Masha Gessen at The New Yorker:
On Thursday night, Donald Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House and spoke for more than an hour. Nominally, this was the final speech of the Republican National Convention, during which Trump accepted the Party’s nomination for a second term as President. (He mangled this procedural line, saying that he accepted the nomination “profoundly,” rather than “proudly,” as his script indicated.) But Trump looked less like a candidate than like a king standing in front of his castle, flanked by members of his dynasty, warning of an insurgency at the gate. The entire four-day spectacle of the Convention seemed designed to assert the existence not of a government, which begins and ends with elections, but of a Trump regime, born of a revolution and challenged by what Trump called “anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners.”
Trump’s use of the White House, where he appeared every day of the Convention; the Washington Monument, illuminated by fireworks at the Convention’s finale; Fort McHenry, where Vice-President Mike Pence delivered his speech on Wednesday; and the U.S. government-owned Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where most of the Convention speeches were delivered, is, on the face of it, a violation of the Hatch Act, which bans the use of federal property for campaign purposes. It is also an assertion of impunity: violations of the Hatch Act are punishable by removal from office, but Trump shows that he can get away with this just as he gets away with using the Presidency for personal profit and rejecting congressional authority during impeachment proceedings. It is also a territorial claim. Toward the end of his speech, Trump went on an apparently unscripted riff about the White House: “The fact is, I’m here. What’s the name of that building? But I’ll say it differently, the fact is, we’re here, and they’re not. To me, one of the most beautiful buildings anywhere in the world, and it’s not a building, it’s a home, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not even a house, it is a home.” It is his home, he seemed to say, and the “socialists,” as Democrats were repeatedly—and inaccurately—branded throughout the Convention, are trying to divest him of his property.
The Trump regime represents a break with the past. Unlike at the Democratic National Convention, no past Presidents spoke at the Republicans’ gathering; every night was anchored by Trump’s family members. The Republican Party dispensed with a platform this year, and its entire agenda could be summed up on a single sheet of paper: the Party supports Trump. Most speakers at the Convention talked of Trump as having wrought revolutionary change, ushering in a new political era—indicating, again, that Trumpism is not merely the governing philosophy of another Republican Administration. It is a new system entirely.
Trump’s regime broadcast an image of itself as solid, established. Speakers appeared framed by the imperial architecture of Washington, D.C. The Democratic National Convention, pulled together from dozens of prerecorded clips and live streams, had an out-of-space, out-of-time quality to it. Like many of us these days, D.N.C. speakers seemed to inhabit spaces that are nowhere and everywhere at the same time, rooms that consist only of what is in front of a laptop camera. One got the sense that the Democrats’ cameras were angled so no one could see the bed (or the child or the mess) behind the speaker. The Republicans’ camera, on the other hand, showed the pillars and grand vault of the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, where speakers made grand stage entrances even though, apparently, they addressed an empty room; most of them were in one place: Washington, D.C. On the last night, at the White House, the cameras showed a bank of American flags and, during the finale, lingered on the raised platforms, a red-carpeted arrangement that Trump apparently favors for the grandest of his grand appearances. (After he spoke from a similar structure during the militarized festivities on July 4, 2019, he incessantly tweeted aerial shots of it.)
To call things what they are, the Republicans adopted a fascist aesthetic for this year’s Convention. It was in the pillars and the flags; the military-style outfit that Melania Trump wore to deliver her speech, on the second night; the screaming fervor with which many of the speeches were delivered; the repeated references to “law and order”; and phrases like “weakness is provocative,” which the Republican senator Tom Cotton offered on the final evening. The aesthetic—and the rhetoric—held out the carrot of greatness, of what Hannah Arendt, explaining the appeal of totalitarian movements, called “victory and success as such,” the prize of being on the winning side, whatever that side is.
Gessen sees the two conventions as “Greatness vs Goodness” and wonders whether or not people will choose greatness” in a time of anxiety, which she seems to think is a natural reaction.
I’m not so sure. Americans have a great reserve of self-regard in the “greatness” category. It’s”goodness” that’s in question and having Trump as president makes it impossible to achieve. He is, obviously, a very bad person. Maybe the “greatness” people like that but I remain hopeful that a healthy majority of Americans don’t. We have a very checkered history, some of which is coming to a head as we speak. But I think that most Americans still want America to be a good country. Trump is promising something very different.