You Didn't Really Think They'd Tone it Down, Did You?

Letter from Milwaukee, Day 3

Nikki Haley delivers a full-throated surrender, even as the GOP delivers a full-throated repudiation of internationalism, free markets, and Reaganism.

Plus a reminder: Despite the show, the spin, and the balloons — none of this is normal.

And you are still not the crazy ones.

Happy Wednesday. (BTW: I’m headed down to the convention today, so stay tuned. Subscribers will receive my daily Letters from Milwaukee.)

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We need more dogs.

Flashback: Moses was a wonderful babysitter.

This isn’t a new RNC—or a new Trump.

My latest in the Atlantic:

Well, that didn’t last long.

After Saturday’s assassination attempt, Donald Trump signaled that he would focus on unifying the country at the Republican National Convention. He told a Washington Examiner reporter that he had scrapped a speech focused on attacking Biden’s policies in favor of taking the chance to “bring the country together.” “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United,” he wrote on Truth Social the morning after the shooting. And a person close to Trump told The Washington Post on Sunday that the RNC’s planners “want speakers to dial it down, not dial it up.” But that quickly proved impossible for a party that has spent years marinating in grievance.

The mood on day one of the convention was, as John Hendrickson put it in The Atlantic today, “oddly serene.” But there were still signs of latent anger: When Trump walked out yesterday, after the opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, the delegates began chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” echoing Trump’s words after the attempted assassination.

Ron Johnson’s apparent speech mishap was an apt metaphor for the GOP’s inability to set a new tone: Instead of appealing to national unity, the senator from Wisconsin accused Democratic policies of being a “clear and present danger” to the country. Afterward, he blamed the teleprompter operator for not loading the new, more pacific speech he said he had intended to give.

As the night wore on, it became obvious that the problem wasn’t just the teleprompter. Impassioned speeches against Democrats’ policies are par for the course at the RNC, and such discourse is essential to our democracy. But yesterday’s agenda revealed something darker and angrier than policy disagreement. One featured speaker was North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican nominee for governor, who declared just last week that “some folks need killing.” “It’s time for somebody to say it,” Robinson remarked in an appearance at a local church. “It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity.”

And yet, despite the GOP’s newfound outrage over incendiary rhetoric, he was still on Monday’s RNC program. The rest of the schedule is filled with more aggrieved voices from MAGA world. Later this week, the former Fox News host and Vladimir Putin apologist Tucker Carlson will take the stage. He is unlikely to present a message of healing.

Also speaking Monday: Marjorie Taylor Greene, one day after she posted on Xitter:

We are in a battle between GOOD and EVIL.

The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars.

They want to lock up their political opponents, and terrorize innocent Americans who would tell the truth about it.

The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.

But, of course, all of this was overshadowed by Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate.

Posting on X just two days before the announcement, the Ohio senator baselessly accused the Biden campaign of causing Trump’s attempted assassination with its “rhetoric.” On Monday, Vance got his reward.

Indeed, Vance would be a curious choice if Trump were genuinely interested in lowering the temperature. The Ohio senator has distinguished himself by a willingness to not only surrender his principles, but also embrace the language and conspiracism of MAGA trolls. He’s lashed out at Democrats for being “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” As a Senate candidate, he blamed the fentanyl-related deaths of Republican voters on the Biden administration and stated that these deaths “look intentional.”…

And then, of course there is Trump Himself.

Even as his team seemed to ask other Republicans to tone down their rhetoric, the former president continued to attack his critics in and out of the justice system on social media. The day after he was shot at, Trump was already relitigating his many grievances on Truth Social, and once again appeared to defame E. Jean Carroll, the woman he sexually assaulted.

As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts — The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.

For a moment on Saturday, it felt as though we might start to see a gentler, more unifying Republican Party. But in politics, moments are fleeting, and as we were quickly reminded, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—a man whose core message is incapable of bringing us all together again.

You can read the whole thing here.

