The purpose of a party's convention is to: (1) decide who will be its candidate for President, and (2) draft and approve the party platform. The Republican party gave up on any presents that it doing (1) this year when it canceled a bunch of primaries and caucuses to make sure that Trump did not face any serious challenge for the nomination. Now that the Republican party has given up on the idea of drafting or voting on a party platform for 2020, what is the point of this week's (alleged) "Republican National Convention"? Can they even call it a party convention?
This is just another example of the GOP losing the plot because it is run by a total dum-dum who doesn't actually know how the government (or either political party) formally runs. For years the parties' conventions have become more and more pro forma, with the nomination effectively decided and the party platform mostly decided before the actual convention. But still, both parties kept one eye to the technical reason they were there. They held a formal vote on the nomination and their platform drafting committees met and hammered out a platform document that was ultimately voted on by the convention delegates. Of course the media downplayed that boring technical stuff and was mostly in it for the speeches and the question of whether and how much there would be a "convention bounce."
I think Trump has no idea there ever was that other stuff. All he knows is the teevee production to produce the bounce. Now that the Republican Party is just the party of Trump, there are few people left who even know what the convention is for and what makes this different from a multi-day rally.
People should stop pretending this spectacle is a convention. It's just a spectacle... and a massive violation of the Hatch Act, because laws don't apply to Trump's people, apparently.
