As darkness descended over the mass genuflection masquerading as a political convention that concluded in Milwaukee the evening of July 18, it was apparent we were witnessing something new and unsettling in American public life. The MAGA coronation of Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, for all its forced merriment, harked back to some of the ugliest episodes of this country’s past.
Beyond the clever, if tasteless, representation of cultish worship expressed by the faux surgical dressings sported by the Trumpian conventioneers was a clear call to stir politics and religion into an unsavory stew. No doubt pleasing (and confirming) to the Trump evangelical base was the Donald’s claim of an endorsement of his candidacy by the Almighty in the wake of his survival of the Pennsylvania rally shooting.
Although blood was “pouring everywhere” in Trump’s exaggerated recounting of the assassination attempt, he felt safe and serene because God was on his side (this by someone of no known religious convictions or discernible morality). “I was not supposed to be here tonight,” the nominee informed his rapt audience, but God interceded; it was, he said, “a providential moment.”
The crowd, Trump continued, was reluctant to leave the scene out of concern for him; in fact, according to reports, it exited in near record time. However, one spectator did not leave; that was firefighter Corey Comperatore, the sole fatality, a first-time Trump rally attendee there with his family; he died shielding them, a genuine hero.
Sadly, Comperatore, by all accounts a decent, upstanding individual, was immediately appropriated by MAGA convention organizers for political purposes. His fireman’s uniform became a prop for Trump’s acceptance speech, when the nominee melodramatically crossed the stage to kiss the victim’s mounted helmet in a transparent attempt to transfer to himself and his campaign some reflected glory and emotional resonance.
The Trump team evidently views Comperatore, not even a committed MAGA partisan, as a useful sacrificial symbol, a modern-day counterpart to the martyred Hitler supporter Horst Wessel, a prominent leader of the fuhrer’s street-fighting “brown shirts” assassinated in 1930. Aspiring authoritarians need martyrs.
The rally shooter, meanwhile, has been conveniently demonized by Trump as someone “trying to stop our movement,” when he was, in fact, a confused young man of no particular political beliefs. Had Joe Biden crossed his path that day, he would have shot Biden instead. Gun fetishism — his family owned 12 firearms, including the one his father provided him — was a prime motivation, along with obvious mental instability and free-flowing, directionless anger.
But back to Trump’s acceptance speech. It was, first of all, less a speech than a rambling, incoherent, self-indulgent word salad that went on too long (the longest such address by far in political history) and meandered to and from disconnected thoughts and bizarre references, much of it seemingly hatched on the fly. Topics weirdly ranged from Washington crossing the Delaware and men playing women’s sports to Russian submarines off Cuba and Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism!
The candidate called for comity and unity, then viciously attacked his opponents. He talked about love, then suggested mass deportations. He pledged peace and reconciliation, then proposed a Fortress America defense system against a world of enemies. He called for an end to political demonization, then engaged in it.
Some observers, watching this exhausting, undisciplined harangue, said it recalled Fidel Castro holding forth in Havana’s central square for hours at a stretch. In the end, even Donald seemed bored with his own extended “eloquence.” He finished up rather abruptly amidst shouted assurances that “We will WIN, WIN, WIN.”
By comparison to the hodgepodge of strange Trumpisms offered by the man at the top of the ticket, the speech of the GOP’s number two, J.D. Vance, was merely dull, flat or bland (choose your adjective). It was also poorly delivered and forgettable as a piece of oratory. Surprisingly, there was little raw, viscerally enraging rhetoric for the MAGA multitude. Trump himself looked unimpressed with what he’d wrought by his choice of understudy.
Vance tried mightily for a heartland effect, but his Yale Law School training obviously got in the way. A promise to be buried with umpteen prior generations of Vances in the hills of Kentucky was a heavy-handed appeal to presumed Appalachian, red-state values. One wonders what his second-generation Indian wife, also part of the future interment it appears, thought of that.
But the real pièce de résistance the ultimate raw-meat offering, was undoubtedly Vance’s depiction of his substitute parent, a profane, salt-of-the-earth grandmother with 19 guns (locked and loaded, we assume), whose resurrection from the author’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) surely saved and solidified Vance’s reputation among the MAGA faithful and legitimized the Ivy League v.p. nominee in their eyes. (“Grandma,” “Grandma,” the gun-loving crowd chanted.)
These, then, were the televised highlights of the Milwaukee gathering that clutter the memory bank. To make real sense of their meaning, however, it’s necessary to delve into the Republican convention’s prior paper trail. Milwaukee was really the prelim to arranging a sequence of events that, if the MAGAs achieve power, will result in implementing something called Project 2025.
At present, Project 2025 consists of a 920-page, 30-chapter document that details plans for a second Trump presidency. It was published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, the preeminent conservative think tank that in recent years has become a branch of the Republican Party; it covers every conceivable area of government policy, with contributions from Heritage staffers, former Trump officials and cabinet members, and dozens of right-wing activists organized by a Washington network called the Conservative Partnership Institute. Heritage President Kevin Roberts characterizes the Project 2025 proposals as a “second American Revolution.”
Roberts is not exaggerating. The following is a mere sampling of agenda items: (1) banning Medicare drug-price negotiations and cutting funds for Medicaid; (2) criminalizing pornography and aspects of contraception and abortion; (3) reducing corporate and capital-gains taxes; (4) introducing a flat-tax system and a national sales tax; (5) converting federal civil servants into partisan political appointees; (6) terminating the Department of Education; (7) placing independent federal agencies under direct executive control; (8) eliminating environmental and climate-change regulations; (9) using federal troops as a presidential police force to arrest political demonstrators; (10) defunding the PBS and NPR broadcasting networks.
The sideshow in Milwaukee was just a light-hearted preview.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024
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