Trump Dynasty Takes Over

The Trump Dynasty Takes Over the GOP

What began as a revolt against the Bushes has given birth to a new dynasty.

By Rich Lowry

Watching the GOP convention, you could be forgiven for believing that the brightest stars in the Republican firmament are all Trumps.

Members of the Trump family have been the best, most high-profile performers. During the first two nights of the convention, the hall began to empty as soon as the Trumps left the stage, its energy and purpose sapped by the departure of the animating family.

Poor Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, a rising star, became an afterthought when she followed Melania on the program Monday night and addressed a crowd about as big as the die-hards left in a ballpark after a 3-hour rain delay.

The Trump phenomenon began, in part, as a revolt against a dynasty (the Bushes) and here we are celebrating a cult of personality with the family in the starring role (and one of the patriarch’s sons, Donald Jr., already marked out for a future political career).

My friend Charles Hurt of the Washington Times, an early adopter of Trumpite populism, couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for the ascendancy of people who are rich and famous thanks to their relationship to someone else who is rich and famous: “Behold! A new American political dynasty is born!”

Whatever this sensibility is, it isn’t small-r republican.

Which isn’t to take anything away from the Trumps: Melania was elegant; Tiffany was endearingly poised for a recent college graduate; Donald Jr. was an impressive platform speaker and, for a Trump, notably Republican. They did their family proud.

Yet this is a strange standard for a political party. The GOP campaign feels a little like an exercise in what the great social scientist Edward Banfield, in his classic study of a backward town in Italy in the 1950s, deemed “amoral famialism.”

Banfield described how each family’s focus on its own narrow interest made it impossible to build social trust. The rule was, “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.”

Certainly this has been Donald Trump’s M.O. throughout his business career—where he has extended no undue consideration to anyone outside the charmed circle of his family—and his politics has some of the same hallmarks.

The Trumps are reckless with the dignity of their supporters. Because the campaign basically consists of the family with only limited supporting infrastructure, the convention was marred by the avoidable Melania plagiarism flap. The Trumps extended the agony of what should have been a 12-hour story by denying the mistake for days, forcing loyalists like Sean Spicer of the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to go through ridiculous contortions to maintain the campaign line.

Sometimes the only thing worse than being a target of Donald Trump’s ire is signing up for his team. It will take an army of psychologists to understand why, having picked Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, Trump felt compelled to belittle him during his announcement and a subsequent “60 Minutes” interview, except perhaps that Trump demands submission and then loses respect for those who comply.

If his family has thrived at the convention, a party stalwart like Paul Ryan has struggled to fit in. The Speaker of the House gave an adorable speech from a warm-and-fuzzy alternative reality where Republican voters had endorsed latter-day Jack Kemp-style Republicanism this year, and then grafted an endorsement of Trump onto it.

Christie has as much claim to be a member of the extended Trump family as any beloved valet, yet didn’t seem to realize or care that in his indictment of Hillary Clinton he condemned positions shared by Trump (warm regard for Vladimir Putin, a hands-off policy in Syria, support for an opening to the Castro regime in Cuba).

Indeed, for a Trump convention, the Republican gathering has been bereft of renditions of the Trump message that won the day in the Republican primaries: immigration restriction, protectionism and a noninterventionist foreign policy that would accommodate dictators and, in all likelihood, outsource the military campaign against the Islamic State.

Even Donald Jr.’s terrific speech sounded decidedly un-Trumpian notes. It was welcome to hear him say “freedom requires a limited government,” but hard to imagine the words passing his father’s lips absent a speechwriter somehow getting them in front of him on a teleprompter.

One reason for the (deservedly) fierce attack on Hillary Clinton at the convention is that opposition to her is the only political glue holding together Republican officeholders and their party’s nominee.

All that said, the convention will almost certainly help Trump. If nothing else, the fanfare of officially bestowing the party’s nomination on him will further legitimize his candidacy for voters. It’s possible he will emerge from the convention with a lead in the polls and in the hunt for an upset in the fall—and a resounding victory for any and Trumps everywhere.