Well, the RNC convention is over, so maybe it’s safe to watch MSNBC again. This morning I’ve been plowing through the reviews. One of the best bits of writing about the convention was published yesterday, by Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, Anti-party in a ghost town: Trump’s undead GOP holds an un-convention. Do read it all the way through. O’Hehir describes a party convention that was almost entirely severed from the history of the GOP. And the people who were there seemed weirdly directionless, as if they weren’t quite sure why they’d come. And here’s the meat of it:
The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it.
If Trump wins this election, he’ll be a lame-duck president in his 80s. More specifically, he’ll be the beloved but decrepit figurehead of the semi-normal popular front of a fascist movement whose darkest and most compelling energies lie elsewhere. Because that’s all the official, above-ground Republican Party is now. Their convention is a deliberately boring dumbshow, listless late-Soviet political theater meant to lull you and me — and most of its actual participants, for that matter — into believing that Trump 2.0 is nothing more than what it says on the box.
By the time of the Reagan Administration the Republicans had learned to turn their televised RNC convention into a slickly produced four-day pep rally, with every campaign button polished brightly and every balloon falling according to script. By contrast, the Dem conventions always seemed a bit disheveled. But I take it this RNC convention was nothing like the old ones.
And then there was Trump’s acceptance speech. I have read there really was supposed to be a plan for Trump to make a “unity” speech and not even mention Joe Biden. He started off well enough, but he couldn’t keep it up. He is what he is. Paul Waldman:
The speech in its written form was what any sane person would have expected: some vague, nakedly insincere words about unity up top, followed by the red-meat speech Trump had always intended to give. But rather than anything resembling a traditional convention speech in form and structure, this was a Trump rally speech, familiar to anyone who has watched one on TV — and an unusually dull one at that.
Here’s how it works: His aides load a prepared text in the teleprompter, and Trump uses it as a scaffold on which he hangs rambling digressions, familiar jokes, bizarre preoccupations, and commentary on the written words themselves (“So true, so true”). He speaks a few of the written lines, then wanders off like Mr. Magoo, then returns to speak a few more of the lines, and wanders off again.
It’s hard to overstate how strange it was that Trump used this extraordinary opportunity, with tens of millions of Americans watching, to offer little more than the umpteenth version of the rally speech he has delivered hundreds of times. Did he say to himself, “Oh, I’ve gotta use the Hannibal Lecter joke, that one kills”? Well he did. We didn’t get the riff about sharks and electric boats, but he did describe a fictional event in which he supposedly visited a shipyard in Wisconsin and on the spot redesigned naval destroyers to make the bow more pointy.
This one is also worth reading all the way through. Waldman gets to the marrow of Trump’s appeal through the use of the German word herrenvolk, “master race,” a term the Nazis liked a lot. And he said what Trump is promising is a a herrenvolk democracy, or one in which only one specific ethnic group (guess who?) is allowed to vote and hold office.
Screw your ideals and principles; the true America is in the blood of the people — or at least some people.
This is why Donald Trump won 62 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2016 and 71 percent in 2020, despite having done precisely nothing in those four years to improve the quality of their lives. This is why he won nearly two-thirds of the votes of whites without college degrees in both elections. You may feel that the economy or the culture has left you behind, Trump and Vance tell them, but you are the realest and truest Americans. It’s in the blood.
And the rest of you? We’ll allow you to be here, but only on “our terms.” For now.
David Brooks, of all people, said this of Trump’s acceptance speech: “The part after the assassination-attempt story was one of the truly awful and self-indulgent political performances of our time. My brain has been bludgeoned into soporific exhaustion.”
David Frum, the Atlantic:
At the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller.
Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”—and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.
I thought this was interesting:
The republican national convention cast a bright light on the party of Trump’s weaknesses: its extremism, its cultishness, its lack of welcome to the majority of Americans. The central idea implicit in the vice-presidential nominee’s speech was the superior Americanness of those with seven generations of ancestors buried in U.S. ground over those whose ancestors are buried in other places. The central idea in the presidential nominee’s speech was “me, me, me, me, me” for more than an hour and a half.
Here Frum is just a tad off. Speaking as someone who has more than seven generations of ancesters buried in U.S. ground, I am very aware that Trump himself and a lot of his minions — Stephen Miller, for example — are only second generation or so. I also note that most Black Americans also have many generations of ancestors buried in U.S. soil, never mind native Americans. And Trump has always seemed weirdly unconnected to American history and culture. Norms, like why it’s important to visit veteran cemeteries, have to be explained to him. And I bet he couldn’t recognize the tunes of “My Darling Clementine” or “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” It’s like he’s from Mars. No, the real criteria are not about how long your family has been here, but whether you are White and male.
Trump really ought to be beatable. His record as president (which Frum accurately reviews) was actually dismal. Biden’s is much better. But you can’t tell that to many Americans, because they have so bought into the Trump mystique and so hammered with propaganda about the failures of Biden that if you tell them the truth, they think you are crazy, or just lying.
Regarding the Biden drama, trying to follow it too closely will give you whiplash. The Conventional Wisdom changes by the hour. He’s getting out! No, he’s staying in! And right now Biden’s staunchest defender is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She and Bernie Sanders are standing by their man. The so-called centrists in the Dem party are in meltdown mode and pretty much resigned that Trump will get another term.
