The ugliest Republican convention in living memory
On the surface, last week’s Republican convention was much the same as any other, said David Brooks in The New York Times. It had the usual ingredients: “balloon drops, banal but peppy music from the mid-1970s and polite white people not dancing in their seats”. But behind all the hoopla, things were anything but normal. It was, for a start, the “most shambolically mis-run convention in memory”. The order of speakers was nonsensical, there were empty seats in the arena during the high-profile speeches, and there was “zero production creativity”. The unveiling of Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence, was completely botched: stealing Pence’s limelight, Trump made it sound as if he really wasn’t that keen on him. And Trump’s wife, Melania, gave a speech blatantly plagiarised from a 2008 address by Michelle Obama. The whole event was a mess.
And an ugly one, too, said Brian Beutler in the New Republic. Instead of policy discussions, all we got were displays of Trump’s egomania, and attempts to demonise Hillary Clinton. New Jersey governor Chris Christie turned the convention into a “show trial” when he listed her imagined crimes and encouraged the crowd to roar “guilty” after each one. The audience soon erupted into what became the mantra of the convention: “Lock her up!” Another former candidate for the GOP nomination, Ben Carson, implied that Clinton was an agent of Lucifer, while one of Trump’s advisors said she should be shot for treason. To add to the poisonous atmosphere, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times, Ted Cruz gave a speech in which he pointedly declined to endorse the man who beat him to the nomination. He was booed and his wife, Heidi, had to be escorted from the convention floor by security officers. Don’t believe everything the media have spouted about this convention, said Rick Perlstein in the New Republic. It didn’t seem that crazy to me – at least no crazier than these political jamborees generally are. Ill-judged speeches happen at every GOP convention. Think of the one four years ago: every speech seemed to be pitched by, and for, business interests, and Clint Eastwood gave a rambling oration in which he addressed an empty chair.
I’ve attended my fair share of conventions, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, and I can’t recall any quite like this. The vilification of Clinton; the sense of “vigilante rage”; the glorification of Trump and his family, who were filmed “smiling beatifically and waving at the adoring crowds from the royal box” – it felt like a “banana republic”.
Trump is undoubtedly copying the tactics of Latin Americanstyle “strongmen”, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. His convention speech was a shameless “appeal to fear and nationalism”. Its message was that America is going to hell in a handcart and that only he can save it. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he thundered. “Beginning on 20 January 2017, safety will be restored.” You might wonder whether there has ever been “such an alarmist presentation from a nominee at a GOP convention”. Well, “actually, there has”. In 1968, Richard Nixon gave an equally dark speech and Trump is clearly hoping to exploit the same popular anxieties. The odd thing is that crime is far less of a problem in the US today than it was in 1968, said Jeet Heer in the New Republic. Despite a recent small uptick, it’s now near a four-decade low. But Trump clearly reckons it’s still worth his while playing the law and order card, in order to tap into public concerns about immigration and terrorism, and racial resentment. And the scary thing is that he may well be right.