Jae C. Hong/AP Photo
Delegates pray during the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, July 16, 2024, in Milwaukee.
The second night of the Republicans’ Trumpfest was a marriage of old and new. Old was highlighting murders committed by illegal immigrants by bringing the victims’ grieving, angry families before the convention to blame Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular for letting those immigrants into the country. A wrinkle on that theme was bringing grieving, angry families whose loved ones had been killed by drugs like fentanyl before the convention to blame Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular for letting those drugs into the country.
New was the complete conversion of one of our venerable, massive political parties into a cult. Eisenhower’s Republicans had to compete with Robert Taft’s and Joe McCarthy’s factions (themselves very different) to their right; Nixon’s had to compete with Goldwater’s to his right and Rockefeller’s to his left; Reagan’s was leavened by Howard Baker’s moderate Senate leadership; W.’s included John McCain, often just one step away from some kind of internal revolt. The entire Republican establishment opposed Trump when he first emerged; Senate leader Mitch McConnell clearly despised him, and a host of candidates ran against him last winter.
All the while, though, Trump was building a base, the MAGA movement, a big tent of narrow perspectives and fierce resentments that mirrored his own. He was not alone in this venture; right-wing talk radio, Fox television, and social media were working for decades to build this constituency, though they didn’t realize until recently that it would center on this particular authoritarian wannabe. We’ve seen the culmination of all these efforts in the first days of the party’s convention, in which MAGA is all—one vast, Trump-worshipping sect. Not a trace of a non-Trumpian tendency, much less an anti-Trump tendency, is detectable.
Just how Trumpian the party has become was put on display as Trump arrived to hear all his defeated foes bow down and kiss his ring: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio from 2016, plus Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley from this year’s primaries. Trump surveyed them from on high, looking down as a king might have surveyed his defeated rivals surrendering at court.
And just how idiosyncratically Trumpian the party has become was evident in its selection of the crime-related horror stories it chose to have spotlighted. Two of them focused less on Biden’s alleged responsibility for a horrible crime, and rather on the alleged misdeeds of two local elected district attorneys who have no role whatsoever in either federal immigration or drug policy. In the first, a woman from New York spoke in an angry roar against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for reducing the sentences of two women involved in her son’s murder. In the second, a woman from Atlanta bemoaned the injustice of her parents, accused of fraud, as she said, doing time in prison while Hunter Biden was still roaming free. The object of her ire was Fulton County DA Fani Willis. Where was justice for the innocent, she wondered, and where was punishment for the truly evil. For the latter, she declared, “There should be no immunity,” a phrase that, in calling to mind some recent events, somehow slipped the notice of the convention’s speech doctors.
Not a trace of a non-Trumpian tendency, much less an anti-Trump tendency, is detectable.
At least one other speaker railed against the generation of ostensibly permissive DAs who beset the nation’s cities, but the only two who rated their own prime-time condemnations were Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis, one of whom successfully prosecuted Trump for falsifying documents related to the hush money he’d paid to Stormy Daniels, the other still endeavoring to prosecute Trump for seeking to overturn Georgia’s vote in the 2020 election.
Not that personal retribution is what this feel-good convention of a great American party is really about.
Families who’ve had a loved one killed by an undocumented immigrant have become a linchpin of major Republican events in the Age of Trump. They are as ever-present as Lee Greenwood, with a much more compelling claim to center stage. At a time, however, when crime rates are in decline across the nation, and when the overwhelming majority of fentanyl smuggling is done by American citizens rather than immigrants, their stories, awful though they be, say nothing about the state of the nation. They are only put on stage to assign collective guilt to all immigrants for the actions of a few, and to blame Biden and the Democrats for crimes for which they’re not responsible.
If Republicans persist in this practice, families of people killed by native-born Americans—who, incidentally, commit crimes at a much higher rate than immigrants—may eventually demand equal time from Republicans. To borrow a meme from Monday night’s convention session, they are the Republicans’ forgotten men and women when it comes to victims’ families. Not to mention those families whose loved ones were saved by the actions of undocumented immigrants.
It was also more than a little galling to hear so much fulminating anti-crime rhetoric from a party about to nominate a man for president who was recently convicted of 34 felonies. If any American party looks with warm indulgence on certain criminals, it sure isn’t the Democrats.
At any rate, the attack on soft-on-crime Democrats wasn’t the only old standby that the Republicans trotted out on Tuesday; they also consulted the ancient playbooks to revive attacks on the soft-on-foreign-rivals Democrats and the mishandlers-of-the-economy Democrats. (Some of the elements of Trumpism—nativism, for one—have been around for a very long time.) These themes were repeated so robotically in the vast majority of the speeches that even Fox News elected to skip most of them, only interrupting their reporters’ chatter and interviews when Trump’s defeated rivals came to the podium. The only one of those who broke from the standard script was Nikki Haley, who endeavored to convince any undecided voters who’d tuned in that it was OK to disapprove of Trump’s manner and the occasional Trump policy, yet vote for him nonetheless.
In a sense, Haley’s presentation complemented two that came later—one from former Trump press secretary and current Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the second from Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump—that sought to soften Trump’s image to women who were still repulsed by him. Both talked about Trump the family man, the loving grandpa of little children; both told of how he’d bolstered their confidence in their potential and boosted their careers. Their Trump, in short, was not the abusive boor he actually is.
As Monday’s session sought to depict Trump as a working-class hero, Tuesday’s painted him as the feminist’s secret pal. Whether these outreach strategies will work at all is anybody’s guess; right now, the best thing Trump has going for him is Joe Biden’s enfeeblement. But whether the outreach works or not, the party is totally his to do with as he will—a condition seldom seen in political parties in modern democracies.
