Any week of a Republican National Convention can be expected to be a week of Republicans comparing the presumptive nominee to the descent of the Messiah. This is not that sort of week, for the nominee in question is Donald Trump, breaker of norms, nationalist shatterer of Conservative ideology Probably no Republican has ever seized the nomination in the teeth of as much Party resistance as has Trump, and the possibility of gunfire without, revolt within, and the wild card unpredictability of the candidate himself promises an entertaining few days.
And this first evening one was not entirely disappointed. The highlights?
First, the sheer pigheadedness of #NeverTrump.
Trump not only has more than enough delegates to win, he’s gotten more votes than any Republican primary candidate in American history. Given that #NeverTrump is not going to wrest the nomination from Trump with those sorts of numbers, you would imagine that they would simply do a George Will, embrace the Dark Side in the wizened form of Hillary, then wait in the wings to take over after a Trump loss and the apocalyptic debacle of Clinton Redux.
Not a bit of it: they got the proceedings started with an expected bang, taking early to the floor, seeking to change the rules and throw open the convention to — well, whoever might emerge. Of course they lost. And howled plaintively as they lost. One should not mourn their passing, however: their futile elitism may do more than any other factor to ensure that future Republican primaries will be models of radical democracy.
Then there was Giuliani. Pretty much written off after crashing and burning in the course of a Presidential run of his own in 2008, Giuliani may well have ensured himself a spot in the coming Trump administration with a short fiery speech that all but brought down the house.
While touching on sorely needed points, such as sincere avowals of a fundamental Trump decency and largeness of heart, mostly Giuliani tore into Hillary Clinton, cop-killers and terrorists with a ferocity rarely seen on Prime Time. Throughout Trump’s campaign, journalists have been trotting out the meme that Trumpistas are driven by fear, but there was no trace of that here: Giuliani sounded ready to grab a broadsword and cut down the enemy in the street in mortal combat personally.
This was not the language of fear, not even the language of anger, but instead a vivid almost palpable thirst to throw language aside, engage the enemy, and engage them now. It was a tone of passionate confrontation creepily reminiscent of the Abolitionists or the days following Pearl Harbor. A grim omen, perhaps.
But it was not unique to Guiliani. That tone echoed in later and surly rendition through like remarks by retired three-star Army general Mike Flynn, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012-2014, and, till recently, potential Trump Vice Presidential pick. As aching to take on radical Islam as Giuliani, Flynn was apparently much frustrated by his time under the tight tether of Obama and Clinton’s comparative diffidence; just how frustrated may be gauged by his leading the crowd in repeated chants of “Lock. Her. Up!” Flynn’s access to intelligence may well make him a valuable advisor to Trump, but stylistically one could see the wisdom of selecting Pence. When a Party leader’s stated aim is to unify first the Party, then the country, sputtering chants for incarceration bring instead a certain cognitive dissonance.
Far more powerful and rational was Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a black police officer who put the case for the rule of law with calm and measured conviction, and raised the specter of “the collapse of social order” in a way that made his talk, to this reviewer, the high point of the night.
That there is a reasonable case to be made for Trump and a number of his positions has always seemed to me obvious; that it is rarely if ever made, and certainly never reported, is no less obvious. Clarke did the obvious: he made the plain and simply stated point that a society indifferent to law, indifferent to its enforcement, indifferent to the deaths of those who enforce it, is surely going down the road to bloody havoc. That those laws need to be just and enforced justly was stated with the same crisp clarity. Would that every convention talk had such concision.
But Clarke spoke too with a certain tragic dimension, for he seemed to understand that order and justice do not arrive in tandem: order necessarily comes first. Thus the harsh theme of the evening persisted even though Clarke’s measured remarks, a theme seemingly calculated to set the mainstream media fainting and wailing: Strength Through Force.
