Reaping the whirlwind
Donald Trump is a “bully” and a “coward.” His campaign has been a barrage of “abrasive, Know-Nothing nativist rhetoric.” His remarks about banning Muslims from the United States are “offensive.”
Attacks from Trump’s political opponents in the Democratic Party? Hardly. All this comes from prominent Republicans, as the party met in Cleveland this week to confirm Trump as their nominee for president. Never before has a presidential candidate been so openly at odds with the long-established positions of his party. Never before has so much of a party’s establishment been so appalled by what its nominating process has produced.
Part of this is quite understandable. Trump has repudiated traditional Republican positions on trade and immigration. He has downplayed the kind of social conservatism that has been Republican red meat for decades. And he has tossed aside any pretence of civility or even reasonableness.
On a deeper level, though, Republican grandees should not be surprised at what their party’s grassroots have wrought. For years, many Republicans have demonized their opponents, treated every compromise as treason, and manipulated racial politics to their advantage. What they sowed they now reap in the person of Donald J. Trump.
As a result, Republicans have been largely spectators at their own party in Cleveland’s convention centre, where their candidate was formally named on Thursday evening. Many top party members – including former presidents, former presidential nominees, governors and members of Congress – simply didn’t showing up. Instead, it will was a week devoted to the cult of Trump, with all his adult children taking the stage to “humanize” the candidate.
The political message, though, should come through clearly. In the wake of the shocking police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., and terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe, the emphasis was, not surprisingly, on “law and order.”
That’s the same message that proved so successful for the party’s nominee in another tumultuous, divisive year – 1968. Trump’s campaign manager says he has been particularly impressed with the acceptance speech delivered that year by Richard Nixon, who played on Americans’ fear of chaos and racial unrest. In that speech, Nixon painted a dark picture of his country: “We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night… We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.”
Trump, likewise, trades in overblown, apocalyptic visions of America. “This country is a hellhole, we are going down fast,” he tweeted last fall. And a day after the Baton Rouge shootings he was out again on social media, proclaiming “our country is a divided crime scene and it will only get worse.”
What a contrast with the sunny, upbeat rhetoric of the man modern Republicans revere as a hero, Ronald Reagan. Rather than “Morning in America,” Trump is touting “Darkness at Noon.”
It’s a sad vision, unworthy of a great nation.