Editorial: On the RNC floor in Milwaukee, Donald Trump is the protector and Appalachia is in ascendancy

Our predecessors on the Tribune Editorial Board would not recognize the Republican Party we found Thursday as we took to the floor of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

There were a few cursory nods to the old party of Ronald Reagan in the form of grainy video. But bankers and besuited businesspeople, the old-school Republicans whose values this newspaper long reflected, were as hard to find as a speaker extolling the values of the free market, the perils of protectionism or even the importance of free speech. What mattered most to those with whom we spoke Thursday night was to ensure that Donald Trump was keeping guard on behalf of America — even, we were told over and over, at the “gates of hell.”

The Republicans have pivoted hard to being a blue-collar protectorate.

Much effort was made to expand the tent to unionized workers, Latino entrepreneurs, tip-earning waitresses from Nevada and Black pastors. But the dominant speakers on the convention’s final day all were macho figures who are routinely mocked by the Democratic-leaning elite such as Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock. Capping off the testosterone-fueled final night was Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who spoke just before Trump. Could there have been anyone more apt to introduce the Republican nominee for president of the United States in this day and age?

Embarrassing, said educated Democrats, heading to bed after huffing and puffing at home. But on the convention floor, Republicans roared, along with an ascendant Appalachia, which vice presidential nominee JD Vance claims as his heritage.

Events have conspired to bolster this narrative. Stunningly so. President Joe Biden has become a mortally wounded political figure, sick with COVID, struggling with memory, mental acuity and the stairs to Air Force One. On July 13, in utter contrast, Trump survived an assassin’s bullet whizzing past his head and grazing his ear.

The convention fell quiet as Trump described Saturday’s events in hushed tones. He did wallow in what must have been a traumatic experience. His story was his immediate clenched fist, his bloodied “fight, fight, fight,” and the determination of his “beautiful” crowd in Pennsylvania not to run when bullets flew.

This election is the last stand of a bulging demographic that has fought off aging and refused to leave the political stage, and it’s striking that many of the extollers of Trump’s virtues, such as Hulk Hogan and Lee Greenwood, are not young men. But the point in that convention hall was that they are winners when it comes to cheating their own mortality, with the famed wrestler ripping off a shirt to show his still-muscular torso, just as Trump shifted his own body to avoid a potentially deadly bullet. Trump’s head turn was not mere chance, the convention was told again and again, but some sort of combination of godly intervention and the target’s innate instincts.

Thus Trump still is “with us” by the grace of God, and that has given him a week-old gravitas that flailing Democrats have yet to fully understand, even as it comes to steal their voters.

Trump, a man whose biography actually reflects philandering and conniving and expedient self-interest, now has an unimpeachable way to connect to the faith of many Americans. The never-Trumpers who’ve repeatedly cited his hypocrisy as he’s appealed to the party’s evangelical base now have to contend with the narrative of God intervening to save Trump’s life. Democrats are failing to appreciate the power of this redemption story.

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Little of the Milwaukee mythologizing has a relationship with the facts, of course, especially Trump as a combination of Atlas and a biblical David. Indeed, Trump’s ultimate, rambling speech, an epic 92 minutes, sucked the pep out of this rally, revealing among its feast of protectionist, nativist, untrue and unworkable-in-practice ideas the tragic flaw of its deliverer. That would be a baked-in improvisational narcissism that always pulls Trump off script and off mission and, in our minds, represents not protection but unacceptable risk, should this man be elected to the highest office in the land.

Trump fell into digressions so boring Thursday that instead of ending on an triumphant note, the denouement reminded us that Americans are (so far) being offered two astonishingly weak candidates for president, however admirably courageous one of them proved himself to be as a bullet was sent his way.

But if you ever wanted to see writ large the problem Democrats have with a broad swath of blue-collar America, here was the evidence. As we write, Joe Biden appears to be on the brink of exiting the race as the money dries up and calls for him to step down reach cacophonous levels. It’s no longer courageous to make a statement along those lines; it’s politically judicious. And Biden must go, of course, if Democrats hope to win.

But the deeper problem Democrats face is that too many people feel definitionally devalued when the party is seen as the province of educated elites. Heck, few elites even own up to that membership in that club; most craft personal stories that insist otherwise.

Far more people watch the Ultimate Fighting Championship than Stephen Colbert, and elections are a numbers game. And even as many Democrats make enough money not to worry about the checkout prices at their supermarket, the Republicans have been targeting the broad swath of America socked in the teeth by inflation. Trump is being sold as their savior, and there are millions of buyers.

The Democrats must, of course, find a replacement inspiring to the party faithful; if that’s to be Kamala Harris, she had better burnish up her storytelling capabilities and find a speechwriter who can help her reach for more fortitudinous narratives before the Chicago convention. Democrats have to wake up to the folly of their erroneous notion that many Americans vote not for individuals but for baskets of policies with which they agree.

Wrong. They vote for people who they believe represent their interests and values.

The actual details of what Trump was saying Thursday mattered little to the Republicans in Milwaukee; by the second hour, we noticed that few even were listening. They were already happy in his hands.

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