Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
Republicans in 2024: Still a party of one
At the convention, lip service to unity, lies where they could be leveraged and little about the hardest problems we face.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
July 19, 2024 at 5:40PM
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Four years ago, after watching the 2020 Republican National Convention, we on the Star Tribune Editorial Board observed that the GOP had given up its platform to a single focus: its devotion to then-President Donald Trump. The party had ceased to be about policies and had invested its heart and soul — its reason for being — in one man.
We had seen nothing yet. Not only did Republicans at the 2024 convention this week adopt Trump’s proposed platform whole; they almost literally anointed him as God’s chosen favorite.
Far be it from a secular editorial board to argue points of theology with anyone — except, possibly, with a national political party that claims divine backing for its candidate. Americans are entirely free to interpret a near-miss assassination attempt as a mark of God’s favor, if that is what their faith leads them to believe. But it strikes us as dangerous to assert from the convention stage that the deity altered the path of a bullet to protect Donald Trump in order that he might be returned to the White House.
Speaker after speaker repeated the suggestion that God had not finished with Donald Trump yet. In his 90-minute-plus acceptance speech Thursday night, Trump took up the theme: “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God,” he declared. During the assassination attempt, he recalled, “I felt very safe because I had God on my side.”
We trust that Americans will make their choice in November based on more conventional factors. Unfortunately, Trump and the convention that nominated him in Milwaukee left too many of those factors unaddressed.
Climate change? The words did not pass Trump’s lips. Abortion? No. Ukraine? Trump claimed that Russia would not have invaded had he been in office at the time; his evidence for that claim was that it had not done so while he was president. Topics that are crucial to the future of the planet went unremarked, while the former president’s defenders cast him as persecuted, censored, slandered.
“They’re after all of us, and you just happened to be standing in their way,” said Trump’s son Eric, addressing himself to the former president. “Our greatest retribution will be your success.”
The rhetoric of retribution held little comfort for undocumented immigrants. “I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall,” the former president said. “We have to stop the invasion into our country that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. We’re not going to let that happen.”
He spoke glowingly about the “liquid gold under our feet,” meaning oil, and promised, “We will drill, baby, drill.” The crowd loved it.
Despite the discord promised by such positions, he presented himself as a crusader for national unity.
“I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America,” he said. “For there is no victory in winning for half of America.” Even so, he took time in his speech to call former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy” and to describe himself as “the one saving democracy for the people of our country.”
As is his custom, Trump peppered his remarks with falsehoods, exaggerations and half-truths. He said he had delivered the biggest tax cuts ever; he didn’t. He said inflation under President Joe Biden was “just simply crushing our people like never before”; it was higher in 1980, and even the recent inflation, which never reached that previous peak, has moderated. He claimed that violent crime is up; in fact, it’s down.
Trump had arrived in Milwaukee with a favorable wind at his back. First, a debate went well for him by going disastrously for his opponent. A Supreme Court ruling held that he was largely immune from prosecution. That was followed by a judge’s decision to throw out one of the remaining cases against him. And in the midst of all this, the opposition party — the one currently in residence at the White House — was in disarray over whether its leader should continue his campaign.
With all of that going for him, a near-death experience might have been an opportunity for Trump to show a certain magnanimity, even graciousness, toward his opponents. He could have softened his tone and actually begun to move the country toward the kind of unity he says he seeks. It appears, instead, that the kind of unity Donald Trump wants is a unity devoted to himself.
Now that Gov. Tim Walz’s vice presidential bid has ended, there’s important work to do at home. Reinvigorating that “One Minnesota” campaign is a must.
