Trump National Convention 2020 -- Night 1
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying any attention at all for the last five years, but night one of the 2020 Republican National Convention was confirmation of an utterly uncontroversial truth—Donald Trump is the Republican Party, and the Republican Party is Donald Trump. The party is so completely encapsulated in him that the GOP feels no need to publish a new party platform in 2020—something they’ve done every four years since 1856. Instead, the party is simply reaffirming their support for the 2016 platform and offering an unqualified endorsement of Trump.
They don’t need to offer a new vision because the entirety of that vision is contained in one person—a person who, as recently as June of this year, was unable to articulate to the most friendly interviewer imaginable what he would do if re-elected president. This is because he hadn’t for a moment even considered what sort of policy goals he should pretend to have, because he has no interest in anything but his immediate self-interest. Tomorrow barely exists for him, right now. January and beyond? His goals for the nation? Undiscovered country.
The party needs no platform, because everyone already knows the platform, and formalities such as traditional platforms are just more swampy PC nonsense, anyway. The platform is that Donald Trump will continue to piss off and/or astonish and horrify the people that his base wants pissed off, astonished, and horrified, and the administrative apparatus operating behind the tempest will continue to dismantle the “regulatory state” and work to further enrich and entrench the moneyed interests for whom they really toil. The circus is for the sizable minority who actually elect him—the bread, meanwhile, reserved for a far smaller minority more likely to join the “cultural elites” in mocking the deplorables than accompany them to a MAGA rally.
And so we have a convention that seems more designed to reassure the leader of how great he is than it is concerned with convincing anyone not already on board to reconsider. The latter is an impossible ask, given the brand—the former is a necessity in any low-rent cult of personality. Trump is the party. The party is Trump. But a couple of the speeches on Monday night also illustrated precisely how the party will move on without him, when the time comes—they’ll just pretend it never happened. But until then, Trump is everything.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the president’s son’s girlfriend, came out in her Fox News best and gave a six-and-a-half-minute pep talk to the Trump base. She yelled into a giant, empty hall about how re-electing Donald Trump is the only way to save the “soul of America,” and that failing to do so will lead to mass enslavement.
They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.
She screamed and thundered like a deranged cultist, describing her boyfriend’s dad as an emancipator preventing the evil Democrats from being allowed to “destroy your families, your lives, and your future.”
America, it’s all on the line. President Trump believes in you. He emancipates and lifts you up to live your American Dream. You are capable. You are qualified. You are powerful and you have the ability to choose your life and determine your destiny.
You have the power, but not without the benevolent blessing of the great liberator, Donald Trump. This isn’t a hyperbolic misreading of what she said. This is what she was literally yelling.
Donald Trump, Jr.’s speech was of a kind with his girlfriend’s, but tinged with a sort of personal, psychological, and existential sadness that I was not expecting to see on television at the 2020 RNC. Junior painted the Democrats as out to deny you your freedoms, as Guilfoyle did, but his anger and sarcasm couldn’t mask his desperate neediness, either. The main feeling I got watching him speak—aside from wondering about how much caffeine or other uppers might be coursing through his veins—was one of pity. Junior is standing there like someone who has never once been convinced that his father loves him without precondition. He is starving for the affirmation that only his dad can offer, and never has. He’ll have to make do with the reflected adoration he can soak up from his old man’s cheering crowds, with the hollowness of Instagram likes for the memes he steals from cleverer morons. I felt deeply sad for him, which is a neat trick for someone who is so easy to despise.
There has been some talk that Junior represents a potential future of the Republican party, which I think is incredibly generous to his political prospects and also a far bleaker view of our future than I care to entertain. I can only assume, perhaps for the benefit of my own mental well-being, that most other people, including a sizable portion of his ostensible constituency, see him as I see him—a sad, unloved person with no discernible personality or ideas beyond what he thinks will make enough people like him, even as his father is never counted among them. Is that plus his last name enough for a national political career? I don’t know. At least his old man is an authentic narcissist.
South Carolina Senator Tim Scott gave the “best” speech of the night by going in precisely the opposite direction, pretending that nothing at all strange or weird is going on in the GOP, the evidence of the whole night that preceded his speech notwithstanding. He sounded like a normal Republican of a previous era, for the most part. He offered his own compelling biography, complete with inspiring ancestors, youthful obstacles overcome, and a small business background. And the culture war has been so front and center in GOP rhetoric for so long that even odd claims about obviously institutionalist Democrats like Biden and Harris don’t sound crazy, no matter how demonstrably silly they are.
Our side is working on policy -- while Joe Biden's radical Democrats are trying to permanently transform what it means to be an American.
