There Isn’t a New GOP—Or a New Trump

For a few brief moments after Saturday's events in Butler, Pennsylvania, it appeared that perhaps Donald Trump would try to dial back heated rhetoric and according to his own words seek to unite Americans. Some talking heads even speculated that the brush with mortality might cause Trump to engage in some introspection and result in both him and the GOP to make a course change and perhaps waiver back towards the Republican Party of old.  All of that turned out to be a short lived fantasy and Trump and speaker after speaker - e.g., Marjorie Taylor Green, Ron DeSantis and numerous others - at the Republican National Convention made clear that the message of division and hatred of others remain the hallmarks of Trump and the party he has subverted.  Gays, migrants, liberals, Democrats and others were attacked and depicted as enemies to America and "real Americans."  The Republican Party of Eisenhower and even Reagan is truly dead and gone and seemingly will never return.  The GOP is now fully formed in Trump's image with endless lies, falsehoods and misogyny now requirements for a  place at the GOP table.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the swiftness with which unifying the country was flushed down the toilet:

For a moment on Saturday, it felt as though we might start to see a gentler, more unifying political climate. But Donald Trump is still Donald Trump, and his message is incapable of bringing America together.

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.” . . . . 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. . . . 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.

But 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.”

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.

Far from being a voice of political comity, Vance has called loudly on the right to “seize the institutions of the left.” Vance has said that if Trump returns to power, he should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. … And then when the courts stop you, stand before the country” and say, quoting Andrew Jackson, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

And then 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.

[W]e were quickly reminded, Donald Trump is still Donald Trump—a man whose core message is incapable of bringing us all together again.