Anti-party in a ghost town: Trump's undead GOP holds an un-convention

MILWAUKEE — I don’t know whether the folks who tried to sell “vegan barbecue” from a booth in the strip of concession tents outside the 2024 Republican National Convention got bad advice or simply took an ill-advised leap of faith. Either way, I’m almost surprised they were allowed to do it. Doesn’t vegan barbecue sound like exactly the sort of Obama-era DEI woke outrage that Donald Trump would like to outlaw or defund, or at least humiliate into nonexistence?

But the cognitive dissonance of this convention goes well beyond that forlorn, misbegotten entrepreneurial venture. (I was relieved to see, at last, a couple of actual customers approach the booth; definitely journalists.) Amid all the obvious headline drama of the 2024 presidential campaign, which has already seen one candidate survive an attempted assassination and the other still struggling to survive an attempted intra-party coup, the RNC has so far been a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event.

Famous last words, I know. Trump’s closing-night speech on Thursday — rumored to be a lengthy stemwinder on a 19th-century scale — will no doubt be intended to rouse and unite the GOP faithful and send them forth to victory over whatever forces they believe are oppressing them. That’s approximately what happened at the 2016 convention in Cleveland, largely a disorganized and dull affair before Trump’s “I alone can fix it” acceptance speech, which was genuinely traumatic to sit through as a supposedly dispassionate observer. (I described it at the time as a 7.8 on the Nuremberg scale.)

But the differences are much bigger than the similarities. Both inside the arena and out on the Cleveland streets, the 2016 convention had the chaotic, unhinged, angry energy of a can of Mountain Dew vigorously shaken by a malicious six-year-old and left out in the sun. There was a distinct sense that worlds were colliding — the world of so-called mainstream politics and the MAGA revolution, the old Republican Party and the new one, in its just-hatched larval form. History was clearly being made; it was marvelous or terrible or both at once, according to your taste.

History is not being made here, so it must be going on someplace else. This convention is underpopulated, overpoliced and entirely devoid of drama. For local businesses, the alleged economic benefits have been disastrous, which could be read as a larger metaphor. Many square blocks of downtown Milwaukee’s normally vibrant riverfront district have become a fenced-off or blockaded exclusion zone, reminiscent of Belfast in the 1980s. It feels like a ghost town, and the ghosts moving through it are the delegates and honored guests and media vultures like me, halfway pretending to take part in a political ritual that lost all possible meaning before most of us were born.

Even the MAGA hats, which in Cleveland sprouted everywhere like an army of joyous little red Pac-Men, ready to munch America into imagined homogeneity, have all but disappeared. Oh, there are the updated green and yellow versions, confusingly marked with “45-47,” but they haven’t really caught on. The originals are rarely seen and faintly embarrassing, like Guess jeans from the ‘90s worn without irony.

It’s difficult to characterize the collective mood of Republicans based on this convention. They seem listless and confused and mildly delusional, like the people at the vegan barbecue booth. But they also believe they are poised to win a national election, and that part seems plausible enough. Perhaps the source of the cognitive dissonance is that the people gathered in Milwaukee represent something, or part of something, but they haven’t figured out what.

It’s not quite accurate to say that they replaced the old Republican Party with a new one. They don’t have a political party at all, or at least not in the old-fashioned American sense. It has no clear or consistent principles, and no policies or goals that aren’t liable to be turned upside down at a moment’s notice.

Within the space of about three minutes on Wednesday night, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s newly-anointed running mate, suggested that the Iraq invasion launched by a Republican administration in 2003 was a huge mistake (true), blamed it on Joe Biden (mostly false, with an asterisk) and then brandished his own patriotic credentials for enlisting in the Marine Corps in — hang on, let’s look it up — 2003 and serving for six months in, um, Iraq.

I was on the floor of the convention at that moment, inches away from Turning Point USA founder and Vance booster Charlie Kirk, and for a few seconds you could feel the bafflement spread through the crowd: So was Senator Hillbilly Elegy a true American hero for risking his life in a stupid war that was started by the Republican president before the one to whom he’s hitched his wagon, or was he, as his boss might put it, a “sucker,” not to mention a shameless hypocrite? How's the vegan barbecue, anyway?

The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it.

If Trump wins this election, he’ll be a lame-duck president in his 80s. More specifically, he’ll be the beloved but decrepit figurehead of the semi-normal popular front of a fascist movement whose darkest and most compelling energies lie elsewhere. Because that’s all the official, above-ground Republican Party is now. Their convention is a deliberately boring dumbshow, listless late-Soviet political theater meant to lull you and me — and most of its actual participants, for that matter — into believing that Trump 2.0 is nothing more than what it says on the box.

One of the mildly endearing things about Republican conventions of the pre-Trump era was the devotion to GOP kitsch. Ladies of uncertain age with hair the color of expensive brass candlesticks, who enjoyed being described as “kooky” in their Missouri or Alaska or Arizona hometowns, would show up in elaborate red-white-and-blue outfits bedecked with an impressive collection of buttons and pennants and bespoke garments from Republican campaigns gone by.

These were largely tributes to the party’s triumphant heroes — Ronald Reagan, first and foremost — but also to its pioneers and martyrs. Purists proudly flaunted 1964 Barry Goldwater gear; Richard Nixon was briefly exiled from the pantheon and then redeemed, in a distant early warning of the grievance politics that led us to Trump. At the legendary Houston “culture war” convention of 1992, the first one I attended as a journalist, I met an elderly delegate whose enormous felt hat sported campaign buttons for Thomas Dewey, Alf Landon and Herbert Hoover.

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None of those guys would have been a viable Republican candidate by that time, let alone now. But even as the Reagan revolution and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove hardened the party’s edges and drove out the last of the old-line ruling-class liberals, that history still mattered to the grassroots Republican activists who ran county committees and came to conventions.

Those small-town postmistresses with their vintage Goldwater buttons have moved on to farther shores, and the GOP history they once cherished hasn’t just been forgotten or neglected in the Trump era, but utterly obliterated. Even Reagan, for good or ill a genuinely transformative Republican president, has been ghosted, and casts no visible shadow on the party of Trump and Vance. As mentioned above, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been erased from institutional memory, which is both understandable and borderline psychotic.

As for the other once-beloved and now-disappeared Republican president of postwar America, Dwight Eisenhower, his erasure makes sense in a different way. Republicans Liked Ike (as most Americans did, to be fair) until they dimly and gradually became aware that his bland, sunny optimism represented the path not taken, the sliding door to an alternate GOP reality now long out of reach. Ike is an unperson for today’s Republicans, un-celebrated at an un-convention by an un-party fueled by unquenchable, unfocused unhappiness. It’s tempting to call that un-American — but we are where we are, folks, eating vegan barbecue with JD Vance in a ghost town.