As the Democratic National Convention convenes virtually, nightly riots continue in Portland. The city police are on their own since the Oregon State Police withdrew after the county DA announced he wouldn’t prosecute most arrestees. Every night, rioters are arrested and released only to hit the streets the next night. The riots have spread from the Mark Hatfield Justice Center, to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building, to various neighborhoods in Portland. City, state, and national Democrats and the media doggedly insist the demonstrations are ‘mostly peaceful.’

Meanwhile, in New York City, 51 people were shot last weekend, four of them fatally. Sidewalks in toney Manhattan are empty, the shops are boarded up and major brand retailers say they are pulling out of the city. In August, the city’s murder rate is up 29% over the same period last year. The number of robberies, rapes, and murders has sky rocketed. With the sanitation budget slashed by $106 million, trash cans are overflowing and rubbish fills the streets and so have rats. 420,000 people fled the city during the first three months of the pandemic, 13,000 apartments stand vacant, and real-estate prices have crashed. At the same time, the real estate market in the metro area is booming. Mayor Bill De Blasio seems oddly disinterested in the chaos, focusing instead on Black Lives Matter and attacking Donald Trump. The Democrat Mayor of the nation’s largest city was not invited to this week’s Democrat National Convention.

But John McCain’s widow was. The Democrats gave each convention night a theme, and the first night’s theme was former Republicans supporting Biden. Cindi McCain narrated a video about Biden and her husband, in which she talked about their bipartisan work and Biden’s decades of foreign policy experience; his work on Cold War era issues like chemical weapons bans and nuclear arms control. GOP leaders spoke as well. These include former Ohio Governor John Kasich, who competed against Trump in the overcrowded 2016 Republican primary and has been a staunch critic ever since. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell talked about Biden’s foreign policy experience. Powell told the convention Biden would ‘stand up to our adversaries, never the other way around.’ Powell once told the world that Saddam Hussein had massive stockpiles of WMD. Michelle Obama spoke for many Democrats in a passionate speech about the state of America today, many pundits and strategists will call for her to run for president in 2024.

On the second night of the convention, Biden received the official nomination. In a moving ceremony, Democrats pledged their delegates via video from their home states. Jimmy Carter endorsed Biden, saying he’d been a close confidant since the 70’s. Then, Bill Clinton talked about Trump, ‘At a time like this, Oval Office should be a command center. Instead it’s a storm center. There’s only chaos. Just one thing never changes. His determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame. The buck never stops there.’ Bill Clinton said that. About the Oval Office. John Kerry, one of the architects of the now defunct Iran Deal, lectured America on foreign policy.

The third night of the convention belonged to old Democrat grandees. Hillary Clinton told the gathering Trump would try to steal the election and once again blamed her loss in 2016 on Russian interference. Obama gave a long speech attacking Trump and then introduced the Vice Presidential nominee. Traditionally, past presidents don’t criticize sitting presidents. Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris spoke at length about her background and being a biracial woman, slammed Trump’s handling of the Wuhan Virus, and, in the most memorable line of the convention, declared, ‘There is no vaccine for racism.’ 

Congruent with the Dem Convention, the Trump campaign has placed a seven-figure ad buy on YouTube and other digital platforms. People visiting YouTube will see one of several Trump campaign ads slamming Democrats. These ads will run on Youtube’s banner for 96 hours. One ad juxtaposes Democrats talking about ‘peaceful protestors’ with images of Portland and other cities aflame. An ad ‘Joe Biden in his own words’, quotes Joe Biden’s racist comments over the course of his 50-year career in politics and ends with Kamala Harris calling him racist in last summer’s debates. A third ad plays on Biden’s cognitive decline and asks, ‘What happened to Joe Biden?’  Yet another attacks Biden for saying he’ll raise taxes and give amnesty to Illegal Immigrants, ‘America can’t afford Joe Biden,’ the ad says. No GOP nominee of the 21st century would have run ads so hard hitting and brutal, not George W Bush, not Mitt Romney, and not the late John McCain. And that’s what separates Trump from the GOP establishment.