All the more startling, then, the speech by Melania Trump, and in particular her introduction by The Man himself. All was business as usual: the crowd babbled, the commentators droned, the general jumble on the floor ululated, and then suddenly the lights dimmed, and turned a deep blue. A paler, bright, moonscape-blue shone from the stage, foggy and mysterious, Sherlockian, capturing everyone’s attention, and then, slowly, a silhouette began to emerge— The Donald!
“Aa—aa—ah…” rose up from the dazzled masses as Trump, holding the attention of the convention and the world in the palm of his hand, calmly strolled up to a rising podium and smiled out at the crowd, which exploded into frothy Niagaras of applause as vast photographic murals of dazzled Trumpistas appeared behind him, one ecstatic American face metamorphosing into the next. It was brilliantly staged. But, more importantly, without a word it demonstrated a palpable charisma, a mastery almost, I cannot even imagine Hillary Clinton exhibiting.
It is debatable whether Trump appeared Presidential at that moment, but what he most definitely did do was radiate star quality in a degree I have seen no politician since John Kennedy possess. That is no guarantee of administrative competence, to be sure; still, there is a poetry to governance that number-crunchers and consultants never quite grasp. Trump simplyradiated it, though his is a poetry as alienating to some as it is seductive to others.
Then — even more surprising — he introduced his wife Melania with a simplicity and brevity that was very nearly elegant. It is not easy for Trump to get off stage, and particularly not when his appearance on it was so masterfully prepared. But leave he did, with a concise deftness that bordered on the elegant.
Trump often surprises, but he almost invariably surprises by going too far; rarely through any demonstration of understatement. His appearance here was so understated and so well done, it expands one’s sense of his range.
Melania Trump would be the first completely foreign-born first lady in American history (Louisa Adams had an American father). She would also be the most strikingly beautiful, putting even Jackie Kennedy in the shade. The content of her speech was what one might have expected of her ghostwriters: she spoke of Donald’s love of country, love of family, loyalty, decency, etc.
But the sheer beauty of the speaker distracted from the words; and how odd, in this welter of nationalism and populism, to hear someone speak with an accent thick enough to cut with a steak knife, someone whose foreign elegance clearly belonged more on a catwalk than among the cap-wearing sweaty proles gawking and unsure of quite how to react. Mrs. Trump — who can speak six languages, who was born and raised in a Communist state with a Communist official for a father, whose background is high international fashion — added an almost alien, Martian note to the comfortable cocoon of the “Make America Safe Again” theme, like a virtuoso flash of Mahler intruding into a bluegrass solo from Deliverance.
One had a sudden sense that a Trump administration might not perhaps make America safe, but might well bring to it a degree of elegance, surely the last possibility one would have expected from the day’s proceedings. Yet sure enough, The Donald capped it with yet another brief appearance, not basking in the limelight as usual but basking instead in evident and self-effacing pride in his wife. Then off the couple went; and the Pavlovian rhetorical machine switched back on, citing the dangers without, the need for unity and rigor within.
In summary? A win for Trump. Journalists have much anticipated this convention, hoping, like the swine they are, for blood in the streets and chaos and insurrection on the floor. Yet nothing especially maniacal happened. Career Republican politicians talked about making America safe and strong; the candidate’s loving wife enumerated his virtues and love of country; the opposing party and its sad and culpable leadership was deplored and bashed.
What mattered was not what was seen, however, but the fact that it all proceeded with a kind of operational competence not always evidenced by Trump, whose attitude towards electoral politics has more in common with Charlie Parker riffing on Lullaby In Birdland than the nuts-and-bolts event planning and delegate-counting and Brahmin-courting of other, lesser pols.
To the GOP establishment, though, Day One, for all its fiery oratory of Giuliani, may well prove to have been a lullaby: the moment when the doubts of the conventional rank-and-file were sufficiently soothed as to comfortably coalesce around the Perfect Storm of the Trump insurgency; the moment when even the unbelievers committed not merely to pick up the rubble afterwards, but to win.