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Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has two faces.
From one angle, the operation looks disorientingly competent and normal: The Republican nominee has pivoted to the center on various hot-button issues and sought to broaden his base with symbolic overtures to traditionally Democratic constituencies.
From another angle, it looks like a deeply weird, somewhat fascistic reality star’s personality cult — because it is.
The tension between these tendencies was on lurid display at this week’s Republican National Convention.
At the behest of Trump and his allies, the RNC approved a new GOP platform, one free of calls for federal abortion bans or any explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. The Republicans’ official agenda also forswears any cuts to Medicare and Social Security, including increases to the retirement age. All of these stances contradict longstanding conservative movement goals, and all three bring the Republican Party into closer alignment with public opinion.
Meanwhile, Trump used some of the RNC’s primetime speaking slots to signal sympathy for nonwhite voters, younger Americans, and union members. The biracial model and rapper Amber Rose gave a speech that invited young, historically liberal voters to rethink their skepticism of Trump and his party. “The truth is that the media has lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time I believed those lies,” Rose declared, explaining that she eventually realized, “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me. These are my people.”
The RNC’s outreach to union voters was even more concerted. On the convention’s first night, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien enjoyed the most prominent speaking slot. The union leader did not actually endorse Trump and spent much of his address on diatribes against corporate greed that received tepid support in the convention hall.
To all but the most attentive viewers, however, O’Brien’s status as the keynote speaker overshadowed the absence of a formal endorsement: By all appearances, the head of one of America’s largest unions was vouching for Trump’s commitment to workers’ interests.
Taken together, the RNC’s four-day infomercial for Trump’s GOP was far more professionally orchestrated and broadly accessible than its 2020 and 2016 predecessors, which often seemed to be made by and for Fox News addicts.
Yet other aspects of the convention betrayed the strange, illiberal, and authoritarian character of Trump’s politics. As well-managed as the Trump campaign has been to this point, it cannot escape the inherent liabilities of the man it’s trying to sell.
Trump’s disconcertingly appealing, illiberal oddity
Not all of these elements were necessarily unstrategic. No Republican nominee but Donald Trump would give primetime RNC speaking slots to Hulk Hogan or Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White. The appearances weren’t all smooth — at one point, Hogan referred to the GOP nominee as “Donald Dick J. Trump” — but to the extent that Trump’s team is hoping to consolidate its apparent gains with low-information, younger voters, conveying a spirit of irreverence and fun might be well-advised.
Similarly, the convention’s messaging on immigration was at once grotesquely hateful and plausibly popular. During his nomination acceptance speech, Trump reiterated one of his favorite and most cartoonish lies: that the inflow of migrants to the United States is not driven by the political instability and economic challenges of some Central and South American countries, but rather, by those nations’ diabolical plot to ship all of their most violent miscreants across our border.
“The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country,” Trump declared. “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.”
One would hope that the message conveyed by rhetoric this unhinged would be: “I am a liar and I think that you are stupid.”
But Trump’s words could just as plausibly reinforce the impression that he won’t let any nagging sympathies for asylum seekers prevent him from getting tough on border security. The American public’s mood is now more nativist than it has been in decades. In April, a survey from Axios and the Harris Poll found 51 percent of Americans expressing support for “mass deportations” (a policy that RNC attendees promoted by holding up “Mass Deportations Now” signs). And this month, for the first time since 2005, Gallup found a majority of Americans (55 percent) saying that immigration to the United States should be decreased.
Still, other manifestations of Trump’s ineradicable oddity and illiberalism are political liabilities.
Trump’s strategically unwise, ideologically fitting VP pick
Among these is the selection of J.D. Vance as the Republican nominee for vice president. The Ohio senator is an unaccomplished and largely untested politician, one who has publicly taken a variety of extreme and unpopular issue stances.
Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by just a six-point margin, in a year when the national popular vote favored Republicans by roughly three points. For context, in 2020, when Joe Biden won the popular vote by four points, Trump won Ohio by eight. Thus, Vance underperformed Trump significantly in an election cycle that was much more favorable to their party. And this is the only election campaign that Vance, a hit memoirist and businessman, has ever run.
Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate signed a letter in 2023 imploring the Justice Department to halt the delivery of all abortion pills, in accordance with a controversial interpretation of an obscure federal law. Two years earlier, Vance argued that even victims of rape and incest should not be allowed to obtain abortions because “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Vance distanced himself from these statements in recent weeks without outright renouncing them. On Meet the Press earlier this month, the Ohio senator said that “the Supreme Court made a decision saying that the American people should have access” to mifepristone under existing federal law and that he supports honoring that decision.
He also told Fox News’s Sean Hannity this week that “Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his views on abortion are going to be the views that dominate this party and drive this party forward,” and that he therefore supported abortion being left to the states for the foreseeable future. In both cases, though, Vance framed his moderation as an act of deference to another authority. He did not say that he personally believes access to an abortion should be an inviolable right in some circumstances or that the federal government should not restrict access to abortion pills.
Vance has also suggested that the far-right conspiracy theorist (and Sandy Hook truther) Alex Jones is largely right about the American power structure, as “a transnational financial elite controls things in our country” and these elites “hate our society” and “are probably sex perverts too.”
Most critically, Vance is among the most openly authoritarian Republicans in Washington. He has said that he would have helped Trump overturn the 2020 election results, raised money for January 6 rioters, called on the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation against an anti-Trump Washington Post columnist, touted plans for consolidating the president’s authority over the federal bureaucracy, and argued that Trump should simply defy any court orders that obstruct such a power grab.
Traditionally, presidential candidates use their VP picks to assuage potential concerns that swing voters might have about them or balance out the ticket demographically. Vance’s selection, by contrast, exacerbates Trump’s biggest political liabilities: the perception that he is an authoritarian extremist whose election would threaten abortion rights.
Nevertheless, Trump picked him precisely because Vance’s current ideology closely mirrors his own. According to the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, the Trump campaign had initially planned to pick a milquetoast, unthreatening running mate, such as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. But Trump was eventually persuaded that he needed a fellow true-believing populist to help him enact his most far-reaching ambitions.
The Achilles’ heel of Donald Trump’s campaign is Donald Trump
The most politically damaging manifestation of Trump’s weirdness and authoritarianism at the RNC, however, was the candidate’s own address.
The Republican nominee’s acceptance speech was the longest ever given, meandering across 92 bizarre and tedious minutes. This excess was a direct reflection of the authoritarian nature of Trump’s candidacy. The nominee of a healthy democratic political party must balance their own narcissistic appetite for attention against the interests of the various constituencies they represent.
Having consolidated his personality cult’s control of the GOP, Trump faced no such constraint. His speech did not stretch to marathon length because of its abundance of substantive content. Rather, it consumed so much time because Trump allowed himself to supplement nearly every passage with pointless and tiresome ad-libbing, after detailing his own narrowly averted assassination in painstaking detail.
A less weird and authoritarian Republican nominee might have also drummed up panic about undocumented immigration. But they probably wouldn’t have paused in the middle of such demagogy to ask the crowd, “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs?” and then say, incongruously, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump’s endless, self-indulgent rambling was alienating enough in and of itself. Even more unnerving was the spectacle of an increasingly bored crowd struggling to humor their dear leader with increasingly strained outbursts of enthusiasm.
The 2024 Trump campaign is a highly professional operation, run by two of the most accomplished consultants in Republican politics, and much of the RNC reflected their savvy. But no matter how cleverly you package Trump, the flaws in the fundamental product remain.
The Republican nominee is unpopular, odd, authoritarian, and beatable. Democrats despondent over their own standard-bearer’s shortcomings should not embrace defeatism, but rather, get themselves a normal and age-appropriate nominee.
