The Workers United…
Awkwardly for the left, Trump is the President of the working man
I wrote this about the Republican National Convention in July:
Well someone had to do it. I watched much of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week on PBS. I’m surprised that I saw so little coverage of it in the UK media, especially after the Trump assassination attempt.
Yet, this was arguably the most important event in global politics right now. The RNC foreshadows what American politics is likely to look like in the not too distant future if, as seems inevitable, Donald J Trump is re-elected President (and is not successfully assassinated meantime, as many on the internet appear to want ).
“Four more years” they chanted as if he’d never left the White House. As if Biden was just a doddery caretaker, filling the space where a real President should reside. Perhaps they’re not far off the truth, now we understand just how much Biden’s powers have waned in recent years.
The backdrop to this convention has been the rumour, gaining strength by the hour, that President Biden is on his way out before, rather than after the November election. PBS pundits, for what it’s worth, seem to think that Vice President ,Kamala Harris, will be the New Democratic Party candidate, if only to avoid offending the black vote. How she might go down with white, Asian and Latino voters, who seemed to dominate the Milwaukee auditorium, is another matter.
What made Milwaukee famous last week was of course the messianic manifestation of a bandaged and visibly emotional Donald J Trump. I use the term “messianic” advisedly. You could have been forgiven for thinking that this was second coming, such was the adulation of the Republican faithful.
UK media commentators find Republican political events off putting at the best of times. They loathed this quasi-religious spectacle. The former Newsnight presenter, Emily Maitlis, denounced it on the News Agents podcast as a “dystopian…gathering of weirdos and misfits…spouting garbage”. She was no doubt appalled by the repeated attacks on “woke” politics. Delegates cheered speakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for declaring there “there are only two genders” and castigating Joe Biden for turning Easter Monday into “Transgender Visibility Day”.
The PBS anchors didn’t sound much more sympathetic than the News Agents, as they deployed their fact-checkers to pick apart each speech. Though in truth there were precious few facts to check. This Convention was really about a photograph: that image of a bleeding Trump defiant under the flag. “Fight Fight.Fight.” delegates chanted at every opportunity, echoing Trump after the Butler assassination attempt. How do you fact check that?
It hardly needs to be said that the Republican National Convention is not an event aimed at media intellectuals. It sometimes seemed to be taking place in an evangelical mission tent to the sound of raucous country rock. Patriotic songs about god, freedom and “America First“ introduced speakers who praised the Lord almost as much as they praised The Donald. Trump - never a very religious man - has we’re told been chosen by god to “Make America Safe Once Again”.
Republicans genuinely seem to believe that god intervenes in their everyday lives. Speakers said, with no trace of irony, that god stepped in to combat the “evil that came to Butler Pennsylvania on Saturday” as one Senator put it. Trumps former rival, Ted Cruz, offered “thanks to the almighty for protecting President Trump” before endorsing his presidency and saying, that only Trump could stop the “literal invasion of the United States” by migrants.
This is all very alien to British political culture, as is the fetishisation of the flag and the militaristic undertones. However, what mainly struck me, unlike Republican conventions of the past, and what Maitlis seemed to miss in her liberal angst, was how unashamedly working class it was. The most obvious sign of this is the presence of that blue-collar icon, JD Vance,, the author of “Hillbilly Legacy” as The Donald’s new running mate.
Vance is the first Millennial to be on a major election ticket, and with his Indian American wife, Usha Chilukuri, the daughter of immigrants, he is not your identikit US conservative. A one time “Never Trumper” - he once called Trump “cultural heroin” and even compared him to Hitler ” - Vance is now being talked as a possible successor to Donald Trump. And his theme could amost be summed up by the oldest picket line slogan: the workers united will never be defeated’
Vance said he stood for “The auto worker in Michigan wondering why politicians are destroying their jobs; the factory worker in Wisconsin who makes things with their hands and is proud of American craftsmanship”. He said wages rose faster during the Trump presidency than at any time in the previous thirty years. This is true. Though as fact checkers point out, the blue-collar wages boom wasn’t quite so explosive after taking inflation and a rise in the minimum wage into account.
There’s clearly something happening here, to paraphrase Dylan, and the media don’t know what it is. I was astonished to hear Sean O’Brien, President of the Teamsters Union, mount the Convention platform and lay into capitalism in a diatribe against non-union companies and corporate greed. He railed against zero hours contracts, anti-union laws, export of jobs. The boss of America’s biggest trades union said the workers “own America” - or at any rate should do. You would never have heard anything like this at a Republican rally in the 1980’s. Indeed, it’s the first time a Teamster boss has spoken at a Republican convention.
O’Brien wasn’t alone. There were speakers in tattoos and teeshirts lamemting the collapse of their communities, the opioid crisis and the treachery of the “corporate elites”. There has been a big push at this Convention to sell Trump to the working class black vote, following polling evidence that Biden’s support is collapsing in rust belt cities like Milwaukee, which is the key to the swing state of Wisconsin. Black delegates reminded the crowd that the Republican Party was originally founded to combat slavery - which is almost true.
This is most unlike the Grand Old Party. David Urban, a former Trump campaign adviser, asked CNN: “ Am I at the right convention?. The tone has worried some Trump supporters on Twitter, who fear a dilution of conservative values - especially on abortion. Trump has rejected a federal abortion ban and says it should be a matter left to the states to decide. This has been interpreted as an attempt to stop abortion being a defining issue for voters in November.
Trump the survivor is supposed to selling “unity”, at this convention, hard as that may be to believe. But by unity Trump doesn’t mean embracing liberals, he really means his former revivals embracing him, like Ron “Desanctimonious”, as Trump called the Florida governor, now firmly pro-Trump. Then there was “Lying” Ted Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio, and of course “Bird brain” Nikki Haley, all lining up to endorse “four more years” of Donald J Trump. Penitents who have finally been restored to the true path.
You don’t have to support everything Donald Trump stands for to vote for him, said Haley. But it helps. “Trump stands for secure borders, safe streets, cheap gas” said one delegate, “cops are good, criminals are bad; boys are boys and girls are girls..It’s not hard”. Many Democrat voters might agree, even President Biden in populist mode. But it looks as if Trump won’t have “Sleepy Joe” to kick around for much longer.