Ross Douthat The inability of any speaker, civilian or politician, to resolve the tension between the usual incumbent claims that Things Have Never Been Better and the grim reality of the Covid-19 death rate and the unemployment rate. There were other tensions — blaming Biden for being too tough on crime in the 1990s and blaming him for being too lax on crime now; claiming Americans won’t be safe in Biden’s presidency by citing trends that have worsened under Trump. But the basic problem for this convention is that the Republicans were trying to sell an incumbent administration that failed to prevent a continuing crisis — evident in the very design of the convention itself — and nobody tonight, up to Trump himself, had any rhetorical solution save evasion.