The Republican Party surrenders to the Trump 'show'

President Trump, on the first day of the Republican Convention.LOGAN CYRUS / AFP

To the cry of "Four more years!" Donald Trump has received a small audience from Charlotte (North Carolina), somewhat soulless by the demands of social distancing, at the start of a Republican Convention that will try for four days to convince voters that the 45th president of the United States United deserves a second term. The candidate has drawn attention from the beginning, after being nominated, with a long and chaotic speech that has demonstrated his absolute power in a party that has even given up on debating a program. “To be continued,” explained the training, “enthusiastically supporting the leader's agenda.

It took only a few hours for Trump to grab the spotlight, making a surprise trip to Charlotte to accept the nomination with one of those hypomanic showman speeches that has lasted for an hour. At one point he said "to finish", and still spoke for 20 more minutes.

If the Republicans wanted freshness to counter the canned point of the Democratic Convention, they have had it even before the official programming started at night, with a frenzied speech that went from the economy to the Remdesivir; from employment to the "Chinese plague"; from the jokes about Biden to the number of televisions on the presidential plane; from the wall on the border to the millions of Jeff Bezos; from the bias of the media to the ISIS caliphate; of the 300 conservative judges appointed during his tenure to orders for corn that are delivered to China; from energy independence to the threat of the “super radical” left; from tariffs on countries that "have been taking advantage of the United States for years" to promising to hire more police. And, as the common thread of the chaos, the recurrent accusations of the Democrats of planning an electoral fraud with the vote by mail, which fill the horizon of the November elections with concern.

"We caught them doing bad things in 2016 and now they are preparing bad things," Trump has said, alluding to baseless allegations that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden spied on his campaign. “They are using the covid to steal the elections. You have to be careful. This time they try to do it with the mail vote scam. We have to win. It is the most important election in the history of our country ”.

Trump's first intervention has been a disorderly review of an ideology and an agenda set individually by the president. To such an extent it has come to mold the Great Old Party at will, that the Republican National Committee has announced that this year, for the first time in its history, it will not adopt a new electoral program, but will “continue to enthusiastically support America's agenda. First from the president ”.

The decision was made, they explain, because the scope of the convention has been reduced by the pandemic and they did not want "a small contingent of thin people to formulate a new program." Democrats, although they held their convention entirely virtual last week, did adopt a new program. “It is no longer the Republican Party. He is a cult of Trump, ”lamented on Twitter the former chief of staff of Vice President Dan Quayle and prestigious conservative political analyst Bill Kristol.

Party programs in the United States are non-binding documents that express the principles and positions of training on important issues. An exercise of some interest in the case of Republicans, after a few years in which President Trump has broken with what was considered the party's orthodoxy on key issues such as foreign policy or fiscal policy. In replacement of the program, the Trump campaign released the day before a document with the "central principles" of the president for a second term. A list strikingly devoid of detail, with promises such as "return to normalcy in 2021" or "drain the globalist quagmire by standing up to international organizations that harm American citizens."

The first day began with the traditional roll call , in which the delegates of the different states and territories of the country give their votes to the candidates for president and vice president. Without competition, Donald Trump and Mike Pence were overwhelmingly nominated. Unlike the Democratic Convention, the roll call was held in person, although with an auditorium populated by only 336 delegates. In response to the message of the Democratic convention that what is at stake is democracy, Vice President Pence, after accepting his nomination, has defended that "it is the economy that is on the ballot." There was no shortage of criticism of Joe Biden, of whom it has been said in the roll call that "he is hiding in the dark, waiting to take the lives of our unborn babies."

But President Trump has drawn all the attention from before he even reached the auditorium, attacking the media on Twitter from Air Force One for not following an event that marks a turning point for him live. The party needs an urgent change in the campaign narrative. With the script disrupted by the pandemic, the president walks away from Biden in polls, both domestically and in decisive states. And if anyone can correct the course, Republicans trust, that is Donald Trump.

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