17-year old vigilantes with assault rifles roam the streets, as Pence tells America you ‘won’t be safe’ under Biden

Yet another black man is shot in the back by a white police officer, in full view of his children. In the ensuing protests, two people are shot dead and a 17-year-old vigilante kid with an assault rifle is arrested and charged with double homicide.

An “unsurvivable” storm, promising a 20-foot high wall of water, waits to dump itself upon the southern gulf coast on the watch of a climate crisis denialist president. And in this moment, vice president Mike Pence stares down the barrel of the camera to tell his people, “The hard truth is you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Prior to this moment, he has spoken of President Trump’s “unprecedented action” to contain America’s coronavirus outbreak, untroubled by the certain fact it is the worst anywhere in the world. It takes the fact checkers a matter of seconds to point out that, no, Trump did not “suspend all travel from China”, that more than 40,000 people arrived in the US on direct flights from China in the two months after the ban was announced.

But what does it matter? As he speaks, Tucker Carlson is already on Fox News, lionising a 17-year-old boy charged with murder.

“How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” he says.

The full forces are mobilised. The battle lines are very clearly drawn. The only question left unanswered is how much of America will be able to withstand the blizzard of lies that is coming for it.

The aim is to push Joe Biden out to the radical left in the public imagination, in the hope that a full five decades of public service, one of them as vice president, are not sufficient to show the obvious truth that he is anything but.

The Trump 2020 campaign will be the ugliest, most stomach-turning spectacle most of us have ever seen. And it would be beyond foolish to think the accumulated evidence of its certain falsehood will be enough to stop it.

The third night of the Republican National Convention also heard from Burgess Owens, a black former NFL player running for Congress in Utah.

“We stand at a crossroads,” he said. “Mobs torch our cities while popular members of Congress promote the same socialism that my father fought against in [the Second World War].”

This is such historically illiterate garbage it feels almost physically painful to have to engage with it, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that the only mob that has, in recent times, descended on any American city that promotes the values America fought against in the Second World War were the swastika-waving Nazis that marched through Charlottesville, on a day which President Trump described as having “good people on both sides”.

Viewed from afar, for quite a few decades, America’s two-party system has looked slightly more vigorous than Britain’s, because its more liberal option did not grow out of the socialist tradition, and so the right has found it harder to play the easy shots, to denounce the Democrats as communists, Marxists, Trotskyites and so on.

But they are playing the easy shots now. They have no basis in fact, of course. Absolutely none. They’re the most desperate measures, they always are, but they might just work.

“The choice in this election is whether America remains America,” Pence said. Everything is polarised now, of course, to the extent that is anything but clear whether, to everyone on earth who exists outside of Trump’s narrow base, the choice is whether America can return to what it was before, or if it will be lost for good.