adopting their biracial son at his birth. Johnson is white. “But one day, he’s going to grow up and he’s going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man. And my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.”
But this is what it is:
The fact that the police could one day view her sons differently, simply due to the color of their skin, doesn’t make Johnson mad, she said. Instead, it makes sense to her.
“Statistically, I look at our prison population and I see that there are a disproportionately high number of African-American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes. So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road – as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road – because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
So she knows she probably has a murderous thug on her hands, which makes her hope the police do what they should:
“So the fact that in his head, he would be more careful around my brown son than my white son, that doesn’t actually make me angry. That makes that police officer smart, because of statistics.”
That didn’t come up at the convention. Trump’s team can worry about that later. They should have been thinking about this:
The decision by the Republican National Convention to feature President Trump conducting official business inside the White House underscores how he is leveraging the powers of his office for political gain – raising questions about whether an event featured Tuesday night violated federal law.
In a remarkable pre-taped scene packaged as part of the convention’s prime time programming, Trump took part in a naturalization ceremony for five new citizens as acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf administered the Oath of Allegiance.
“On behalf of everyone here today, I’d like to express my gratitude to you, Mr. President for hosting this naturalization ceremony here at the White House,” Wolf said.
Kathleen Clark, a legal and government ethics professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said that the event appeared to be designed as part of the convention, an action that would violate a criminal provision of the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch employees from participating in politics in their official capacity.
Others commented that these five were from each what of Trump has previously called shithole countries, those which weren’t Norway, and that he asked each of them to tell him how wonderful he was. You know. See! They think I’m wonderful!
He can revoke their new citizenship in the morning and deport them and be done with them. No one like them will ever get into America again. But for now, his America welcomes everyone.
This was nonsense. The Hatch Act was the real issue:
Under the act, federal employees are prohibited from using their authority to influence the election of a presidential candidate, Clark said, calling Trump and Wolf “breathtaking in their contempt for the law.”
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the legal basis of the event, said it was part of the president’s official schedule that was publicized on a public website.
“The campaign decided to use the publicly available content for campaign purposes,” the official said. “There was no violation of law.”
The explanation will never fly in court but this is complicated:
The most widely known civil provisions of the Hatch Act do not apply to the president and the vice president. But the law applies to executive branch employees who are involved in planning or executing any political events staged at the White House, including video segments filmed there, experts said.
And while the president and vice president are exempt from the civil provisions of the law, they are subject to two criminal provisions derived from the Hatch Act, Clark said.
The naturalization ceremony – as well as a video of Trump granting a pardon inside the White House that aired earlier in the night – comes after numerous Hatch Act violations by administration officials in the past several years.
“This is a clear violation,” said Jordan Libowitz, spokesman for the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “This is so obviously, blatantly, insultingly a Hatch Act violation that it’s starting to seem like the Trump administration is going out of its way to find new ways to violate the law. We’ll be filing a complaint.”
And there will be lots to complain about.
On Monday, Trump appeared in two prerecorded videos shot inside the building, one in the East Room and another in the Diplomatic Reception Room.
On Tuesday night, first lady Melania Trump spoke from the Rose Garden. Numerous administration officials appeared to be in attendance, according to video feeds of her speech.
On Thursday, Trump is expected to deliver his official acceptance speech from the South Lawn, which is set to host hundreds of guests.
Earlier this month, the Office of Special Counsel told House Democrats in a letter that while the president is not prohibited from delivering his convention speech on White House grounds, the involvement of White House employees in the event could raise Hatch Act concerns.
But who is going to stop him? He could order Army troops to go door to door all across America and tell people to vote for him. Who can stop him?
There are no rules. Carol Morello, the diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post, covering the State Department, reports this surprise:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made history Tuesday night when he addressed the Republican National Convention, a move that critics say violates a long-standing State Department policy that draws a line between diplomacy and politics.
Pompeo videotaped his brief speech Monday night from the rooftop of the famed King David Hotel in Jerusalem, using striking views of the Old City as a backdrop.
The image was everything. He loves Israel, Trump loves Israel. Israel loves Trump. American Jews who have voted for Democrats for generations and don’t care for Donald Trump, they hate Israel. They hate themselves. Don’t be like them.
But he didn’t say that:
Pompeo used his minutes before the camera to tout the Trump administration’s foreign policy, including its exit from the Iran nuclear deal and support for a peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates announced earlier this month.
“The primary constitutional function of the national government is ensuring your family – and mine – are safe and enjoy the freedom to live, work, learn and worship as they choose,” he said. “Delivering on this duty to keep us safe and our freedoms intact, this president has led bold initiatives in nearly every corner of the world.”
That was rather generalized and useless, and of course there was this:
The State Department said Pompeo’s decision to speak at the RNC was made in his personal capacity and did not involve government resources. But it left many diplomats dumbstruck.
