I expected more, I must admit
The best dispatch from the GOP convention so far comes from Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. It has seemed to me that the convention is a bit boring and listless all things considered. You’d think with their main man wandering around with a bandage on his head after an assassination attempt, the energy would be off the charts. And I would have assumed that the Really Big Showman would have orchestrated a much more exciting program even aside from that. But it doesn’t seem to be. There’s a good reason the man himself is falling asleep every night in front of everyone. It’s boring.
You have to read O’Hehir’s vivid (and hilarious) prose to get the real flavor of what’s going on there but I think this observation is important to understand what’s really going on:
The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it.
If Trump wins this election, he’ll be a lame-duck president in his 80s. More specifically, he’ll be the beloved but decrepit figurehead of the semi-normal popular front of a fascist movement whose darkest and most compelling energies lie elsewhere. That’s what the official, above-ground Republican Party is now. Their convention is a deliberately boring dumb show, listless late-Soviet political theater meant to lull you and me — and most of its actual participants, for that matter — into believing that Trump 2.0 is nothing more than what it says on the box.
Yup. As weird as it seem to say it considering all the drama on both sides, I’ll just say again that the election isn’t really about either of the old guys at the top of the ticket. This is about the battle of two coalitions. And their coalition is fascist.