Reports from the first two days of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee suggest that the mood of the room isn’t merely energised but giddy. Some of us know that feeling; the sense of jubilation that comes after suffering a near-death experience (or, for those who haven’t, see losing then finding one’s wallet) that the Republicans and their leader are at present enjoying.
Two days after a failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump, delegates in Wisconsin crashed around with the hysterical relief of people whose plane just dropped 4,000ft, then discovered, after all that, they’re not going to die.
For Trump himself, this mood must be even more ecstatic. His appearance at the convention on Monday alongside JD Vance, his pick for vice president, and assorted other guest speakers, was an illustration of the largesse brought about by happiness. Trump hates sharing a platform. His speech is usually peppered with insults and mockery. He scowls and accuses, or sulks and slumps. So over the moon was he on Monday, however, that a man who has been known to sink to Fidel Castro levels of unfiltered ramblings in public simply sat there, beaming, apparently unmoved to speak.
Quite apart from surviving Saturday’s bullet, of course, Trump has a lot to be happy about. On Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the indictment against him for removing classified material from the White House and keeping it at his home in Mar-a-Lago. He is ahead in the polls in all seven swing states. I also suspect that Trump is enjoying the unprecedented novelty of occupying the moral high ground. After the shooting on Saturday, the Democrats expressed sympathy and concern for the former president, while everyone agreed it was very wrong of someone to have tried to kill him. For a brief window, Trump has been not only at the centre of the world’s attention, but, uniquely in the life of a man so personally and professionally unpleasant, proffered plenty of sympathy, too.
And what a cheerful chipmunk he is! “I want to try to unite our country, but I don’t know if that’s possible,” said Trump on Sunday, experimenting – we must assume fleetingly – with not being an arsehole. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.” You could hear in these remarks not only a possible pivot to Jesus, but also a sense of disbelief: so this is what it feels like to be admired, praised and respected for doing something brave rather than saying or doing something rancid.
Which brings us to Vance, the junior senator for Ohio, and a recent convert both to Trumpism and hardline Catholicism. I can’t look at Vance without recalling, incredulously, a time in the recent past when the former Republican house speaker Paul Ryan was deemed the incarnation of smooth-talking evil – Ryan wanted to privatise Medicare and reduce the top rate of tax to 25%, nursery slope stuff by today’s standards – or poor old Mike Pence, rocking a facelift even worse than Joe Biden’s.
How innocent we were. Vance, a grownup Chucky with a beard, may be an even stricter proponent of Trumpism than its originator. Along with Vance’s aggressive stance on tariffs, apologism for 6 January and opposition to abortion rights even in instances of rape, it’s worth remembering that one of the takeaways of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling memoir of 2016, was that poor people shouldn’t eat steak when rice and beans will do. To British ears, everything Vance says has the shadow of the workhouse behind it.
And so to the convention itself, which serves as a reminder that, whatever else their shortcomings, Republicans do put on a better show than the Democrats. To wit: Rudy Giuliani staggered sideways into a folding chair; Amber Rose, the model and TV personality, opened as a keynote speaker (Rose used to hate Trump, a detail that might have stood against her at the convention were it not for the fact that, sorry to be gross, you could tell Republicans simply couldn’t believe someone that hot had shown up to endorse them).
Also present among the delegates, some of whom wore symbolic ear bandages and T-shirts featuring Saturday’s photo of Trump unvanquished, were various failed British politicians including Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, both of whom engaged in a doomed effort to get someone, anyone, to show up to their events. Like everything that Trump touches, the tone of all of this had an unreality to it that can only be described as camp, further proof of something we already know; that there is no event grievous enough to flip these clowns into serious political people, fit for stewarding the most powerful country on Earth.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