“You can argue that U.S. government resources are not being used,” a former diplomat said, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain contacts within the State Department. “But he is not speaking as secretary of state? Is he speaking as Joe Blow? I don’t think so.”
Another former senior official called the decision “very tacky.”
Tacky or not, it was new:
Many of Pompeo’s predecessors maintained a high firewall, though some attended their party’s conventions. No sitting secretary of state, however, has made a speech at one.
“As secretary of state, I am obliged not to participate in any way, shape, fashion, or form in parochial, political debates. I have to take no sides in the matter,” Colin Powell said in 2004, when he decided not to attend the RNC while he was secretary of state under George W. Bush.
The tradition stretches back to the aftermath of World War II, when Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” That means foreign policy represents all Americans, not any particular faction, and should not be infected by domestic politics.
Pompeo doesn’t think like that:
Pompeo’s speech was taped in Jerusalem apparently in part to highlight the successful foreign policy narrative of normalized relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, a recognition popular with President Trump’s base of evangelical voters.
Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, once told an interviewer from the Christian Broadcasting Network that it is “possible” that Trump is like a modern-day Esther, a biblical character who persuaded the king of Persia not to destroy the Jews.
That’s our foreign policy? And there are the rules:
The State Department recently updated its restrictions on mixing politics and diplomacy in a memo from the legal adviser dated Dec. 3, 2019, that Pompeo approved.
“The Department has a long-standing policy of limiting participation in partisan campaigns by its political appointees in recognition of the need for the U.S. Government to speak with one voice on foreign policy matters,” the memo said. “The combination of Department policy and Hatch Act requirements effectively bars you from engaging in partisan political activities while on duty, and, in many circumstances, even when you are off duty.”
Among the restrictions in the memo, first reported by Politico and viewed by The Washington Post, is this statement: “Senate-confirmed Presidential appointees may not even attend a political party convention or convention-related event.”
In an email to employees dated Feb. 18, 2020, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun said the updated guidance was even more restrictive than what is required by law, to protect the institution’s integrity as it argues on behalf of American values overseas. He said it applied to all employees.
Oops:
Some veteran diplomats were aghast that Pompeo would make his videotaped speech after approving the updated guidelines.
Nancy McEldowney, the former dean of the Foreign Service Institute that trains incoming diplomats, said Pompeo had crossed the line “of precedent, propriety and ethics.” She called it a “blatant attempt to use American diplomacy to support Trump’s campaign.”
Of course it was, so someone had to do a bit of clean-up:
The State Department declined to comment, beyond an early statement saying Pompeo is addressing the convention “in his personal capacity.”
“No State Department resources will be used,” the statement said. “Staff is not involved in preparing the remarks or in the arrangements for Secretary Pompeo’s appearance. The State Department will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance.”
But none of it mattered much. David Ignatius notes this:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech to the Republican National Convention was short but revealing: He touted Trump’s “bold initiatives in nearly every corner of the world.” But he couldn’t cite many concrete achievements produced by Trump’s flashy, disruptive personal diplomacy…
Even by Pompeo’s account the record of presidential success so far is thin. Pompeo invoked China, for example, but in the absence of a trade deal or any of the other gains Trump had wanted in 2017, his list of accomplishments was largely negative. Trump “has pulled back the curtain on the predatory aggression of the Chinese Community Party” by blaming China for the coronavirus, jailing Chinese spies and toughening the U.S. stance on trade, Pompeo said.
On North Korea, ballyhooed by Trump two years ago as a breakthrough, Pompeo reported only a modest achievement: “The president has lowered the temperature and, against all odds, got the North Korean leadership to the table.” He also credited Trump for halting Pyongyang’s nuclear and long-range missile tests. He made no mention of the 2018 Singapore summit’s promise of denuclearization.
Pompeo ignored the fallout from Trump’s erratic diplomacy. “Because of President Trump, NATO is stronger,” he contended. NATO allies may be paying more for collective defense, which is a plus, but many analysts see a sharp deterioration in trust and confidence among key NATO allies.
Pompeo wisely didn’t attempt to parse the relationship with Russia, which continues to assault U.S. interests around the world – even as Trump advertises his desire for better relations and describes evidence of Russian intelligence assaults as a “hoax.”
So, for the most part there was nothing there, which means Pompeo must be running for president in 2024:
Trump’s foreign policy record is one of unfinished business. On all the major issues – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – the future policy options are a mystery. Pompeo is a loyal acolyte. But even he couldn’t find many successes to praise Tuesday night. Surely he suspects that he could do better.
That might explain this, or maybe all of this is quite simple. No one in the Republican National Convention was in charge of continuity. This was the blooper-reel.
Just Above Sunset 