Delegates take selfies on the convention floor during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 15.Julia Nikhinson/The Associated Press
The Republican National Convention is not an event built for doubts or dissent or even slightly complicated feelings or thoughts.
It obliterates such things under a blizzard of rhinestones, earnest rock music and more red, white and blue items of clothing than you ever suspected could exist on this Earth.
If you can imagine a sensory and emotional experience that would somehow combine dropping acid while attending the Fourth of July parade at Disney World with shrinking down to crawl inside a slot machine, that might get you part of the way there. But only partway. It is mesmerizing, totalizing, both monstrous and miraculous.
To step into the Fiserv Forum, the sports arena where the convention is taking place in Milwaukee until Thursday, is to be rocketed down a rabbit hole where the scale of everything seems bent and blown up. The convention floor where the 2,500 delegates sit in neat wedges behind the vertical signs that denote their states seems small and weirdly human in scale. The stage, where Donald Trump is expected to formally accept the party’s presidential nomination Thursday night, is much, much larger than it looks on TV, looming and decorated with haphazardly stacked rectangular blocks covered in digital screens.
They’ve hauled the arena’s electronic scoreboard up to the rafters, where the enormous screens that wrap around it projecting all the action make the Wizard of Oz look like a man who lacked artistic ambition. There are even screens on the scoreboard’s underside, so if you were inclined for any reason to look up to the heavens, the GOP would be there, too.
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The dress code at the RNC is its own special art form. There are what you might think of as the Business Republicans, who wear navy suits if they’re men and shift dresses, kicky and expensive-looking shoes and tasteful scarves – all in some combination of red, white and blue – if they’re women. They are the only people who would remotely look normal outside the convention, and therefore the least interesting people at the convention.
There are so many others who lean in. At one point on Monday, I was leaving a washroom when a woman dressed like an ensemble member in Hamilton – white breeches, tall black boots, tricorne hat, blue tailcoat with gold buttons – walked in, and I barely blinked.
Entire delegations sport matching ensembles: pink satin bomber jackets for the women in the New York crew, red shirts and beige cowboy hats for the Texas flotilla, red vests for Idaho. Tennessee wears orange in honour of its college football team, but otherwise it’s an uninterrupted sea of red, white and blue, from the people to the branding of the Fiserv Forum and everything else inside the most severe security perimeter you’ve ever encountered.
All the reporters are drawn like catnip to the same irresistible novelty acts on the convention floor. The dude with a gold Donald Trump bust the size of a toddler’s fist, hanging around his neck on a chain. The woman wearing a straw boater hat with big donkey ears attached to it and a little donkey figurine on top, with the words “Trump Kicks Ass” scrawled across the front.
“I have mules, I live in east Tennessee,” explained the hat owner, Sharon Anderson. “They’re part donkey, and the donkey is the mascot for the Democratic party, so I decided to say Trump Kicks Ass.”
Then there was the woman in a glittering red-and-white striped jacket emblazoned with the words PROUD AMERICAN across the back, which she’d paired with blue starred leggings, and red and gold high-tops so brightly lit around the soles that she could have been stationed on an airport tarmac.
Among the boring dressers, there were two highly visible men at the convention on Monday who have sparred very publicly with Donald Trump. One was Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has disagreed with Mr. Trump’s claims to presidential immunity and critiqued the former president’s conduct in various other ways.
When Mr. McConnell stepped to the microphone during the roll call to pledge Kentucky’s delegates to Mr. Trump, he was booed so loudly he couldn’t even be heard. Down on the floor directly in front of the stage, Ms. Light-up High Tops suddenly realized who was at the mic and yelled “Oh, boo!” in disgusted surprise, like she’d just discovered something on the sole of her shoe. She had good company in her jeering.
The other convention guest who had Trump clashes in his past résumé was Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, but things went differently for him. Mr. Vance has at various times described Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” “America’s Hitler” and “unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
That was all before Mr. Vance had what news stories have described delicately as an “evolution” or “transformation,” but which is more straightforwardly understood as recognizing the rewards of picking the right ring to kiss. Over the past several years, Mr. Vance passed through some rushed neutral ground on Mr. Trump to emerge as one of his most enthusiastic cultural errand boys.
And for the vision, insight and dedication he had shown, Mr. Vance was welcomed at the RNC on Monday afternoon with the rapturous applause and beatific glow of the freshly elevated, just hours after Mr. Trump announced him as his vice-presidential pick.
Mr. Vance was wearing a dignified navy suit with a pale blue tie, but even without a single piece of stars-and-stripes flair on his person, he fit right in. The Republican National Convention is not a place for doubts or dissent or complicated feelings. Like shame, for instance.