After an assassination attempt and four days of festivities suffused with his presence, Donald Trump took to the stage in Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum last night. Behind him was his name spelled out in golden lights.
Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower nine years ago as a radical outsider. On Thursday night, he spoke to a Republican National Convention that revolves around him and his personality. The first man to win the Republican presidential nomination three times in a row (Richard Nixon also won it three times, but not consecutively), Trump exemplifies a transformed GOP.
One convention theme was that the persona was the political. A constant refrain of the speakers (elaborated especially by son Eric Trump’s speech) was the sheer scale of the political opposition that Trump has faced: the Russia-related conspiracy theories, the media hostility, the post-presidential prosecutions, the attempt to throw him off the ballot. Saturday’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, put an exclamation point on this account of Trump battling against all odds. Throughout his 2024 bid, Trump’s team has offered him as a figure of mimetic grievance—the embodiment of dissatisfaction within the electorate. The ferocity of the opposition Trump has confronted has burnished his appeal to Republican voters and proved essential to maintaining his hold on the party.
As a politician and media maestro, Trump prefers the operatic: sweeping and lurid, punctuated with grand gestures and dramatic tableaus. This convention offered many such spectacles. Some were heavy, such as the appearance of families of soldiers killed during the Afghanistan withdrawal. Others were light and fun. When Hulk Hogan ripped off his black T-shirt to reveal a “Trump-Vance” T-shirt underneath, he launched a million memes. (Professional wrestling might be the most operatic genre in American popular culture.)
Trump’s close call on Saturday gave him a near-mythic presence leading up to his speech. For days, his team had been previewing a “new tone” of conciliation and bipartisanship. The opening of the speech invoked “confidence, strength, and hope,” and his narration of the shooting was a riveting aria. He was somber, subdued, and—very unusually for Trump—vulnerable. It was something like a confession from a 1980s Oprah episode, only on a grand scale. Surrounded by images from the shooting, Trump said that he was addressing the crowd “only by the grace of almighty God.” He also celebrated the fortitude of his supporters at the rally in Butler that day. He noted that the crowd did not panic. They showed grace under fire, too. He paid tribute to other victims of the shooting, including the slain firefighter Corey Comperatore.
The new tone lasted for about half an hour. Then it was time for classic Trump—but more Festivus than Don Carlos. He increasingly departed from his prepared text, and his speech became a list of familiar hits. He lamented the border crisis, complained that other countries were taking advantage of the United States, and railed against inflation. He made personal criticisms of leading Democrats. He even strayed close to what is his political third rail (his challenge to the 2020 election) when he accused his opponents of “cheating” in past elections.
The speech—at over 90 minutes, the longest nomination acceptance in modern American history—never really laid out a focused policy vision. Perhaps it didn’t need to. Unlike any presidential challenger in more than a century, Trump is running as a former president. Voters know his record in office and can compare life under his administration to the present. Based on lots of polling, they do prefer Trump’s record, especially on the economy, to Joe Biden’s.
The set pieces of the convention—from Hulkamania to Trump’s somber kiss of Comperatore’s uniform—might matter more to average voters. Reading the policy tea leaves of convention speeches is more for political junkies. At the heart of Trump’s 2024 campaign is an effort to turn out disengaged voters.
Yet, for those so inclined, Trump’s speech also offers a fascinating glimpse into a Republican Party in transition. On the one hand, the Trump-era GOP has broken from some former orthodoxies. Echoing a broader shift within the American political elite, many convention speakers were critical of “free trade,” especially trade with the People’s Republic of China. There was more skepticism of Wall Street. Workers themselves, and not just “job creators,” found themselves in the spotlight.
On the other hand, numerous continuities persist. In addition to beefed-up border enforcement, the central policy pledges of Trump’s speech were boosting energy production at home and cutting taxes. Trump celebrated the performance of the stock market under his presidency and said that he wanted “tremendous growth” in the economy.
The GOP is still heterogeneous. Polling released this week by the Manhattan Institute found that, by almost 40 points (59–21), Trump voters preferred tax cuts and deregulation over tariffs and subsidies for promoting manufacturing. On an intuitive level, this finding makes sense. The same populist sentiment that makes many Republican voters skeptical of rule by “elites” will also prompt them to regard federal interventions with suspicion.
This suggests that a new synthesis might leave some longstanding Republican policy themes transformed but not abandoned. For instance, policies aimed at renewing manufacturing might include some combination of deregulation and public investment. With marginal tax rates much lower than they were in the late 1970s, tax cuts might have hit the point of diminishing returns as a principal economic-policy lever, but tax policy could still play a role in, say, helping with family formation or encouraging investment in the American industrial infrastructure. Energy policy exemplifies that possible synergy between populism and growth economics: expensive energy hurts economic growth, family finances, and manufacturing. A blue-collar GOP cannot afford to cast aside economic growth—though the tools to deliver it might differ from those of 50 years ago. Republican proponents of taking a more aggressive approach to antitrust efforts have argued that fostering economic competition can help deliver more growth.
The cascading instability of the Biden years—from eye-watering inflation to a massive border breakdown to multiple crises abroad—has given Trump the chance to make an historic political comeback. The administration’s chaos-ridden stewardship has made Trump’s own disruptiveness seem more palatable, and perhaps even more necessary, to many voters. Yet the former president still faces political risks. Despite Biden’s unpopularity and the outbreak of an internal war within the Democratic Party, Trump holds only a relatively narrow lead in polls. Swing voters may grow more resistant to him if he appears too disruptive and if Republicans cannot present a clear vision of Main Street economics and cultural politics. The race remains to be won.
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