Trump’s former rivals bury their criticism to celebrate all-powerful GOP leader
Donald Trump looked on with an ethereal gaze Tuesday as a parade of Republican presidential candidates whose dreams he crushed staged a parade of the vanquished at the Republican National Convention. On another night awash in emotion after Trump escaped an assassination attempt just days before, speakers joined a choreographed attempt to soften his hardman image, portraying him as a caring and even benevolent, leader, boss and grandfather while smoothing the rougher edges of his populist and authoritarian worldview.
The message on night two in Milwaukee was double-edged and impossible to miss: this is indisputably and irrevocably Trump’s party now and the GOP is united in pursuit of victory.
“Donald Trump has my full endorsement, period,” said former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who warned during primary season that Trump would foment global and political chaos and who declared in February, “I feel no need to kiss the ring.” Her genuflection, which came shortly after Trump made another triumphant entrance into the arena, might have come through gritted teeth, but it closed off the unfinished business of an acrimonious primary race that saw the former UN ambassador win hundreds of thousands of votes long after her campaign ended.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once billed himself as Trumpism without the pandemonium and as a potential president who could actually enact the MAGA agenda. But on Tuesday night, he implored the crowd, “Let’s make the 45th President of the United States the 47th President of the United States.”
DeSantis, whom Trump first saw as a protégé, and then a traitor, drew a rare guffaw from the ex-president at someone else’s joke when he declared, “America cannot afford four more years of a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ presidency,” referring to the 1989 dark comedy in which two employees pretend their dead boss is still alive.
Many grassroots Republicans who backed Trump confided on this year’s campaign trail that they saw the Florida governor as a potential successor — once the ex-president had moved on. But Trump watched Tuesday alongside his newly anointed MAGA heir apparent, vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The first, affectionate flush of their political infatuation was obvious and it laid bare the price DeSantis may pay for ignoring the maxim of Omar from “The Wire”: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has spent years paying penance for his bitter 2016 primary fight with Trump, which has seen him swallow his fury at the ex-president’s insults over his father and wife. He’s long since dropped any hope that he can be a powerful political operator outside Trump’s shadow. And he made sure many seconds did not elapse on Tuesday before roaring, “God Bless Donald J. Trump.”
The poetry of Trump’s red-hatted followers
In 2016, Trump obliterated Marco Rubio’s hopes of a generational transformation of the Republican Party. The Florida senator was once a GOP hawk and orthodox conservative who backed comprehensive immigration reform in the mold of the GOP’s spiritual leader before Trump, former President Ronald Reagan. But to remain politically viable, Rubio has undergone the reeducation in populist nationalism that anyone who wants a future in the GOP must endure.
On Tuesday, he used his personal political heritage as a platform to lionize Trump for turning the GOP into a party for the working class, in a soaring speech that showcased the eloquence that once led pundits to put him on a fast track to the Oval Office. Those ambitions clearly have not been fully sated — one possible reason why Trump passed him over for a spot as his vice presidential nominee.
Rubio sought to imbue Trumpism and the millions of supporters who crowd into the ex-president’s rallies with a kind of poetic nobility. “For those still wondering in the press and many watching at home, these, these are the Americans who wear the red hats and wait for hours under a blazing sun to hear Trump speak,” he said. “What they want, what they ask for, it is not hateful or extreme.” Rubio said these citizens just want the basics – good jobs, lower prices, secure borders and safety from criminals and terrorists.
“There is absolutely nothing dangerous or anything divisive about putting Americans first.”
A mix of hero worship and personal ambition
Tuesday’s myth making came as no surprise. Trump has long cultivated a personality cult in the Republican Party. He demands total loyalty from subordinates and basks in public praise — as demonstrated in on-camera Cabinet meetings when officials lined up to laud him. His curated image of strength and bombast honed on the “Apprentice” developed along lines that delighted his fans. But it horrifies many Americans since his grasps for unaccountable power often cross into demagoguery. His vows to use a second term to enact “retribution” could augur contentious days ahead, despite his pledge to forge national unity after narrowly avoiding death in a Pennsylvania park on Saturday afternoon.
The idea of Trump as a superhuman leader has taken on a theocratic dimension since the attempt to kill him. Almost every speaker at the convention has argued that divine intervention spared the ex-president so he could be installed once again in the Oval Office on a mission of national salvation. As Trump’s former White House press secretary and current governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, put it: “Not even an assassin’s bullet could stop him. God Almighty intervened because America is one nation under God and he’s certainly not finished with President Trump.” The idea that a greater force is at work is deeply felt by many delegates in Milwaukee amid an overwhelming sense that Trump has been divinely blessed.
But as Trump sat alongside Vance overlooking the arena, it was also hard not to draw comparisons with the imagery of the Soviet Union, as a rotating MAGA politburo of officials and family members moved in and out of his balcony box and subordinates around him followed his every move — popping up out of their seats to join him in standing ovations and looking for cues as he pumped his fist.
In bowing before Trump, his supplicants look to a distant future
But Tuesday night was not exclusively about elevating Trump.
His former foes had their self-interest at heart. Even Trump cannot go on forever. And on a distant day where the once and possibly future president has moved aside, there will be a GOP vacancy. Vance might have leapfrogged Trump’s past rivals by snaring the vice-presidential nomination after an intense effort to impress his new ticket mate. But in any future contested fight for the Republican nomination, the approval of the Trump base will be paramount.
By 2028, or whenever the next contested Republican race takes place, Rubio will be an elder statesman — far older than Vance, who’s 39 and will be a heartbeat away from the presidency if the GOP ticket wins in November. Cruz may still have designs on the social and evangelical conservative sector of the GOP — which is critical to launching GOP presidential campaigns in Iowa. Huckabee Sanders could rival him for those voters. She’s always been with Trump and figures to be a prominent female MAGA standard bearer in future presidential campaigns.
Haley, who does well with the hawkish, internationalist wing of the party, will need to bolster her support with MAGA voters if she’s to do better in a primary race in the coming years.
After offering her endorsement of Trump, she effectively loaned Trump her voters – many of whom were repelled by the ex-president. “There are some Americans who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100% of the time,” she said. “My message to them is simple: You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him.”
Haley smartly stressed areas where she and traditional conservatives might agree with Trump – for instance, on a hardline policy that is pro-Israel and anti-Iran. But the most remarkable foreign policy content of her speech came when she sought to reframe the ex-president’s frequent cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, is a devotee of the staunch US foreign policy creed of Reagan, whom Republicans once memorialized for winning the Cold War.
But 40 years on, a Democrat, President Joe Biden, has assumed Reagan’s role of facing down Moscow’s tyrant. So key GOP figures are whitewashing Trump’s hero worship of Putin by suggesting that in office he wielded some kind of mystical inner strength that deterred the former KGB lieutenant colonel. “Putin didn’t attack Ukraine, because he knew Donald Trump was tough. A strong president doesn’t start wars; a strong president prevents wars,” Haley said.
Her willingness to paper over her glaring foreign policy differences with Trump was another sign that the former South Carolina governor shares the reality of all the GOP presidential candidates Trump left in his wake.
The only possible path to power in the future lies in homage to Trump now.
Despite his previous criticism of Donald Trump, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley endorsed him during the Republican National Convention, emphasizing the need for party unity and potential presidential victory. In a similar vein, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who had a contentious primary race with Trump, publicly showed his support for the ex-president, acknowledging the importance of Trump's backing for political viability within the Republican Party.
