You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. —MATTHEW 12:34-35
I left the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday morning, after its first full day, and took the Badger Bus back to my home in Madison. By then, I had filed two reports for The Progressive, recounting my experiences on Sunday and Monday. I had planned on staying at least through Wednesday, but by the end of day Monday, I knew that I had had enough.
Nothing bad happened to make me want to extricate myself from the convention earlier than planned. Everyone I met there—other reporters, conference attendees, Newt Gingrich—was nice. That’s what made it so hard to take. The Republicans at this convention are overjoyed; they have every right to be.
In the immediate aftermath of the despicable assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, the RNC’s new universal theme became “unity.” This has been achieved, to an astonishing extent. “I’ve never seen the Republican Party so united and so much together and I’ve been coming to national conventions for forty-eight years, this is my twelfth convention,” former Governor Tommy Thompson told the Wisconsin State Journal on Tuesday. “It’s never been like this.”
Watching the convention Tuesday night on C-SPAN, with its continual coverage of what’s happening on the convention floor, I saw Trump’s former foes, including Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and, ta-dah!, Nikki Haley, who was invited to the festivities after Trump was shot on July 13.
“You don’t have to agree with Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him,” Haley told the gathering. “Take it from me. I haven’t always agreed with President Trump. But we agree more often than we disagree.” Earlier this year, Haley said it would be “like suicide for our country” were Trump to again be the Republican presidential nominee. She also called Trump “unhinged,” saying he is “more diminished than he was” and “is now saying things that don’t make sense.”
Cruz began his remarks with a proclamation: “God bless Donald J. Trump.” This is a guy who once stood up, ever so slightly, to Trump, declining to urge others to vote for him in 2016 after Trump had insulted Cruz’s wife and suggested his father helped kill JFK. DeSantis—who during the primary campaign also attested to Trump’s diminished capacity, saying “He’s lost the zip on his fastball”—also fell in line, referring to Trump in near-messianic terms: “Donald Trump has been demonized, he’s been sued, he’s been prosecuted, and he nearly lost his life. We cannot let him down, and we cannot let America down.”
DeSantis devoted the heart of his speech to recounting horrific instances in which “illegal immigrants” have committed heinous crimes, making it sound as though they were both common and deliberate, which they are not. But the Republicans are now all singing from the same hymnal, accusing Democrats of purposely seeking to destroy the country—a ridiculous assertion.
One after the other on Tuesday night, Republicans at the RNC displayed their party unity by agreeing on false claims: That Biden intends to force everyone to buy electric cars; that the nation’s Democrat-led cities are dystopian hellscapes where the streets have become rivers of blood from the crime Democrats are actively encouraging; and that Democrats are deliberately letting hordes of dangerous illegal immigrants pour across open borders so that they can vote for Democrats.
I heard Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana falsely state that “prisons are being emptied” in other countries to increase the flow of illegal immigrants to the United States. He also vowed to “end the Democrats’ assault on American energy once and for all,” another nod to something that isn’t happening. I listened as presidential wannabe Vivek Ramaswamy declared: “We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis right now. Faith, patriotism, hard work, and family have disappeared, only to be replaced by race, gender, sexuality, and climate.” I heard West Virginia Governor Jim Justice issued this weird warning: “We [will] become totally unhinged if Donald Trump is not elected in November.”
Joeff Davis
Donald J. Trump, Jr. speaks at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed: “Republicans are the law-and-order team”—without mentioning such possible exceptions as when Trump instigated a violent assault on the Capitol, broke the law by making hush-money payments to a porn star, defamed a woman he sexually assaulted, and committed multiple other crimes for which he may still be convicted.
Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake lashed out at “the fake news,” pointing to the rows of cameras that were delivering her remarks to a global audience and saying, “Frankly, you guys up there in the fake news have worn out your welcome.” She added: “But the really good news is that every day more and more people are turning off the fake news,” as the audience roared. The RNC is nothing if not a celebration of ignorance.
Oh, and anyone watching heard speaker after speaker purposely mispronounce Kamala Harris’s first name.
All of this meanness and nonsense is uniformly accepted among the Republican Party faithful packed into this convention. And there is no denying that, at least right now, they have the upper hand. Trump’s candidacy is ascendant; Joe Biden’s position at the top of the Democratic Party’s ticket has never seemed more ill-advised.
Wednesday evening brought more of what has come before. More hallucinated claims of American weakness abroad and of rampant violence, chaos, and economic catastrophe at home. More quivering assertions that Democrats are trying to promote crime, rig elections, turn schools into indoctrination camps, persecute Christians, declare war on fossil fuels, outlaw gas-powered cars, open the border to as many murderers and rapists as possible, and take away everyone’s guns. The Republicans have one overriding campaign message: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
One of the speakers, former Trump Advisor Peter Navarro, was released from prison that morning after serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House select subcommittee looking into the events of January 6, 2021. The RNC crowd gave him a thunderous standing ovation. He presented himself as both a victim and a hero, telling the audience, “I went to prison so you won’t have to.” Oh, please.
Several speakers derided Biden’s green energy initiatives, with North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum warning darkly about Americans being left without electricity for their lights and air conditioning. A representative of the petroleum industry prompted chants of “Drill, baby drill.”
No one expressed any concern about a warming planet and changing climate.
A succession of speakers pegged Biden—who a few hours earlier announced that he has contracted COVID-19—as an incompetent commander-in-chief. No one had any problem with Trump’s disparagement of fallen soldiers as “losers” and “suckers,” his suggestion that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff be put to death, his expressed desire to use the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, his shameful appeasement of Vladimir Putin, or his fondness for dictators.
Joeff Davis
The floor during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Donald Trump Jr., a constant presence during the convention, took his turn at the podium. He railed against “pro-crime district attorneys,” media who tell lie after lie, and educators who “teach our children there are fifty-seven genders.” He lauded his father’s courage after being shot, comparing it to that of Teddy Roosevelt, who gave a speech after being shot by a would-be assassin in Milwaukee in 1912.
But the evening’s marquee speaker was Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for Vice President. A Yale Law School graduate who wrote the best-selling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy about his hardscrabble childhood, Vance went from being an avowed never-Trumper to his most groveling sycophant. He has said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence refused to do on January 6—stopping the electoral count and delivering the 2020 election to Trump. He has called for a national ban on abortion. And here’s his take on the current main target of Putin’s military aggression: “I don’t really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other.”
Vance got a hero’s welcome from the RNC faithful, who seemed more determined to chant than listen. His constantly interrupted speech was part personal history and part paean to Trump, who he said had shown he has “the heart of a lion.” He presented himself as someone who understands the challenges of ordinary Americans and pledged to be “a Vice President who never forgets where he came from.”
And, there’s no getting around it: However extreme and his politics may be, and however dangerous it is for the other side of Trump’s ticket to be a yes man, Vance was polished, personable, and impressive. He said all the right things. He even raised the convention’s most pertinent query, in reference to a second Trump term: “Just imagine what he’s going to do when we give him four more years.” Just imagine indeed.
The Republicans at the convention began chanting, “Four more years! Four more years!” They were completely unified.