What country does Mike Pence live in?

What 176,000-plus deaths from covid-19? What devastating shutdown and recession? What double-digit unemployment? What mass uncertainty over whether and how to open the schools? What shocking police killings of African Americans? What long-overdue reckoning with systemic racism?

Let me put it another way: What country does Vice President Pence live in?

During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Pence sounded as though he lived in some kind of fantasyland that perhaps had encountered a few tiny little bumps in the road. His party has spent the week claiming to represent “the common man,” but Pence spoke as though he knew next to nothing about the daunting challenges that Americans are having to deal with every day. The most he could muster was an acknowledgement that “we’re passing through a time of testing,” as though he were consoling a motorist after a fender bender.

He did offer “our prayers” for victims of Hurricane Laura, and he acknowledged there had been deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, though not how many. But his only pointed and specific words were his attacks against the Democratic nominee — “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” — and his full-throated endorsement of President Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric.

The vice president rejected the idea of systemic racism, instead focusing on the protest and demanding its end. He blasted “violence and chaos . . . rioting and looting . . . tearing down statues” — with no mention of why those things might be happening.

Pence spoke from an iconic American setting, the site of the War of 1812 battle whose “rocket’s red glare” and “bombs bursting in air” inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fort McHenry is meant to symbolize national unity. It was an act of defilement to use such a place for partisan political rhetoric intended to provoke division and fear.