Donald J. Trump could not truthfully appear at the Republican National Convention as a president who got America safely through the Covid-19 pandemic. He walked to a campaign lectern with a presidential seal and looked out on a crowd of faces. And denied a reality in which the virus had faded away the way he said it would in its early days, he created that too, by stage-directing it. Mr. Trump’s 70-minute renomination speech dwelled, for a few minutes here and there, on the pandemic and his administration’s response. But its setting, like much of his convention, told a simpler story visually: That the coronavirus didn’t exist, or at least was no big deal.

Source: New York Times August 28, 2020 12:25 UTC