Republican convention

The Trump Show

For all the spectacle, the Republican convention will do even less of whatever it is conventions are supposed to do.

By Jack Shafer

Who’s looking forward to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland—besides presumptive nominee Donald J. Trump, that is?

Damn few top Republicans, according to a report this week in POLITICO by Alex Isenstadt. Senators, governors and leading members of the House of Representatives are sending their regrets by the dozens to the July 18-21 affair. If they’re attending, many are telegraphing their intent to avoid speaking from the podium on behalf of Trump. Corporations like Wells Fargo, UPS, Ford and others who usually sponsor the event are bailing, too, threatening to turn the Cleveland confab into a Potemkin Village of a convention, if not a ghost town.

Perhaps only journalists, whose attendance carries with it no kind of endorsement, seem drawn to the Republican Convention. Journalists love to disparage the political conventions as overscripted pageants, which they are, designed to sway the voters who tune in on television, which is true, and persistently complain that the events produce very little reportable “news”—a fact that is easily confirmed. Whatever news a political convention does generate can be collected more cheaply from afar via Skype and Facebook, as David Corn of Mother Jones pointed out  to the Huffington Post four years ago. But complaining about the convention’s emptiness, bitching about the horrible lodgings miles from the action, and carping about the parties from which one is excluded is only a part of the ritual. No political journalist would ever decline the opportunity to attend.

For reporters and TV viewers who have groused about the vapidity of political conventions, Trump has heard their plea and vowed to rewrite the script. He’s now denying any intention to speak all three nights of the convention, but he is still promising to fully integrate his family into the festivities and to pour enough entertainment sugar over the proceedings to give the entire nation diabetes. “I don’t want people to think I’m grandstanding—which I’m not,” he told the New York Times, then adding, “But it would get high ratings.”

A political version of a beauty pageant appears to be in the offing—which is logical given the fact that Trump owned and operated the Miss Universe franchise for two decades. But who will play the beauties? Variety reports the low likelihood that any top stars will appear at the arena on Trump’s behalf, which means a record number of B-list celebrities, politicians and reality TV stars may be conscripted.

But by draining the usual tedium from the convention and replacing it with a new variety of tedium, Trump may be making a political mistake. Political conventions serve to advance the ritual sociodrama that is the quadrennial struggle for presidential power, as anthropologist James R. McLeod instructed us in a 1999 paper (which I’ve cited before). Prior to the conventions, the candidates battle one another in primaries and caucuses, promulgating a kind of political upheaval that resembles ritualized war. Political campaigns are “rituals of rebellion,” McLeod writes, “in which the voices of the constituent units of the society are vented publicly through the process of campaigning.”

Even when a candidate enters the nominating convention as the presumptive winner, the party’s culture may still be tainted by the residue of the primary battles. The losers are allowed to bring their grievances to the convention to make a final expression of them before burying them before uniting with the victor in combat against the opposing party. Symbolic unity can be achieved by giving the losers podium time in a desirable TV slot, or a plank in the platform that nobody reads anyway, or some other gesture, or promises of presidential appointments should the nominee win the election. (Loser Bernie Sanders is doing this—a lot of this—inside the Democratic Party.) And so the wheel turns.

But the wheel can’t turn if the major losers refuse to participate in the healing ceremony, which is how the 2016 Republican convention is shaping up. Something like this happened in 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination. The non-Goldwaterites didn’t boycott the convention as the non-Trump forces are this year, but they did resist making peace with Goldwater, refusing to participate in the sociodrama of the 1964 presidential election. Disaster followed for the party.

To bring it back to this year’s convention, it may never have been Trump’s intent to banish his Republican foes from the convention, but his words and deeds—his refusal to “pivot” toward more predictably Republican positions or to make other face-saving accommodations—have dissuaded all but the most toadying of Republicans from participating in the Trump convention.

As the 15,000-strong news media army rolls into Cleveland, several ready-made stories will be there for the journalists to tell, none of them to Trump’s liking. Denied the traditional story about a splintered party “coming together,” reporters will zero in on Trump’s imperial style, and frame him as a modern-day Caligula who has attempted to stamp out all opposition, continuing many of the themes already present in news stories about him. For Republicans who have the stomach to attend, the convention will give them the loudest possible megaphone to express their distaste for Trump. And finally, the relative news void created by Trump will free reporters to give blanket coverage to the inevitable street protests against him.

Trump’s convention will contain so much of his winning that, as he promised in September, you’ll soon be bored by it.