Republican National Convention Is a Trumpian Triumph

A movement that was a joke nine years ago is a party now. Its members are certain they will win.

Peggy Noonan. ??? 1/2

I will make something clear before sharing some honest, perhaps startling thoughts.I did not support either of the major party presidential candidates in 2016 and wrote about it here. I could not endorse either in 2020, and explained why here. I fully expect my third consecutive write-in this November, for the same reasons as stated in my 2020 column, plus the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the attempt to overturn the results of the election, which was not a failure of “decorum” and “norms” but something else and, I believe, more sinister.

But I strongly believethat in my profession and as far as you are ableyou must not let your views and convictions become cataracts over your eyes that cloud your vision. You have to see as clearly as you can and say what you see. And you must be alive to the spirit of things, and their meaning.

I state all this for clarity’s sake as the political year heats up.If I say the Republicans had a stupendous convention I am not saying I am Trumpist;if I urge Democrats to climb their way out of the Slough of Despond I am not declaring myself a Democrat. It has been said of this column that it does balls and strikes, and I take it as a compliment but I don’t think it’s true. Umpires don’t tell the pitcher to try a fastball or the batter to shift his stance. I do.My advice to both parties is shaped by my thoughts, which are those of a political conservative. I want both parties to be clean and constructive and to shine, and I want to be moved by their excellence.

And so, to the Republican National Convention: It was stupendous, a triumph in every wayfrom production through pronounced meaning and ability to reach beyond the tent. It moved me. Madeline Brame, speaking of the stabbing death in New York of her son, and District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “soft on crime” response, moved me. The Gold Star families whose sons and daughters died at the Abbey Gate== during the botched withdrawal from Kabul and were later abandoned by the White House moved me. What love—and what an indictment.

The convention was wild in the way things that are alive are wild. Harmeet Dhillon covered her head with a shawl to sing a Sikh prayer; Amber Rose, the beautiful young woman with face tattoos being cheered for speaking about what it is to support Donald Trump in her media world, and why she is willing to pay the price; Shabbos Kestenbaum, the Harvard grad suing Harvard for discrimination over its failures after Oct. 7; J.D. Vance’s mother throwing kisses to the crowd as it chanted her name, and her son saying maybe they’ll have her 10th anniversary clean and sober in the White House.The citizens were so much more eloquent than the professionals.

And of course Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters, railing against corporate greed to a Republican convention whose delegates warmly applauded.

And none of that was even the headline.The headline: This wasn’t a divided party, it was a party united. It wasn’t only Mr. Trump’s party, it was an explicitly Trumpian party.

We saw something epochal:the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation.It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.

This was a party that at least for a week could turn the page on its obsessions. Election denialism was out, a post-DEI future in….

https://archive.is/iAIlj

>>21258571

2/2

Observers have noted how joyous the delegates seemed, and they did.It is not only that they believe the assassination attempt, and Mr. Trump’s response to it, which has entered American political mythology, seemed to confer an air of the mystical and an affirmation of their loyalty. They were also happy because it’s settled now, and they won.

The first time this Republican Party gathered it was 2016 and the mood was darker, defensive around the edges. For many it was their first convention. The party was split. People were less sure of things than they said. Does a handful of real and legitimate grievances amount to a philosophy? I own a string of dry cleaners in Indianapolis, and I’m up against the Bushes and Skull and Bones. Maybe the establishment would strike back and smite them in November.

All that is over. A movement that was a joke nine years ago is a party now. Its members are certain they will win in November because they believe the vast majority of Americans feel just like them: a hard no on illegal immigration, unstopped street crime, foreign entanglements. They believe they speak for normal people. Meaning in spite of past apocalyptic talk of civil war, they believe the majority of America is still normal. And like them. There was a funny little affirmation in that.

In any case the long-heralded change has happened, and will have some real part in shaping American politics in the 21st century.

Why did Mr. Trump pick Mr. Vance? For intellectual heft? Sure—he’s policy-focused and fluent. As an attack dog? It’s not as if Mr. Trump needs one but sure, Mr. Vance, in his brief political life, has shown he isn’t shy to pull off the scab. But he is interesting and something new, and the choice strikes me as revealing about Mr. Trump. When he first ran, and in the first years of his presidency, he flailed about because he didn’t know the implications of his own policies. Some of those policies were new to him, a grab bag based on whatever the crowd cheered. In choosing Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump is saying: I know and have embraced a specific policy approach grounded in particular principles and assumptions, and I will institute it. Trumpism has journeyed from the chaotic to the intentional.