Make no mistake: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want a cultural revolution. A fundamentally different America.
Ah, yes, it’s the staid Republicans, led by policy wonk Donald Trump, who are focused on the ins and outs of legislation. It’s the guy who has been in the Senate or the White House for as long as most of the country has been alive, and his prosecutor/Senator colleague, who are trying to usher in the Marxist revolution. Whatever you say, Tim.
The only thing really weird about the whole speech was the total unwillingness to even raise an eyebrow in the direction of acknowledging that Trump is anything unusual at all. It’s a perfect vision of how the party will try to move on without him, when Trumpism inevitably dies with the man himself. No one else will be able to do Trump the way he himself can do it, so the GOP will pretend it never happened. All that stuff that came after Obama? That was just normal Republican stuff, working to make life easier for small businesses and conscientious Christian people. The rest was just a media-invented hysteria. The GOP will sound like Marco Rubio and Tim Scott again before Trump is cold in the ground.
Nikki Haley’s speech was even more blatant in its insistence that The Trumppening hasn’t actually happened—that the last four years have just been a normal continuation of known GOP priorities on the economy and foreign policy, led by an unapologetic leader in the precise mold of Ronald Reagan. (That she did this shortly after Trump himself explicitly praised the authoritarian leader of a country that had unjustly imprisoned an American who was sitting in the room with Trump because of that imprisonment and subsequent release is both hilarious and almost too on the nose.)
This president has a record of strength and success. The former vice president has a record of weakness and failure. Joe Biden is good for Iran and ISIS, great for Communist China, and he’s a godsend to everyone who wants America to apologize, abstain, and abandon our values.
The real danger is Joe Biden’s inevitable spinelessness, both in the face of our enemies abroad, but more importantly before the radicalized woke Twitterers who will overrun him shortly after he takes office. Trump is actually just standing up for centuries of established American values, all evidence of the last two hours or four years or his entire grifting, fraudulent lifetime notwithstanding. Biden will let the mob tell you that you should be ashamed.
America is not a racist country, she said, before talking about some of the ways she and her family personally experienced the racism of its citizens.
They came to America and settled in a small southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a Black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship, but my parents never gave into grievance and hate. My mom built a successful business. My dad taught 30 years at a historically Black college.
The real racism, Haley said, is letting the racists get you down.
But most astonishing was the way she drove home the most important theme of the convention, of Trump’s entire argument for winning in 2020—that despite Trump having been the president for the last four years, that they have made everything worse, now, and only Donald Trump can pull us back from the brink of civilizational annihilation. They—the media, the Democrats, the elites, the Marxists, whoever—have given Trump no chance to succeed, instead plunging the country into needless, virtue-signalling intractable culture war because of their hatred of our way of life. It’s the Bush Doctrine turned toward the homeland, the GOP having found the enemies abroad wanting.
Haley went so far as to explain that things were actually better five years ago, before Trump became president, after Dylann Roof murdered nine people at a church in her state. (We’ll set aside her using the murder of a bible study group by a race-war-mongering lunatic in order to highlight her leadership skills for when she breaks it out on the 2024 campaign trail.) She stood on the stage at the party convention in a speech meant to endorse the sitting president and said “we” were better off before the incumbent became president.
It doesn’t have to be like this. It wasn’t like this in South Carolina five years ago. Our state came face to face with evil. A white supremacist walked into Mother Emmanuel Church during bible study. Twelve African-Americans pulled up a chair and prayed with him for an hour. Then he began to shoot.
After that horrific tragedy, we didn’t turn against each other. We came together, Black and white, Democrat and Republican. Together we made the hard choices needed to heal, and removed a divisive symbol peacefully and respectfully.
What happened then should give us hope now. America isn’t perfect. But the principles we hold dear are perfect. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America. It’s time to keep that blessing alive for the next generation. This president and this party are committed to that noble task. We seek a nation that rises together, not falls apart in anarchy and anger.
Things were better before! Things are so much worse now! We’re so divided! (…) FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!
Guilfoyle and Junior explicitly displayed the hysteria of what it’s like to be in the thrall of a cult of personality. Scott and Haley followed them, insisting that none of that is weird at all. They couldn’t even furtively glance in the direction of understanding a normal person’s hesitance to embrace Trump and The Trumppening in all of its insanity. If you’re not already in the cult, it was a surreal thing to witness. Trump is the GOP, the GOP is Trump. Any hint of disloyalty or questioning of the “platform”—which is the just the leader, his edicts and whims—will not be brooked by the cultists. And someday, sooner or later, when he’s gone, it’ll be like nothing ever happened at all—nothing out of the ordinary was going on, so why are you freaking out?
