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By Jess Bidgood |
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It was all going so well.
The delegates in front of former President Trump were euphoric. The fake White House gleamed behind him. Everyone there, from the show runners to Hulk Hogan to Melania Trump, had nailed their role in a glitzy production aimed at returning Trump to the real Oval Office.
Well, almost everyone.
“I’d better finish strong,” Trump said, nearly 45 minutes into his acceptance speech. “Otherwise, we’ll blow it, and we can’t let that happen.”
More than forty-six minutes later, when he finally finished a winding speech that grew heavy with grievance, it was clear that the person most likely to stop him from becoming the 47th president, the person most likely to blow it, was Trump himself. He couldn’t help it.
Until then, the four-day spectacle that unfolded in Milwaukee had been a smooth celebration of the rise and astonishingly good luck of a former president who has consolidated the support of his party. But now, with the balloons popped and the T-R-U-M-P lights turned off, Trump has shown Republicans that he might be unable to seize fully the opportunity that has been laid out in front of him.
An earthly celebration
As Trump took the stage in Milwaukee, Democrats were having a full-on meltdown over President Biden and were trading polling showing that he could not win. They will spend much of the weekend with their eyes trained on Rehoboth Beach, Del., looking for white smoke as a president isolated by Covid-19 and the screaming doubts of his party drags out a Shakespearean drama over the future of his ambition.
In Milwaukee, by contrast, it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. The week was an ode to a former president that a bullet had missed, and a sacrament for a man who many at the convention believed was protected by God. Earthly factors were working in his favor, too: Television screens had showed battleground polls leaning Trump’s way. And the convention itself was going off without a hitch.
“Look at all of those big networks. Look at them. They’re all here,” Trump said from the stage last night, before describing the news media’s view of the convention with only a light wash of exaggeration.
“Every one of them has said this could be the most organized, best-run and most enthusiastic convention of either party that they’ve ever seen. Every single one,” he said.
Yet what had been billed as a unity address, one elevated by the former president’s shocking and life-changing brush with death, soon veered back to the same old Trump, replete with the resentment and enmity that some of his allies preferred for him to avoid.
He called Representative Nancy Pelosi “crazy,” seemed to compare migrants to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter and told the crowd that Franklin Graham had asked him to please not use foul language.
“I’m trying. I’m just working so hard to adhere to his note to me,” Trump said during one of the off-script meanderings that left his teleprompter frozen, with the words he was supposed to say waiting hopefully for him to get back on track.
Disorder and discipline
Trump, who during his first two campaigns and presidency seemed to revel in the chaos of a staff that teemed with rivalry, has swapped disorder for discipline, at least when it comes to the people who work for him.
That has not extended to his own behavior — and maybe it does not have to. He transformed his party and rose to the presidency by smashing norms and shocking the public. He has always been more like the polarizing entertainers who took the stage before him on Thursday than the Republicans who occupied the White House before him — and it is not clear whom a sudden bout of discipline is supposed to convince.
“He is among the best known people in the universe, and most of the people in the universe have pretty firm views about him,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “He knows his audience, and his audience is very much blue-collar voters of different races.”
“It’s pretty clear,” Ayres added. “He’s not reaching out to college-educated suburban women.”
Still, there were moments this week that seemed designed to do just that. His granddaughter Kai described him from the stage as a family man who always asks about her life. At a luncheon hosted by the National Federation of Republican Women, Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin said the former president had called him just after his daughter had died of cancer, leaving behind three children.
“It was a phone call from one grandfather to another grandfather in the worst circumstances you can imagine,” he said. “From a dad to another dad.”
“It was a call,” he added, “that was made out of love.”
Playing the hits
Trump also elided certain aspects of his record in an apparent effort to make himself more palatable. He did not describe the jailed rioters who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as hostages, as he sometimes does. Gone was talk of being a dictator for a day.
But as he stood onstage on Thursday night, gazing at a party that has thoroughly devoted itself to him, he could not resist giving attendees the red meat that had brought them there. He complained about the 2020 election, accusing Democrats of using the coronavirus pandemic to “cheat.” He said he had been persecuted by the justice system . He painted an apocalyptic vision of a country he said was teetering on the edge of World War III.
“Look at these crowds,” he marveled. “Love, it’s about love.”
Republicans do not know for sure whom they will be running against in November. They do not know how far their map of competitive states might expand or whether Trump will indulge himself further if his confidence grows.
They can be certain, though, that the man they have tried to elevate to the presidency three times over, a man who tried to hold onto lost power, who has called for jailing his opponents and who has survived an assassination attempt, is not going to change.
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| Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times |
Abortion, once a G.O.P. priority, all but disappears at the party’s big party
One of the most notable things about the Republican convention this week was what was largely left unsaid: abortion. I asked my colleague Lisa Lerer, who recently co-wrote a book on the fall of Roe v. Wade, to tell us what she had observed.
An issue that has been a staple of Republican Party politics for decades was very clearly pushed to the sidelines. Opposition to abortion was not mentioned from the stage by former President Donald Trump, JD Vance, the vice-presidential nominee, or any of the other high-profile speakers.
And even at the convention’s margins, it was largely left out of the conversation.
At a breakfast hosted by the Faith and Freedom Coalition on Thursday morning, the topic took a back seat to issues like religious liberty and to general praise for Trump.
But anti-abortion talk did not disappear entirely.
“In South Dakota, because we love babies so much and because we love families so much and because we protect life, our Department of Health did not have a single registered abortion in the entire state,” Gov. Kristi Noem said at the breakfast, boasting about her state’s near-total abortion ban.
For decades, Republicans saw abortion as a way to drive their socially conservative base to the polls. But now, after losing a series of elections in the two years since Roe was overturned, many Republican strategists believe abortion has become, in the words of their presidential nominee, a “total loser” for the party.
None of this means Republicans are giving up on ending abortion rights. Across red states, they are pushing forward with efforts to restrict abortion rights and access — but they’d rather those efforts remain tucked away in statehouses, far from the prime-time stage of their national convention.
—Lisa Lerer
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