Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo
Delegates are reflected in a mirror at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
MILWAUKEE – I share a few amusing images on Facebook from my stroll late yesterday afternoon through downtown Milwaukee: a chirpy TV reporter from central casting standing on a street corner, lonely and forlorn, microphone in hand, looking for people to interview; a poster for Dennis Quaid’s forthcoming cinematic hagiography Reagan pasted on a sidewalk like a target for dogs to poop on.
Later, inside the security perimeter, I’m collecting images and snatches of conversation like I’ve done at my four previous Republican conventions going back to 2004 in New York, only half-heartedly now, with an I’m-too-old-for-this-shit weariness. Uncle Sam rolling by on a Segway. Me assenting to the request of the young companion of an old preacher ranting about masturbation through a bullhorn to pray over me. Mentally making notes of the stupidest T-shirts (“TRUMP + CONSTITUTION = AMERICA”). Taking down snatches of stupidity from the podium: “They promised peace and they gave us war!” (That’s right, just look at all the doughboys being sent off by tearful sweethearts at the train stations.) “You ain’t vote for Donald Trump, you ain’t Black!!”—a recall of something Biden said in the 2020 campaign, but actually an older schtick dating back to Reagan’s strategist Richard Wirthlin, who realized there were few Black votes to be had but many white ones, and by having as many Black people around the candidate as possible Republicans can reassure the wary that they are not racist for voting for a racist political party.
Learning from one of the slick videos that plays between speakers that gas is $5 a gallon and “everything in the store is now double the price!”—and from another that Biden’s “new Army of IRS agents!!” will march down suburban streets in martial phalanx. The thick-accented Hispanic Republican telling the same story about the forefather who traveled here in steerage with only five dull nickels and pocket lint to his name but worked hard and played by the rules and never took a handout and look at where his grandson is now!! (“They even used the FBI to go after traditionally Catholics as if we were terrorists …”)
The college-student intern I’ll be working with pings my phone to let me know she’s arrived in the hall, and I reply with a one-word command: “Observe!” It’s heartfelt. I’m so deadened by one more round of grandma and grandpa in silly red-white-and-blue hats and smirking country club boys in salmon pants and hair-sprayed aspiring undersecretaries in hip-hugging Nancy Reagan–red dresses tripping over manhole covers in spike heels and stupid signs and stupid shirts and stupid buttons and stupid hats and stupid, stupid, stupid. I’m so tired of the same sorry Howard Beale temptation I feel at every last one of these things to go up to the slickest-looking TV talking head standing there looking stupid with a microphone in his hand waiting for the camera red light to blink on and wait myself for the light to blink on to scream in his face live for the benefit of the viewers at home, “Why don’t you for once tell the truth to the people about how stupid this all is????”
I’m so deadened to all of that that I’m desperate for the testimony of other sets of eyes and ears, of what this all looks and feels like to someone who hasn’t seen the same goddamn schtick over and over and over again.
THEY’RE NOT ALL THE SAME, NOT QUITE. I’ve been able to come up with an economical theory lo these past two decades to explain how the Republican convention used to work, and how it changed with the coming of Donald J. Trump. In the before times, the speeches, videos, and performances were carefully scripted to be as middle-of-the-road seeming as possible, a TV show to reassure the normies watching at home that whatever they heard about the radicalization of the Republican Party was not true at all. Any explicit outreach to reassure the right-wing ideological base that the party is really all about delivering America to them is transacted in dog whistles.
For example, the 2004 convention featured as a star performer the African American gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, which was a perfect dog whistle, in that I only found his performance mentioned once in any news report, in one of those articles that are also requisite every four years about how obscure the entertainers the Republicans manage to draw to perform are, because all the truly famous singers are Democrats. No one outside the tribe for whom this dog whistle was intended heard it. None of the media bigfoots knew or are to point out that McClurkin was not obscure at all among evangelicals, who revered him for testifying two years earlier to how the scourge of pornography had “turned” him gay; or that not long before this performance he had gone on The 700 Club to reveal how homosexuals are “trying to kill our children.” There were no mainstream TV commentators explaining to the folks at home who just thought they were hearing a Black man with a decent voice surrounded by a clutch of children dressed in blindingly pure white that this was a symbol of the semiotics, then, of McClurkin’s crusade to protect the purity of all the little children from the diabolical snares of the homosexual recruiters. (“The gloves are off,” he had told The 700 Club. “And if there’s going to be a war, there’s going to be a war.”)
So that was the show inside those basketball arenas, the one seen on TV.
“What’s your message for Joe Biden?” The message is bleeped out. The crowd roars.
