Sputnik via AP
What time is it? What year is it? The first night of Donald Trump's convention suggested we were back in an earlier age, when crime was rampant, fear stalked the cities, and good people hunkered down in their homes and prayed the storm would pass.
"The vast majority of Americans do not feel safe," Rudy Giuliani grimly announced, before proclaiming that Trump would restore order in America as he, Rudy (thumping his chest to make sure you understood he meant himself), had in New York. Never mind that serious crime has fallen by a quarter since 2006, and had been halved in the decade preceding. Dangers lurk everywhere.
To prove the point, Trump's handlers produced three parents of sons killed by undocumented immigrants. Two were killed in auto accidents, however, and with more than 30,000 Americans killed in such accidents every year, it's hard to argue on the basis of two cases that the undocumented present a disproportionate hazard on the road. The third son was killed by an immigrant gangbanger, but since this happened in 2008, during the presidency of George W. Bush, it's not clear why their father held Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton responsible. One can only conclude that the Trump campaign went shopping for tragedies in which immigrants were to blame, and this was all they could come up with.
"America has enemies in the homeland and abroad," said Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, during a near incoherent rant during which he lamented that, "our troops are distracted by what bathroom door to open up." Had Trump actually chosen Flynn as his running mate, as he was reportedly considering, the campaign would have had to shut him up, much as George Wallace's managers once had to throttle Wallace's running mate, General Curtis LeMay, after he opined that the U.S. could easily wage and win a nuclear war. The advice one of Wallace's cronies subsequently gave LeMay-"keep your bowels open and your mouth shut"-would have been good counsel for Flynn and, for that matter, most of Monday's speakers.
Even by the standards of the modern Republican Party, even by the standards of Fox News, Monday's performance was vapid, demagogic, and just plain stupid beyond belief
-too crude for O'Reilly, though suitable, perhaps, for Hannity. There was no discussion of what Trump would actually do as president other than build a wall, back the police and support our troops. (The endless discussions of Obama and Clinton short-changing the armed forces had nothing to do with the kinds of wars we're fighting now; but like much of the evening's discussion, could have been lifted from a Reagan campaign attack on Jimmy Carter, when the U.S. faced, in the Soviet Union, a powerful nation state. For that matter, the arguments were out of sync with Trump's isolationism, though his managers obviously thought it was more important to bolster Trump's image as an all-around tough guy.)
Indeed, the convention is shaping up to be remarkably substance-free. The Republican platform was enacted in the afternoon session minus any discussion whatever of what it said. For that matter, there was no real discussion of Trump the man. Giuliani said he'd reveal confidences about Trump's help to New York cops and fire fighters who'd been injured, but actually provided no anecdotes. Neither did would-be First Lady Melania, who attested to Trump's humanity without providing any stories that demonstrated it.
What Monday was really about-indeed, what the entire Trump campaign has been really about-was Republicans lashing out furiously at the changes that have swept America in recent decades, at the more diverse, cosmopolitan and liberal America that has risen in their midst, and at the political forces and leaders who represent that new America. Their discontent is more about cultural and racial displacement than it is about the economic marginalization and decline of the white working class. The one speaker who raised those issues on Monday, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, completely failed to rouse the crowd. To be sure, Sessions was an indifferent speaker, but this was a night when every other oratorical stumblebum (and they were legion) was able to get some response simply for attacking Clinton, or praising soldiers, or chanting "USA!"
Republicans had shown themselves divided during their afternoon session, when the vote on accepting the convention rules produced genuine turmoil and anger on the floor. Anti-Trump delegates were volubly infuriated over their failure to win a roll-call vote on the rules report. All the delegates are united, however, in their rage at having to share and cede their country to people not like them. That's not a message, however, that really resonates much beyond the party base. It won't rally enough voters to push Trump to victory. Hence, the throwback to the law-'n-order rhetoric of Richard Nixon, to the depiction of a nation in which order is crumbling before dangerous and disruptive forces.
It would be surprising if the Republicans can pull this off. While terrorist attacks can traumatize, the nation is not facing the kind of political environment that helped elect Nixon-a disastrous and costly war abroad and widespread riots at home. Moreover, Nixon's appeal to racial backlash worked in a nation whose electorate was close to 90 percent white, while today's electorate is roughly just 70 percent white.
While Nixon may provide the model for Trump's campaign, Reagan was the only Republican president invoked-again and again-in Monday's proceedings. The Bushes have become those whose names must not be spoken, since they've refused to support Trump; while Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower presided over a party that still accepted a role for government, and as such are anathema to today's GOP. Having obliterated their own history, Monday's convention speakers were free to attribute to Obama certain sins-like failing to bring down Osama bin Laden (a charge Flynn made in passing)-that really belonged to George W. Bush.
But in parsing history, policy and strategy, I'm failing to convey the emptiness, the thought desert, the vast, numbing Dunciad that Donald Trump unleashed on the nation on the opening night of his convention. This conclave cries out for a Mencken to howl at its assembled booboisie. And it's only just begun.
