The Republican National Convention was more than a coronation. After the failed attempt on his life at a rally in Pennsylvania, just days before the convention began, Donald Trump was canonized in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the RNC stage. The whole convention revolved around the shooting and Trump’s miraculous survival—evidence, many said, that God had chosen him to save America.
Besides divine intervention, the other major theme of the convention was retribution on behalf of wounded, white masculinity. Part religious revival, part NASCAR rally, the entire show was impervious to rational analysis. Reporters scrambling to fact-check the fire hose of false claims from the stage found themselves drowning in a sea of lies.
Facts were not the point. The point was emotional catharsis and a big dominance display. It was Hulk Hogan waving a giant American flag and ripping off his shirt. It was Kid Rock swinging his hips, pumping his fist, and belting out “Fight! Fight! Trump! Trump!”
It didn’t matter that the Trump years were not, as a parade of convention speakers claimed, a golden time of record economic growth, job creation, peace, security, and patriotic unity. Conveniently forgetting the death toll from COVID-19, pandemic shutdowns, civil unrest, falling financial markets, and a massive increase in the national debt, delegates happily basked in the idea of a happier bygone era when Trump was President.
Above all, the first Trump Administration—a mere four years ago—was a time when “the forgotten men and women of America” were remembered and valued, Trump’s newly selected running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, told the delegates in a speech aimed at white working-class voters in swing states.
Vance cleverly claimed a direct family connection to all of the closely divided Midwestern states along the Rust Belt, where voters will decide the outcome of the presidential election this year. He described how his relatives migrated “from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”
The author of Hillbilly Elegy talked about being raised in poverty, his mother’s struggle with opioid addiction, his grandmother’s arsenal of guns. He made a populist appeal to voters who have endured the flight of manufacturing, economic precarity in the global economy, and the feeling that they are looked down on by urban sophisticates. His speech was a hit.
As Wisconsin delegate Cory Tomczyk, a Republican state senator from Mosinee, explained, Vance burnishes Trump’s populist credentials. “I think that Donald Trump is a man of the people,” Tomczyk said, as he watched Vance’s speech from the floor. “Even though he’s a rich man, he can relate to the common man. I think J.D. Vance came from the common man and is doing great things. So I think he rounds out the ticket very well.”
There is real substance to Midwestern working-class voters’ sense of alienation. I’ve interviewed rural Wisconsinites who said they voted for Trump in 2016 because he spoke out against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other global trade deals supported by Democrats and Republicans alike that accelerated the “get big or get out” trend in agriculture and contributed to the flight of manufacturing jobs to other countries.
Vance spoke directly to those voters when he said in his speech at the RNC, “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.” But while Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), contained some protections for Wisconsin dairy farmers, progressives viewed it as only a “marginal improvement.”
Mostly, what Trump pushed through in the way of economic policy was a massive tax cut for the rich. If Trump’s signature tax cut becomes permanent, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the top 0.1 percent of earners will get $278,000 in tax cuts, while the lowest tier of taxpayers will get an average of $130.
The current Republican platform doesn’t offer much to workers, either. During the convention, U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, co-chair of the platform committee, declared, “We produced a different kind of platform—one dedicated to the forgotten men and women of America.” In the name of those struggling Americans, Blackburn said, the GOP has dedicated itself to cutting taxes and regulations—in other words, the same old Republican program.
The populism of the Trump campaign is not economic populism; it’s about restoring white, male social status.
There was an awful lot of talk at the convention about trans girls in sports, “woke” public school teachers, the dangers posed by the “radical left,” as Wisconsin U.S. Senator Ron Johnson put it, and, of course, the “invasion” of the southern border. Delegates waved placards that said “Mass Deportation Now!” and chanted, “Send them back!”
Never mind the economic impact mass deportation would have on, say, Wisconsin’s dairy industry, where 70 percent of the labor is performed by undocumented immigrants.
When it comes to tangible benefits, President Joe Biden’s administration has been a far more effective champion for working class people than Trump ever was or will be. The White House felt betrayed when Teamsters President Sean O’Brien gave a prime-time speech at the RNC calling Trump “one tough SOB,” since, as The Washington Post reported, the Biden Administration has bailed out the pensions of 350,000 Teamsters, appointed staunchly pro-labor members to the National Labor Relations Board, and instituted union labor requirements in federal contracts.
In Wisconsin, Democrats are running a door-to-door campaign to explain the concrete benefits the Biden Administration is offering working families through the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Carrying calculators, volunteers are contacting individual families to tell them about tax rebates worth a couple of thousand dollars on new windows and appliances and apprenticeship programs for their kids in high-tech, clean economy jobs. This is so that, as Democratic strategist Melissa Baldauff put it, “they’re all of a sudden, without having to get a four-year degree and take on any debt, starting to make really good money.”
The populism of the Trump campaign is not economic populism; it’s about restoring white, male social status.
The 2024 election pits these wonky policy advances against the promise to put women back in their place and enforce the idea that America is a white, Christian nation.
Trump’s foreign policy promises are, likewise, pure fantasy. Just by the sheer force of his tough-guy image, Trump will stop other nations from going to war, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump Jr. explained at the convention, since Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have dared to invade Ukraine and Hamas would never have attacked Israel under Trump. “Fight! Fight! Trump! Trump!”
When Biden dropped out of the race the weekend after the RNC, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, the backlash intensified. A woman of color atop the ticket represents exactly what the Trump cult is rallying to prevent. Things are sure to get even uglier.
Harris is a powerful advocate for women’s rights to control their own bodies, a symbol of nonwhite, nonmale leadership and the modern age that the Trumpists are fighting so hard to beat back.
As U.S. Representative Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin, put it recently in a speech on the floor of the House, the “angry feminist movement” is emasculating men and the United States will “work our way back” to the 1960s if Trump wins in November.
Of course, most U.S. voters are not eager to be dragged backward to an imagined golden past. Democrats might as well take it to the hoop. Time and demographics are on their side.
And there are more grounds for feeling encouraged. After all the buildup at the convention, Trump’s speech, meant to be the climax of that event, was a big letdown—rambling, incoherent, belligerent, and boring.
Despite all the hype, the cult following, and the canonization, Trump is still a badly compromised candidate. He lacked the discipline to follow his campaign’s advice for even a single night and act like a statesman after he survived an assassination attempt. He couldn’t stick to the script that was visible on his teleprompter, about unity and bringing America together. Instead, he departed into his familiar rants about “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and the Democrats who “cheated” and stole the election from him in 2020. Delegates started streaming out of the hall as Trump rambled for a record-breaking ninety-plus minutes, petering out sometime after midnight on the East Coast.
It’s a mistake to buy into Trumpworld’s storyline about how powerful and irresistible he is. He’s beatable. And given Biden’s increasingly, painfully obvious weakness, it’s a good thing he stepped down. Now we will see what Democrats have to offer—not just a better program for working people, but a better salesperson. What Trump is selling is a cult of personality.
The Democrats are not a cult. The messy public fight over Biden’s candidacy is over. Biden did something Trump would never, ever do, by voluntarily giving up power. He took the high road. There’s hope the rest of the country will follow.