Outside those conventions I’d attended in 2004, 2008, and 2012 was where you could see the spectacle of the Republican Party that we would come to know as Donald Trump’s. In 2004, in New York, I saw it on display at “conservative comedy night” at the Laugh Factory. At the podium, for the TV cameras, first lady Laura Bush had said, “We are determined to provide a quality education for every child in America.” Then at the chuckle hut, the MC said we “have to face the fact that there are some dumb kids. It’s time to give just a few of them coloring books, some crayons—press on to what we can save.” And in 2012, in Tampa (in the giant, white, hardened, air-conditioned “Theater Tent” in the “American Action Network Pavilion,” next to the “Cigar Tent”), I sampled Occupy Unmasked by a filmmaker named Steve Bannon, and learned that the reason Occupy had so few Black people was that “they’re being prepared for part two: the race war.” And walking around afterward, as I wrote in my dispatch, I met “a young man in a T-shirt advertising his small business, YoungObamaHaters.com, which sells products featuring a map of America crisscrossed by rifles and the slogans ‘My Country My Future,’ and ‘Deport Barack Hussein Obama.’ He asked me ‘where the hippies are protesting at.’”
So, yeah, pretty much, that’s what’s changed. They still have some of the warm and cuddly talk onstage inside the hall, and maybe more this year than 2016, to fleece the gullible rubes of the press that New and Improved Donald Trump, post-shooting, is “pivoting” to a kinder and gentler approach. But mostly, what it was like last night, and will be like, is what happens when the “where are the hippies at?” guys with crosshairs on their minds get to feature inside the hall as well.
FOR REASONS OF PROFESSIONAL DUTY, A FEW SCENES.
I take a wrong turn into a section under the stands where my credential does not permit me to be, hit a dead end, and am walking back through the narrow corridor behind the row of temporary TV studios, push through a knot of extremely well-pressed suits blocking the way, and now have a story for parties about the time I shoulder-checked America’s 118th Speaker of the House.
Snap a shot of the screen across the basketball floor from the speakers, “… the racism is in cities run by Democrats. Look at the South Side of Chicago. Poor black kids trapped in failing schools …”
Straw boater. Nikki Haley bumper sticker on one side. Trump bumper sticker on the other.
Slick video, hard-working waitresses, bartenders, etc.: “You’re looking at America’s service workers … and like so many others in Joe Biden’s America, they’re struggling economically…” (It’s selling Trump’s proposal to make tips tax-free.)
Charlie Kirk, the conservative entrepreneur who grifts on college campuses, but got trolled so mercilessly during campus speeches by the neo-Nazi “Groyper” tendency that he had no choice but to become a lot more explicitly racist himself, does a pretty impressive callback to Ronald Reagan’s convention speech in 1980. “Their vision is: Limit your dreams. Give up. Aim lower. Be content with less.” He’s good at this: “Gen Z watching on TikTok right now, I have a message for you … you don’t have to feel aimless and unhappy …”
Slick video, men in hard hats. “What’s your message for Joe Biden?” The message is bleeped out. The crowd roars. Then the Steamfitters union’s Bobby Bartells repeats a Donald Trump lie about funding the reconstruction of Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s, and all the hard work his guys got to do on the project. “And a quick note to President Biden: That involved working after the hours of 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.! Now, more than ever, we need a president who gets things done. We have an open border …”
Byron Donalds, the Black congressman from Florida who might have flitted into your attention span for his comment that Blacks had it better in America before Lyndon Johnson screwed everything up, speaks of the heroism of his mother for fighting to put him in a private school, when “Democrat politicians wanted to trap me in a failing school,” then relating how his grandparents heroically paid to keep him there when his mom lost her job and “went on government assistance” (he mumbled that part very quickly)—then, literally two minutes later, with contempt in his voice: “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sent their kids to high-priced private schools …”
PayPal founder David Sacks with the requisite advertisement for the propaganda of Vladimir Putin: “The Biden-Harris administration”—he missed the memo that you’re supposed to call it a regime—“has taken a world that was at peace under President Trump, and they lit it on fire … He provoked—yes, provoked—the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion.” (The crowd has been pretty listless, as they often are these early nights of conventions—but they perk up for this.) “Afterward, he rejected every opportunity for peace in Ukraine, including a deal to end the war just two months after it broke out.” He called it “President Biden’s new forever war.”
Teamsters president Sean O’Brien on how much “a growing group” of Republicans like J.D. Vance—Trump’s running mate who got a zero on the AFL-CIO’s legislative scorecard last year—“truly care about working people.” (Oh, and Mr. O’Brien, I’d like you to meet Mr. Sacks …)
“My name is Amber Rose, and I’m a model/entrepreneur … Inflation is out of control.”
Trump appears onscreen, from somewhere in the bowels of the arena, like lost footage of a cameo from Spinal Tap.
And the four or five poor saps whose slots follow Elvis’s entry into the building have to put up with the crowd chanting “We want Trump” every time they, instead of he, takes the stage.