Nota Bene

• Nikki surrenders, because she’s Nikki and was always going to drink deep from the cup of self-abasement. Her timing was striking, because it came the day after the Trumpified GOP rejected many of her alleged core beliefs.

• Via Politico’s JMart: “By choosing the Ukraine-skeptic Ohio senator, Trump accelerates his party’s rejection of its Reaganite roots.”

  While toeing the party line and praising Vance in their public comments, in private the interventionists ranged from horrified to merely alarmed that one of the loudest critics of aiding Ukraine could soon be first in line for the presidency. The grimaces, sighs and whispered frustrations from the old guard as they made their way through the convention reception circuit were easy to find in the day after the selection.

• Via Politico. The GOP abandons conservatism.

  “‘I think what we’re witnessing now is a full on frontal assault on conservatism,’ said Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Vice President MIKE PENCE from 2019 to 2021, who is so estranged from this new version of the party that he was advised to skip the convention. ‘And you can look at the platform walking away from issues like life and traditional marriage, embracing tariffs across the board, but I feel like yesterday and last night went a step further when you have speakers that are basically saying NATO was at fault for [Russian President VLADIMIR] PUTIN’s invasion of Ukraine, and referring to job creators as ‘corporate pigs’ and announcing national right to work.’

• ProPublica: J.D. Vance Praised Alex Jones as a Truth-Teller in Speech to Leonard Leo-Backed Group. Because, of course.

  “If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

  Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

  He said that every person in attendance for his speech believed “something that’s a little crazy.” In his case, he said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”

• Bookmark this. Cathy Young catalogues Trump’s rhetoric of violent rhetoric:

  Hyperbolic and sometimes violence-inflected rhetoric is nothing new to American politics. But by any measure, Trump has taken this rhetoric to a shocking new level. He has done more than any other American political figure to erode our social and cultural norms against political violence.

  And, if elected, he is very likely to take us even further down that dangerous road.

• Meanwhile, among the Dems: “Schiff Warned of Wipeout for Democrats if Biden Remains in Race” - The New York Times

  Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who is running for Senate, warned during a private meeting with donors on Saturday that his party was likely to suffer overwhelming losses in November if President Biden remained at the top of the ticket, according to two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Schiff’s remarks at the meeting.

  If Mr. Biden remained, not only would he lose to former President Donald J. Trump, he could be enough of a drag on other Democratic candidates that the party would most likely lose the Senate and miss an opportunity to win control of the House, Mr. Schiff said at a fund-raiser in New York.

  “I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Mr. Schiff said during the meeting, according to a person with access to a transcription of a recording of the event. “And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.”

• And the polls keep trying to tell us something. Via Politico Playbook:

  The topline findings from interviews with over 15,000 voters in seven battleground states:

  1. “Alternative Democratic candidates run ahead of President Biden by an average of three points across the battleground states. Nearly every tested Democrat performs better than the President. This includes Vice President [KAMALA] HARRIS who runs better than the President (but behind the average alternative).”

  2. “Some of the gains are coming from winning undecideds and those previously supporting a third party. However, alternative candidates are also pulling votes from Donald Trump. All candidates continue to hold the Democratic base.”

  3. “Voters are looking for a fresh face. Those more closely tied to the current administration perform relatively worse than other tested candidates.”

  BONUS —→

  Your must-read of the day from Charlie Warzel: “The Flattening Machine. The chaotic aftermath of the assassination attempt shows a toxic information system working as designed.”

  Our information ecosystem is actually pretty good while the dust is up. But the second it begins to settle, that same system creates chaos. As my own shock wore off, leaving me to contemplate the enormity of the moment, I could sense a familiar shift on Reddit, X, and other platforms.

  The basic facts held attention for only so long before being supplanted by wild speculation—people were eager to post about the identity of the shooter, his possible motives, the political ramifications of the event, the specter of more violence. It may be human nature to react this way in traumatic moments—to desperately attempt to fill an information void—but the online platforms so many of us frequent have monetized and gamified this instinct, rewarding those who create the most compelling stories.

  And, finally

  Because irony was long ago beaten to death by hammers.