After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president
It’s not OK that the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. That clearly suggests that reality has stripped a gear and we have careened off into a deeply stupid alternate dimension that resembles a 1980s straight-to-cable sequel to “They Live.” It was definitely not OK to be inside Quicken Loans Arena as Trump accepted that nomination, giving a speech that was sometimes profoundly awkward and went on much too long but was also — it’s always better to face the truth — a masterful display of demagoguery and manipulation.
From the ashen, haunted faces around me in the press gallery, and the conversations over hastily guzzled drinks before and after, I feel sure I wasn’t the only person here who felt as if he were suffering from PTSD, sunstroke and a stomach virus, all at the same time. Still, it was an educational bout with the existential flu. Anybody who still thought Donald Trump was a joke and a dumbass who would humiliate himself and his party go down to Mondale-scale defeat now knows better. You can pick Trump’s speech apart and examine its flaws, of course, but from the point of view of performance and dynamics only one verdict is possible. He killed it. He. Killed. It.
Michael Moore said the other night on Bill Maher’s show that he now thought Trump would win the election, and that feeling has been sneaking up on me for months now. There are valid statistical and demographic arguments that suggest otherwise. My colleague Amanda Marcotte has been asking all week: What states, or what groups, does Trump win that Mitt Romney didn’t? That’s a conversation for another time. But if Hillary Clinton does indeed defeat this guy, it’s gonna be a nail-biter.
In a few different ways, Trump’s acceptance speech hinted at the traditional pivot toward the center expected of a nominee moving into the fall election. He said the word “wall” just once — it will be a “great wall,” of course — and alluded only indirectly to his infamous proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He made headlines by uttering the appellation LGBTQ twice, very carefully, and then congratulating the crowd for not booing at his assertion that citizens in that category had rights. He said “Latino” twice, instead of the more Republican-friendly English word “Hispanic.”
Trump described himself as a Republican just once, during an acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. He never used the word “conservative” at all. Go ahead; pull up the transcript, hit control-F and type it in: 0 of 0. Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney would be spinning in their graves, if they were dead, and right now they wish they were.
Trump also signaled clearly that he knows where Hillary Clinton’s vulnerable spots are. He attacked “nation-building” and “regime change,” central elements of bipartisan foreign-policy dogma for the last 20 years that have been variously implemented by Bush-Cheney neoconservatives and Obama-Clinton liberals. He attacked free trade in general and Bill Clinton’s disastrous NAFTA deal in particular. Watching a Republican nominee vow to avoid overseas wars and shut down free-trade treaties is vivid proof that the membrane of history has been punctured and we’ve gone sloshing through it, covered in amniotic fluid, into some “Man in the High Castle” reality. As someone in my Twitter feed observed earlier in the day, we won’t hear those promises next week in Philadelphia.
But you don’t need me to tell you what Trump said, or how well it was calibrated. What you might not have felt on TV was the level of emotion flowing from the crowd to its Dear Leader and back again, which at certain moments hit a 7.5 on the Nuremberg scale. When he got the crowd wound up into chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!” — which was about Clinton’s foreign-policy record, not the email scandal — and then smiled his Cheshire-cat smile and said, “Let’s defeat her in November,” it was like watching a maestro conduct an orchestra. OK, kind of a crappy pops orchestra in someplace less cosmopolitan than Cleveland, but still...
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