Republican National Convention 2024

In talk about what a second presidential term for Donald Trump might bring, one name has become the shorthand for all the horrifying things that might await: Project 2025.

It’s been called “authoritarian” and “dystopian.” It’s the talk of TikTok. Some Democrats see it as the ace in the hole that could help Kamala Harris beat Trump in November. Trump has claimed, implausibly, to know nothing about it. And Trump’s top campaign officials have recently attacked it in increasingly venomous terms.

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has two faces.

From one angle, the operation looks disorientingly competent and normal: The Republican nominee has pivoted to the center on various hot-button issues and sought to broaden his base with symbolic overtures to traditionally Democratic constituencies.

Throughout the entire Republican National Convention, I struggled with one big question: What is the Republican Party for?

That it was for former President Donald Trump went almost without saying. Look at the way that solidarity ear bandages became the RNC’s must-have fashion accessory, or how long the audience managed to put up big cheers during his historically long and rambling acceptance speech on Thursday night.

If Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, Republicans have a ready-made case against her: They can say she was President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” in charge of immigration and the border, and she failed.

At least seven different speakers at the Republican National Convention over the last week have used that moniker to describe Harris, from the president of Goya Foods to anti-immigration activists to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.

But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.

Many have interpreted Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as signaling a new age of Republican economic populism.

In this view, until now, the precise ideological contours of Trumpism had been muddy, as the mercurial demagogue oscillated between populist heresies and conservative orthodoxy — vowing to impose price controls on pharmaceutical companies one day, fighting to slash taxes for the rich and gut Medicaid the next.

I’m no fan of Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but when I picked up the book it’s based on recently, in light of rumors that its author, J.D. Vance, would be Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, I expected it to feel more substantive than its screen adaptation.

At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad.

“Horrific crimes. Murders. Gang attacks against our police. Child sex crimes. And the brutal killing of a nursing student on her college campus.”

That’s the kind of rhetoric Republican convention-goers were exposed to in Milwaukee on Tuesday, after an ominous video — narrated with a deep voice that sounded like it came out of a 2000s action movie trailer — depicted a dystopian version of Joe Biden’s America.

It wasn’t groundbreaking that the speakers who took to the Republican National Convention stage Tuesday spent much of the night railing against President Joe Biden’s border and immigration policies. Biden was enabling a “border bloodbath,” crowd signs read, as congressional leaders accused Biden of enabling a border “invasion.”

Nor was it new to see them use provocative, inflammatory, or extremist rhetoric to talk about immigrants and the Democratic incumbents. “Every day Americans are dying,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz thundered, “murdered, assaulted, and raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”

In one of the more interesting moments of the first night of the Republican National Convention, South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott claimed that former President Donald Trump surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt was nothing short of a miracle.

“Our God still delivers, and he still sets free. Because the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but the American lion got back up on his feet,” Scott said, following up the sermon with a roar into the microphone. The crowd roared right along with him.

I met Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Donald Trump’s new choice for vice president, in the summer of 2022. I was covering a conservative conference in Israel, and Vance was the surprise VIP attraction. We chatted for a bit about the connections between right-wing movements across the world, and what American conservatives could learn from foreign peers. He was friendly, thoughtful, and smart — much smarter than the average politician I’ve interviewed.

Yet his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.

In a normal presidential campaign, the announcement of a running mate gets a lot of media attention — but has little immediate importance.

But Donald Trump’s campaign this year is not normal. And his veep pick this year could well be the most important such choice of our time – with major implications for the future of both the Republican Party and American democracy as a whole.