It should be added that it was creepy to see members of the Trump family dominating prime speaking slots all week.This was carelessly cultish, and in its carelessness insolent. Mr. Trump’s speech was surprisingly muted, scattered and low-energy. It lacked drama even though he was narrating what it is like to be shot. (Of course she misses the most valuable part of why the Republican Party, Trump and his family. She’s a Bush supporter)

To give you a sense of how powerful I think all this has been, I have a feeling it’s going to change the Democratic Party in the coming weeks.

They are professionals; they saw what Milwaukee was. They want to be bold too, they want to be winners, they want to unite and turn the page. Mr. Vance is 39 and about to ignite imaginations.Everything feels open.

Do the Democrats have a golden magic pony among them? Is that what it takes to change? To win? They’re going to find out.

A final point. We have, many of us, for some time—months, certainly the past few weeks—felt various degrees and kinds of horror.But oh these are exciting times. Things are moving, shifting. Again, this is big history. Hold on to your hat.

https://archive.is/iAIlj

Victor Davis Hanson

@VDHanson

Democracy Really Is Dying in Darkness—But by Whom?

Never in modern presidential history has a political party staged a veritable inside coupto remove their current president from his ongoing candidacy for his party’s nomination and reelection.

Stranger still, the very elites and grandees, who now are using every imaginable means of deposing Biden as their nominee, are the verypublic voices that just weeks ago insisted that candidate Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle.” And they damned any who thought otherwise!

They are also the identical operators whose machinations ensured that there would not be an open Democratic primary. They demonized the few on the Left who weakly challenged Biden in the primaries.Yet now they will select a replacement candidatewho likely never received a single primary vote.

Note further: Biden’s impending forced abdication isnot because he is non compos mentis.

Rather, the inside move isdue to Biden’s disastrous debate exposure that confirmed his dementiacould no longer be disguised by a conspiracy of leftist politicos and media.

Butfar more importantly, the impetus for removal is driven by the admission that the cognitivelyBiden is headed for a climactic November defeat

Were Biden now ahead in the polls by five points, these same backroom machinists would be insisting thathe was still Pericles.

Yet now Biden is being un-personed and Trotskyized, as we prepare the new groupthink narrative of his likely surrogate—a soon to be praised eloquent, mellifluous, and articulate Cicero-Harris.

That Biden will likely remain as president until January 20, 2025, should remind the country the Left is more worried about its own next four-year continuance in power than the fate of the country that now admittedly will be guided in the next six months by a president judged unfit by his own supporters to run for the very office that he will still keep holding.

Further irony arises when those who, as supposedly guardians of democratic norms, pontificated to the country the last nine years about the Trump-Hitlerian threat to democracy. Yet now they so cavalierly work overtime on how:

a) to pull off the removal of their candidate from the November ballot on grounds of senility,

b) but not the removal of the same president from office (their own fate is more precious than our collective fate as a nation),

c) while trying to select, rather than elect, a replace candidate,

d) without ever offering any explanation, much less an apology, how a Democrat president from January 20, 2021, was daily declared vibrant, dynamic, and engaged but suddenly one day after June 27, 2024, was remanufactured as not?

Perhaps as an aid and primer on Biden removal they should reread the essay by former Obama Pentagon official Rosa Books. Just 11 days after the Trump inauguration, she published in Foreign Policy, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020”.

It was a veritable manual on the various ways of removing the just inaugurated president—listing immediate alternatives to the distant 2020 election: impeachment and conviction, 25th-Amendment removal, and, barring all that, a military coup: “The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

So, to make sense of what these self-appointed and sanctimonious protectors of democracy are trying to pull off demands an Orwellian vocabulary—memory hole, newspeak, unperson, and groupthink.

Yet there is one more irony.

Very soon, those who welcomed the protests of summer 2020 radicals, and exempted the rioting and violence, and then again did nothing in 2024 as mobs tore apart campuses and shut down public facilities, will host a Chicago convention—where those very same liberated forces may wreak havoc on the outside, while their backroom progenitors, with threats, money, and the media, will wreak havoc on democracy on the inside.

Last edited

5:56 AM · Jul 19, 2024

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>>21258581

Yes she was but I watched her on the news during the Bush Admin, she has been unabashedly hateful of Trump. Repeating the talking points. And she cannot even hold it back in this article.

Overall the article was very good