• Kimberly Guilfoyle – formerly a Fox News host, prosecutor, first lady of San Francisco, and current girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr. – painted the upcoming election as a scorched earth war of attrition.
  • “Don’t let [the Democrats] step on you. Don’t let them destroy your families, your lives, and your future. Don’t let them kill future generations because they told you and brainwashed you and fed you lies that you weren’t good enough.”
  • Guilfoyle warned voters of a nightmarish future. But for millions of Americans, the nightmare is already here, and her boss is in the White House.
  • This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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“Make America Great Again” was the 2016 Trump campaign’s nostalgic and optimistic slogan. “Keep America Great” is Trump’s declaration of a successful first term.

Could “They Want to Enslave You” be the next Trumpist mantra?

Granted, it’s a little much for mainstream consumption, but it’s also a direct quote from Kimberly Guilfoyle’s speech during night one of the Republican National Convention (RNC) and seems to encapsulate the current vision of the 2020 Trump campaign.

Lest it be assumed I’m taking the Trump campaign’s lead fundraiser out of context, here’s a larger excerpt from Guilfoyle’s speech in which she painted a vision of what America will supposedly look like under a Joe Biden administration and a Democratic Congress:

"They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself."

Guilfoyle - formerly a Fox News host, prosecutor, first lady of San Francisco, and current girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr. - repeatedly painted the upcoming election as a scorched earth war of attrition.

"Don't let [the Democrats] step on you. Don't let them destroy your families, your lives, and your future. Don't let them kill future generations because they told you and brainwashed you and fed you lies that you weren't good enough."

Destroy. Kill. Brainwash. Totally healthy and not at all unhinged rhetoric coming from a primetime speaker at one of the US' two major political parties' conventions.

Without naming him, Guilfoyle also took direct aim at her ex-husband, Gov. Gavin Newsom, as well as other California Democrats which she says took "a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation, and immaculate environment" and "turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes."

Guilfoyle repeatedly, and falsely, referred to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as socialists. She also cited her background as the daughter of a Puerto Rican native and an Irish native to establish her street credibility on the dangers of socialism. That Puerto Rico is a US territory and Ireland is not a socialist country doesn't seem to have factored into Guilfoyle's equation.

The pitch and volume of her voice rising with every passing phrase, by the end of her speech in an empty auditorium, Guilfoyle had put Howard Dean's 2004 campaign-destroying "I Have a Scream" speech to shame.

The message within Guilfoyle's show-stopping performance wasn't out of step with several other of the night's speakers. But it seems that for all the delusional boasts of how great Trump's administration has been, the RNC's driving mission is to scare the hell out of voters that unless they vote for the orange man, the "Marxist liberal activists" are going to throw them into the gulag.

To be clear, Democrats aren't immune from these sorts of sweeping statements. The party's leaders spent last week painting Trump as an existential threat to the country's future, but they at least had some evidence to work with.

The US remains crippled by the coronavirus pandemic, thanks in no small part to Trump's disastrous response which included politicizing the use of masks, attacking states who locked-down at the beginning of the crisis, and putting his crony son-in-law Jared Kushner and his rich-kid buddies in charge of securing PPE.

The results speak for themselves. Double-digit unemployment. The most devastating rate of coronavirus infections and deaths of any rich country in the world. Trump's managed to make a US passport essentially worthless (we can't even go to Canada, how's that for MAGA comeuppance).

Guifoyle's speech was a clarion call to the electorate, begging them to prevent America's descent into a living nightmare. But millions of Americans are already living in one, and her boss is in the White House.

So yes, the Democrats exaggerated (sometimes called "lying") plenty during their four-day propaganda infomercial, but none of the DNC speakers came close to the false and apocalyptic rhetoric of Guilfoyle's.

And that was only night one.