The Trump National Convention. The Atlantic - Politics by Elaine Godfrey

The Trump National Convention. The Atlantic - Politics by Elaine Godfrey 

Jul 12, 2024 

You may not have thought it possible for the GOP to swaddle itself tighter in the trappings of Donald Trump—for Republicans to more completely absorb the former president’s essence. But next week, they will.

The Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Milwaukee, will showcase a new iteration of the GOP. This year, the proposed Republican Party platform is a Trump campaign document. The GOP’s chief organizing and fundraising apparatus, the Republican National Committee (RNC), has gone full MAGA; now led by Trump’s daughter-in-law, it looks more like a subsidiary of Trump Inc. than a traditional party organ. And instead of a celebration of big-tent unity, the convention will be a four-day fealty fest.

Eight years after Trump’s first nominating convention, the old party grandees have been pushed aside. The GOP platform has been stuffed with his rally applause lines and shorn of policies that might cost him votes. In short, Trump has asserted a level of control that’s unprecedented in recent memory.

“It’s not business as usual,” Marc Racicot, the former Montana governor who chaired the RNC from 2002 to 2003, told me. “The only commodity that holds them all together is an abject commitment to subscribe, to endorse, and to approve of the grand candidate.”

First, the news that ruffled the feathers of GOP institutionalists: Members of the RNC’s platform committee meeting early in Milwaukee were reportedly shocked to find that, instead of dividing into subcommittees for in-depth discussion of the platform and its planks, party leaders had shown up with a policy document already prepared. Instead of past years’ binders full of detailed plans and proposals for governing, the RNC came with a 16-page stump statement featuring a 20-point, all-caps list of Trumpian priorities: “STOP THE MIGRANT CRIME EPIDEMIC,” “KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS,” “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD.”

[Adam Serwer: Stop soft-pedaling the GOP’s extreme positions]

The proposed platform contains just one mention of abortion, reflecting Trump’s effort to distance himself from an issue that he blamed for the GOP’s lackluster performance in the 2022 midterms. Instead of language urging a federal ban on abortion, as many among the party’s socially conservative and evangelical base favor, the RNC document promises only to oppose so-called late-term abortion.

Normally, nominating conventions provide a chance to celebrate consensus-building and big tent–making. “There’s often a sense that you want to sort of give different parts of the party space,” Boris Heersink, a Fordham University political scientist, told me. And drafting a party platform is usually a balancing act between party leaders and principal candidates. “It’s a marketplace of ideas, both moderate and conservative,” Racicot told me. In the past, getting to a policy consensus and agreeing on language involved days of research, argument, and amendments. This time, the platform was presented, discussed, and approved by the committee in a matter of hours. “They rolled us,” Gayle Ruzicka, an RNC platform committee member from Utah, told a reporter this week after a meeting. “I’ve never seen this happen before,” she said. “And I’m extremely disappointed that we don’t have any pro-life language.”

But other Republicans did not share Ruzicka’s dismay. For them, the leader gets what the leader wants. “For the first time, the nominee decided to rewrite the platform in his image,” James Bopp Jr., a longtime Republican convention delegate and anti-abortion lawyer, told me. But Bopp is not upset by this. “Obviously people thought it was important to do something different this time,” he said. Tom Schreibel, the Wisconsin Republican Party national committeeman and a platform subcommittee chair in 2016, agreed. “That’s what the White House gets you,” he told me. “That’s what being the nominee gets you.”

For national committees to undergo a rebrand when a new president is elected is typical. But this situation is not. That’s partly because Trump is not yet the elected president; he lost his bid in 2020, even if he doesn’t acknowledge it. Theoretically, he isn’t the only power center in the party; the Republicans control the House. “Doubling down on the Trump of it all would make way more sense if Trump was winning big victories and Republicans were struggling at the congressional level,” Heersink, the author of National Party Organizations and Party Brands in American Politics, told me. “In this case, it’s sort of the opposite.”

It’s true that Trump is historically unpopular by conventional polling measures. Yet, in this race, the polling also shows that he has gained a definite edge against an incumbent president whose own approval ratings are dismal—and whose inability to speak extemporaneously has sparked an intra-party panic.

[Mark Leibovich: C’mon, man]

The latest remodel of the GOP began in February. For months, Trump and his allies had been critical of the former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel for sluggish fundraising and her wavering support of Trump’s stolen-election claims. So Trump endorsed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump; the former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley; and the senior Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita to lead the RNC. Trump will have no trouble persuading that team to fight for his priorities: Whatley, a prominent “Stop the Steal” advocate, was on the call in 2020 when Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him some more votes; Lara told a crowd last month in Texas that “Donald Trump won in 2020; we all know that.”

Installing a family member at the top of the party’s political apparatus is not without precedent in the GOP, and it was only a matter of time before Trump’s insistence on loyalty made such clannishness a requirement. The old guard does not approve. Lara Trump “doesn’t know jack shit about running a party,” Michael Steele, who chaired the RNC from 2009 to 2011, told me this week. She’s there to direct money “the way Trump wants it directed.”

And that’s more or less true. Since March, the RNC leaders have driven the party’s train full steam toward Trump. First, they cleaned house, firing more than 60 RNC staffers across the country. (Personnel changes are typical when new management comes in, Steele said, but mass dismissals shouldn’t happen “six months out from a national election.”) Vowing to spend “every penny” getting Trump reelected, Whatley and Lara Trump have set up a new joint fundraising agreement with Trump: Donations will go to the political-action committee that pays the former president’s legal expenses before the remainder filters down to the RNC.

This institutional takeover has quashed whatever Trump criticism or anti-MAGA sentiment might have remained in the party’s organizational and administrative echelons. “That’s always been the end game,” Steele told me. “It’s just like any virus. It may start in one particular organ, but the goal is to spread throughout the body.”

Superficially, next week’s convention, which runs Monday through Thursday, will look similar to previous versions—with all the usual welcome parties and delegation breakfasts, panel discussions and documentary screenings. It will be shiny and loud and, of course, full of reporters. But, like the new platform, the event will have a single focus.

Virtually zero anti-Trump elements of the GOP have survived the great MAGA smoke-out. Trump’s top primary opponent, former Ambassador Nikki Haley, who courted moderate voters, was not invited to attend the convention. Instead, Amber Rose, a model and rapper, has confirmed that she’ll give a speech in support of Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the Senate candidate Kari Lake of Arizona, and primary rival-turned-surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy are reportedly slated to praise Trump onstage throughout the week. So is the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White.

Each day of the convention is assigned a theme relating to Trump’s campaign slogan. Monday’s for example, will mark Trump’s promise to “Make America Wealthy Once Again,” and Tuesday’s will observe his pledge to “Make America Safe Once Again.” On the convention’s third day, Trump will have a chance to parade around his vice-presidential choice, who is set to deliver a speech, perhaps in accordance with that day’s Trumpian mantra: “Make America Strong Once Again.” In yet another sign of the GOP becoming a Trump family affair, Donald Trump Jr. is expected to introduce the VP pick.

[Tim Alberta: Trump is planning for a landslide win]

The convention will reach its climax on Thursday night, when Trump takes the stage to accept the Republican nomination—probably, as he so often does, to Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA.” In his speech, the former president may outline a plan to “usher in a new golden age for America,” as an RNC press release suggests. Maybe he’ll rant about Biden’s age or shark attacks or solar-powered airplanes.

In truth, what Trump says won’t matter much. His nomination, his appearance, is the outcome that all of this hard work was for—the platform-slashing and power-consolidating. Trump is dominant, and everybody knows it.