Here is just part of McKay Coppins described it in The Atlantic:
Americans who tunedin to this week’s Republican National Convention were treated to a slickly produced, four-day dispatch from an alternate reality—one in which the president has defeated the pandemic, healed America’s racial wounds, and ushered in a booming economy. In this carnival of propaganda, Donald Trump was presented not just as a great president, but as a quasi-messianic figure who was single-handedly preventing the nation’s slide into anarchy.
Every presidential-nominating convention is, to a certain extent, an exercise in hype and whitewashing. But Trump’s 2020 convention went further—rewriting the history of his first term with such brazenness that it seemed designed to disorient. The setting of the convention’s final night reinforced the surreality: the made-for-TV stage on the White House’s South Lawn; the cheering, unmasked audience of more than 1,000 standing shoulder to shoulder; the speakers blaring Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” loud enough to drown out protesters at the gate. . . .
Many of the Republican strategists I spoke with this week flatly acknowledged that their party was presenting a version of recent events that veered toward fan fiction. But given the bitter mood of the country and the dire state of the race, they said, the campaign’s desperation was understandable. . . .
The rat-a-tat of distortions and conspiracy theories began with Trump’s address to delegates on Monday, when he accused Democrats of trying to rig the election with universal mail-in voting, which he called “the greatest scam in the history of politics.” (It is not.) Later, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana claimed that Joe Biden had “embraced the insane mission to defund” the police. (He has not.) Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida warned that Democrats would “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.” (They will not.) And Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said Democrats wanted to “keep you locked in your house until you become dependent on the government for everything.” (They do not.) . . .
The myth that Trump has already beaten the virus pervaded the convention. As my colleague Russell Berman has noted, the pandemic was repeatedly referred to in the past tense. “It was awful,” Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in his speech on Tuesday. . . .
Much of the Republican convention seemed to be organized around erasing the national memory of Trump’s bigotry. He presided over a naturalization ceremony. He surprised an ex-felon with a presidential pardon. A slate of Black speakers was invited to say nice things about the president, defend him against accusations of racism, and tout his role in passing a criminal-justice-reform bill.
Of course, in between these feel-good stunts and testimonials were bleak warnings about the “Marxist revolutionary” forces that are wreaking havoc in American cities—and could be coming for you next. The most potent of these segments featured the McCloskeys, an affluent Missouri couple who went viral after pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their house in June. “Make no mistake,” Patricia McCloskey told viewers, “no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.” Protesters, she said, are “not satisfied with spreading chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether.” Police brutality—the issue at the heart of this summer’s unrest—received only glancing mentions during the convention. . . .
The programming may have been glossier, softer, more savvily pitched to certain demographics. But the goal seemed the same—not to persuade or convert, but to disorient and demoralize. Americans have spent the past four years watching the Trump presidency unfold, and they are not overwhelmingly impressed by what they’ve seen. His campaign appears determined to make voters second-guess themselves. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote, the purpose of propaganda “has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any.”