Providence was the real star of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week. For a party in which the evangelical Christian heart beats strongly, it’s not news that Republicans claim a divine mission in their deliberations. But this year even a sceptic might grudgingly acknowledge that if there is a God, recent events would suggest he has dropped in on America, donned a Maga hat and gone to work on behalf of the Grand Old Party.
For speakers from the podium and delegates on the floor, Donald Trump’s brush with death at the hands of a would-be assassin’s bullet last Saturday was a miracle, no surer sign that the Almighty plans on putting the former president back in the White House. “On Saturday the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back on his feet and roared,” declaimed the senator Tim Scott.
You don’t have to believe in Trump’s unlikely ordination as a leonine agent of God to think that he and his party are destined for glory as the US approaches the last 100 days of the election campaign. In the past month we have witnessed not just the failed assassination attempt, but the accelerating collapse of President Biden’s campaign after his catastrophic debate performance, the melting away of Trump’s legal problems, the rapid unification of the Republican Party under his leadership, and growing evidence of a solid and seemingly irreversible shift in the opinion polls in Trump’s direction.
I have been attending party conventions since 1996 and I can’t recall a more exuberant mood among Republicans than I have seen this week in this post-industrial city on the shores of Lake Michigan - rapturous, you might even call it. Despite three presidential election victories since then, popular electoral success has eluded them. Only once in that time, when George W Bush narrowly beat John Kerry in 2004, has the party won the popular vote over the Democrats. But in 2024 they sense the tide has turned decisively in their favour.
The simple reason is a mood shift in America that seems about to propel not just Trump to the White House but for the first time in a century to give Republicans clear majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Many readers, especially in the UK, find this inexplicable. The spectacle of prominent representatives of the British media wandering around open-mouthed at the sheer awfulness of what they were witnessing in Milwaukee helps to explain why so many in the UK now view the US as on the brink of some kind of fascist takeover, at the hands of what the new foreign secretary called, a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath”. So let me try to explain what is actually happening.
American politics is indeed undergoing radical change in a way that favours, for now, the Republicans. But it is not an embrace of apocalyptic authoritarianism. If Trump were not the party’s nominee, in fact, with all his evident character flaws, I suspect the Republicans would be on the brink of a landslide. It is a mark of the depth of the frustration that even as flawed a candidate as Trump may be about to secure a historic win.
The core change is the deepening of the realignment of American politics and the Republicans’ advantage in adapting to it. This was tellingly underscored by Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his vice-presidential candidate. Vance is far from the Putin-puppet, democracy-overthrowing demon he is routinely portrayed in the press. He is the most articulate and thoughtful exponent of a new national conservatism that has shifted the axes of American political choice. What Trump, in his instinctive way, started, Vance is fleshing out in ideas and policy - the opportunity represented by the fact that millions of working-class voters are turning to the Republicans in revulsion at the elitism of the Democratic Party, and in their alienation from the key institutions of the country that have so palpably failed them in the past two decades.
The list is familiar: a climate of intolerant extremism in American education, the media and culture; the opening of the country’s borders to mass illegal immigration in ways that upend traditional American life, suppress wage growth and increase pressure on services; the imposition of new norms on issues of race, gender and sexuality; the sense, even among Trump-sceptics, that the whole media, government and legal establishment was mobilised against him, first to prevent him becoming president and then to defeat him when he was; environmental policies explicitly aimed at weakening America’s extraordinary advantage in energy production; a strategic posture that sent Americans abroad to die in failed attempts to build foreign nations, even as the nation at home was for many disintegrating in violence, drug use and despair.
It’s worth reflecting on this last point to understand why conservatives such as Vance have opposed US support for Ukraine. Two decades of disastrous national security policies have squandered America’s post-Cold War advantage and dramatically constrained its global capabilities. Vance simply asks why in those circumstances, when it faces a far larger existential threat in the Pacific, America should commit resources to a conflict in Europe - where rich allies have resources between them that dwarf those of the Russian adversary, but still demand Americans contribute more.
It is too soon and the race is still too close, despite the lead Trump has opened up, to declare it over. While Republicans gave thanks to God this week, Democrats were working feverishly to get Biden to stand down, and it seems likely that will happen. Perhaps a fresh Democrat will be able to exploit just enough of the doubts people have about Trump to eke out some kind of win. But after two decades of ignoring the rising frustrations of so many Americans, the ground has shifted beneath them. Even God won’t stop that.
The Times
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