The workers united will never be defeated say, er, the Republicans
Trump and his hillbilly legatee JD Vance are making a shameless bid for blue collar votes
Well someone had to do it. I’ve been watching the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, gavel to gavel, as they say on PBS - that’s the non-commercial US Public Broadcasting Service. I’m surprised that I’ve been seeing so little coverage of it in the UK media, especially after the Trump assassination attempt. For, this is 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 a racing certainty, 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 Joe Biden was just the doddery caretaker, filling the space where a real President should reside. Perhaps that’s 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 all about a photograph: that image of a bleeding Trump defiant under the flag. “Fight Fight.Fight.” delegates chorussed at every opportunity, echoing Trump’s words after last week’s 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 music. Patriotic songs about god, freedom and “America First“ introduced speakers who praised the Lord almost as much as they praised The Donald. We’re told that he’s 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 speaker put it. Trump’s former rival, Ted Cruz, offered a solemn “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, 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”, Vance once called Trump “cultural heroin” and even compared him to Hitler”. Yet he is now being talked as a possible successor to Donald Trump. And his theme at this normally most pro-enterprise of conventions could almost be summed up by the oldest picket line slogan of all: the workers united will never be defeated’
Vance said Trump 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 promised to open factories and bring manufacturing back home. Stop “communist China building its middle class on the backs of American workers”.
I was rather astonished to see 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 for all the world like a US Mick Lynch. 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.
On PBS and the liberal media this alt-right workerism is regarded with great scepticism. Don’t they know that the Republican Paety is run by and for billionaires? But perhaps the delegates don’t care. Maybe they regard all parties as in the pockets of yhe elites. At least Trump is THEIR billionaire. Vance said wages rose faster during the 2016-20 Trump presidency than at any time in the previous thirty years. This is technically true. Though, as fact checkers will point out, the blue-collar wages boom doesn’t look quite so explosive after taking inflation and a rise in the minimum wage into account. But there’s always hope - and what Obama used to call the “fierce urgency of now”, whatever that means. If nothing else, this 2024 convention is the most direct appeal to the white working class we’ve heard for a very long time.
O’Brien wasn’t alone. Most Republicans wear the uniform of dark suit and tie. But there were speakers in tattoos and teeshirts lamenting the collapse of their communities, the deaths of sons in Afghanistan, the opioid crisis (blamed on immigrants) and the treachery of the “corporate elites”. There has also 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 a fact.
There’s clearly something happening here, to paraphrase Dylan, even if we don’t quite know what it is. 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-X, 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 his 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 might be to believe. But by unity Trump doesn’t mean embracing liberals - he really means his former rivals embracing him, like Ron “Desanctimonious”, as Trump used to called the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is now firmly pro-Trump. Then there was “Lyin’” Ted Cruz, “Little Marco” Rubio, and of course “Bird brain” Nikki Haley - former rivals 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 speaker, “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 then it looks as if Trump won’t have “Sleepy Joe” to kick around for much longer. If Kamala Harris does indeed take over, we could be in another different, and very racial, ball game.