Aw, gee. The Trumpist Republicans have broken their promise. Who could have ever seen that coming?
They vowed to stage an upbeat, optimistic convention – to offer, in the words of chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, “an aspirational vision toward the next four years.” But what we got instead on Day One – and I know this will shock you – was the apocalyptic message that Donald Trump in His wisdom is all that protects us from the radical left anarchist rioting Godless commie socialists who aim to torch the decadent cities and lay waste to the Caucasian McMansions of suburbia. And just in case we didn’t get the message, SOMETIMES IT WAS CARVED INTO OUR EARS AT DECIBEL LEVELS LIKE THIS, LEVELS MOST OFTEN HEARD IN OLD NEWSREELS OF NUREMBERG RALLIES.
The speakers sounded like Trump, to the point of parody.
If nothing else, this crew knows how to stay on message no matter what. Day One opened with their post office lackey being grilled by a House committee; with the news that their top evangelical fanboy (Jerry Falwell Jr.) watched his wife (a Women for Trump board member) have sex with the pool boy; with the news that Trump’s own sister was recorded saying he has “no principles”; with the news that Kellyanne Conway was quitting to save a family torn apart by her fealty to Trump; with the news that the New York attorney general has launched a new probe of Trump; with the news that 27 ex-Republican lawmakers and 73 ex-Republican national security officials have endorsed Joe Biden…but the Trumpists are shameless. Nothing knocks them off message.
It was downright Orwellian to hear them hail Trump as the sworn enemy of communists, given the fact that Trump has spent his tenure licking the shoes of a former KGB agent and writing love letters to the commie of North Korea. It was similarly weird to hear them hail Trump as the peerless savior who rescued us from the virus (I kid you not), given his track record of quackery and denial, and an ever-escalating death toll that has torn apart families and humiliated us worldwide.
But that’s what happens when a party stands for nothing except a cult of pathological personality.
The GOP, which once stood for small government and limited executive power, is now nothing more than a malleable instrument of der leader’s whim. Its apparatchiks decided – for the first time since the party’s founding in 1856 – not to draft a platform of party principles. You read that right, there is no platform. There is, instead, a three-part resolution:
RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;
RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration…
In other words, “I’m with stupid.”
Even the conservative National Review is appalled: “The Republican Party should stand for something. How can the party ask voters to give it the power to act on its principles and policies if it can’t be bothered to say what they are?…the platform is Trump himself. With Trump’s approval ratings still lagging, that is a dubious political choice; Republicans would be better served to focus voters’ attention on the real differences between the two parties, especially for the benefit of down-ticket candidates in jurisdictions Trump is unlikely to carry.”
Policywise, we did get a few Trumpist bullet points, but they read like they were scrawled on a napkin in a Vegas bar at 3 in the morning. Such as: “protect our veterans,” “return to normal in 2021,” “provide school choice,” “teach American exceptionalism,” and my personal favorite, “cover all preexisting conditions.” That one is odd, given the fact that Trump is currently in the courts trying to kill off Obamacare, which protects people’s preexisting conditions. And remember, a month ago, when he promised to unveil a health reform bill within two weeks? There’s nothing about that on the Vegas bar napkin.
This is not a party anymore. It is a cult hooked on power, determined to scare the bejesus out of people for the sole purpose of sustaining power. As veteran congressional Republican aide Brendan Buck tells journalist Tim Alberta, the Trump party’s ethos can be summed up thusly: “Owning the libs and pissing off the media. There’s really not much more to it.”
Alberta, who has covered the GOP in depth, concludes: “It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator…If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.”
The big question is whether the cult’s paranoid doomsday message, amplified hourly by right-wing “media,” will resonate with enough voters to renew the freak show for another interminable season. As Trump is fond of saying, “We’ll see what happens.”