Anti-party in a ghost town: Trump's undead GOP holds an un-convention

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Anti-party in a ghost town: Trump's undead GOP holds an un-convention
Donald Trump's Republican Party has no history, no principles and no ideology — because it's just a front

By ANDREW O'HEHIR
Executive Editor
PUBLISHED JULY 18, 2024 12:01PM (EDT)


(Salon) MILWAUKEE — I don’t know whether the folks who tried to sell “vegan barbecue” from a booth in the strip of concession tents outside the 2024 Republican National Convention got bad advice or simply took an ill-advised leap of faith. Either way, I’m almost surprised they were allowed to do it. Doesn’t vegan barbecue sound like exactly the sort of Obama-era DEI woke outrage that Donald Trump would like to outlaw or defund, or at least humiliate into nonexistence?

But the cognitive dissonance of this convention goes well beyond that forlorn, misbegotten entrepreneurial venture. (I was relieved to see, at last, a couple of actual customers approach the booth; definitely journalists.) Amid all the obvious headline drama of the 2024 presidential campaign, which has already seen one candidate survive an attempted assassination and the other still struggling to survive an attempted intra-party coup, the RNC has so far been a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event.

....(snip)....

History is not being made here, so it must be going on someplace else. This convention is underpopulated, overpoliced and entirely devoid of drama. For local businesses, the alleged economic benefits have been disastrous, which could be read as a larger metaphor. Many square blocks of downtown Milwaukee’s normally vibrant riverfront district have become a fenced-off or blockaded exclusion zone, reminiscent of Belfast in the 1980s. It feels like a ghost town, and the ghosts moving through it are the delegates and honored guests and media vultures like me, halfway pretending to take part in a political ritual that lost all possible meaning before most of us were born.

....(snip)....

It’s difficult to characterize the collective mood of Republicans based on this convention. They seem listless and confused and mildly delusional, like the people at the vegan barbecue booth. But they also believe they are poised to win a national election, and that part seems plausible enough. Perhaps the source of the cognitive dissonance is that the people gathered in Milwaukee represent something, or part of something, but they haven’t figured out what. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/18/anti-party-in-a-ghost-town-soulless-holds-an-un-convention/