I said a couple of weeks ago that if President Biden decided to withdraw from the race it would be awesome if he would do it on the night Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination. That didn't come to pass last night during the final night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee but the political media still spent the whole day speculating that it was about to happen, which no doubt irritated Trump almost as much since he always wants to be the center of attention — even when his opponents are doing his job for him.
It's obviously helpful to Trump that the Democrats are fighting each other over the fate of their presidential candidate just three months from the election. Still, the drama around Biden potentially withdrawing from the race has stepped on Trump's martyr storyline even as he's ostentatiously sporting a bizarrely large bandage on his right ear and cynically playing the sympathy card. But he made up for it with a smarmy opening to his acceptance speech in which he gave a mournful minute-by-minute recitation of the assassination attempt. At one point he indulged in some truly embarrassing schmaltz by kissing the helmet of the fireman who was killed at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. It all just seemed .... weird. One suspects he's been talking about this nonstop since it happened and is still understandably obsessed.
