A bust of presumptive Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump is on display at the Baird Center before the start of the Republican National Convention on July 12, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Scott Olson/Getty Images
While the political world reckons with Saturday’s assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, the Republicans – their unity reinforced by a combination of outrage and concern – begin their national convention Monday in Milwaukee.
For many of the delegates, the shooting at Mr. Trump’s Butler, Pa., rally almost certainly will serve to emphasize the indispensability of Mr. Trump to Republicans’ fortunes, and the centrality of the former president in the newly defined character of the party.
At the same time, the fact that this week’s Republican National Convention is occurring in the largest city in Wisconsin, a state Joe Biden won by just over 20,000 votes four years ago, underlined the brightening prospects the Republicans feel as the Democrats continue to fester in desperate debate over Mr. Biden’s fitness to serve another term.
Recent polling shows swing states, including Wisconsin, increasingly leaning toward Mr. Trump as unresolved questions about Mr. Biden’s age and mental competence continue to ricochet throughout Washington and the media.
This stark contrast between the two major American political parties represents a break with the recent past, when it was the Republicans who were mired in disunity and controversy, perpetually at war among themselves. When the party was about to nominate George H.W. Bush in 1988, this appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal:
“NEW ORLEANS – Just below the tranquil surface of this week’s Republican National Convention brews a holy war … This battle – a class struggle, a power struggle, and a political struggle rolled intro one – will help determine the shape of the GOP.”
Four years later, when Mr. Bush was nominated for a second term, this appeared on the front page of the Journal:
“HOUSTON – The struggle for the future of the Republican Party is exploding in full force here.”
I wrote those two stories. I’m not writing a version of that analysis this time.
In contrast to earlier Republican conventions, the surface of this year’s GOP conclave isn’t tranquil; it’s full of an unusual combination of shock and grave concern, high spirits and high passion, a far cry from the genteel patina on the party that existed in 1988. There also is no battle beneath the surface of the convention. The dissenters and dissidents have been dismissed as RINOs, an acronym for “Republicans in Name Only,” and the party hasn’t invited them. Nor is there a struggle for the future of the party. That has been fully resolved.
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Nonetheless, the Republicans are convening in Milwaukee for four days, the latest such meeting in a nearly two-centuries-old American tradition. At their conventions, each party confers its presidential nomination, pairs its standard-bearer with a running mate, approves a meaningless campaign manifesto called the party platform that it will swiftly forget, and gives the delegates who have been selected over the past several months an excuse to hoot and holler, cheer their favourites, deride their opponents, enjoy the national spotlight and parade around the host city in outlandish, colourful outfits and wear silly hats that would embarrass them, and the country, in any other setting.
In this particular convention, Mr. Trump is the principal star in the party’s firmament. It’s not only that he will be crowned the party’s nominee. It’s also that, in one of the most remarkable makeovers in the country’s history – the only modern precedent may be Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s takeover of the Democratic Party by 1936 – the GOP has been remade in Mr. Trump’s image.
“Trump is totally in control,” said Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “When he first got the nomination back in 2016 there were holdouts at the convention. There were elements in the party who liked to think of themselves as the adults in the room. The party is now 100 per cent his. Its platform is a collection of Trump’s tweets. But the Republicans also have become much like Europe’s right-wing populist parties.”
Mr. Trump and his populist appeals have transformed the nature and composition of the party. Many of the delegates to this week’s convention possess the demographic characteristics of blue-collar Democrats in 1988 and 1992, and they will assemble in Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum in place of the country-club members, small-town bankers and corporate titans of the party’s past.
The farm-state Republicans gathering in the arena that otherwise is the home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks may have surface similarities to their Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska forebears – but the industrial-state delegates who will join them on the convention floor almost certainly have parents or grandparents who voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy. Some of them certainly even voted for Barack Obama.
Mr. Trump also has transformed the issue profile of the Republicans.
“There’s a change in priorities,” said Paul Beck, an Ohio State University professor of political science. “The Republicans no longer are the party of international trade, no longer the party that wants America to be the leader of the democratic world, no longer the pro-choice abortion party they were in the 1960s. It is a party in Donald Trump’s image.”
Mr. Trump, of course, wasn’t always a Republican, and his transformation has both mirrored and intensified the dramatic political realignment that has marked American politics since the late 1960s.
After New York City construction workers mounted a counter-protest to the students demonstrating against the slaying of four young people at Kent State University by members of the National Guard in 1970, Richard Nixon embraced the “hardhats” and welcomed them into his political circle. Ronald Reagan attracted many Democrats to the Republican standard in 1980 and 1984. The conversion of blue-collar voters accelerated under Mr. Trump and was consolidated during the furor over the validity of the 2020 election that brought Joe Biden to power.
Now the Republicans are hoping to present a positive face, strong enough to reassure the Trump base but not so extreme as to repel the few undecided voters who could make a difference, particularly in swing states.
That is why Mr. Trump has veered away from a federal ban on abortion and has advocated leaving the matter to the individual states – a position that has produced one of the very few controversies within the Republican Party in the run-up to the convention. The calculation: By nominating three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade abortion-rights decision, Mr. Trump has done enough to survive the qualms of the more ardent anti-abortion elements of the party. In any case, there is no chance they would vote for the Democrats, no matter whom they nominate.
So a party that has unity on its mind and believes it has victory within its grasp is gathering in a happy mood.
“The Republicans need to put forward a face that doesn’t alienate Democrats who might be inclined to look at Trump, particularly after the disastrous presidential debate,” said Claire Leavitt, a political scientist at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. “They need to do nothing to draw attention to their own candidate’s weaknesses. He has to seem with-it enough to be a plausible president and not lose control.”