Trump's Convention: Tragedy Or Farce?

The Trump Convention has been a strange mash-up of three previous moments in Republican history -- each of which ended tragically. First, most seminally, is Joe McCarthy's rise and fall, and the witch-hunt he unleashed.
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Photo by: Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx 7/20/16 Donald Trump at day 3 of The Republican National Convention. (Cleveland, Ohio)
Photo by: Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx 7/20/16 Donald Trump at day 3 of The Republican National Convention. (Cleveland, Ohio)

The Trump Convention has been a strange mash-up of three previous moments in Republican history -- each of which ended tragically. First, most seminally, is Joe McCarthy's rise and fall, and the witch-hunt he unleashed. Trump himself, his campaign manager Paul Manafort, and advisor Roger Stone, were mentored and indoctrinated by Trail-Gunner Joe's consiglieri, Roy Cohn. This is Trump's political core, and he calls on it repeatedly in crisis.

Trump drew directly on McCarthyism when, after Orlando, he unleashed Newt Gingrich to call for the re-establishment of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to ferret out Muslim Americans who were planning terror attacks. Trump political adviser Roger Stone accused Clinton aide Huma Abedin of being a terrorist agent working on behalf of the Saudi government. (The one real Saudi Agent highly placed in the 2016 presidential campaign is Trump's Campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort, Stone's business partner, who lobbied for them against Israel, after previously brokering corrupt Saudi arms deals with the French.)

Then, on the opening night in Cleveland, Manafort drew on another dark moment, Richard's Nixon's Miami Beach Convention with its hard-edged, divisive and racially tinged politics, "If you go back and read," Manafort said at a Bloomberg News breakfast, "that speech is pretty much on line with a lot of the issues that are going on today."

Reporting this, The New York Times summed up Manafort's model from Nixon as being a "path to victory this fall through the exploitation of the country's anxieties about race, its fears of terrorism and its mood of disaffection, especially among white, working-class Americans."

Notably, The Times did not suggest that Trump would emulate Nixon's complex substantive legacy: wage and price controls, an opening to China after decades as an anti-Communist hawk, a Southern strategy after an earlier role as a civil rights leader, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The third ingredient being mixed on the banks of the Cuyahoga River is Barry Goldwater's 1974 San Francisco Convention. The symbolic moment was the vision of Trump standing to the side pumping his fist as his delegates booed and drowned out Ted Cruz for refusing to endorse Tail Gunner Donald. Revolutions, it has been said every since the fall of the Bastille, eat their young. This was the year the conservative Revolution that seized the Republican party for Goldwater reached launched its Reign of Terror. Goldwater might not have approved -- but he set the template.

But it is on substance that Trumpism has more to do with Goldwater's platform than with either McCarthy or Nixon.

Goldwater was willing, and eager, to break the Eisenhower Republican coalition apart on the issue of its leadership on civil rights, in which Nixon played a significant part. (It was House and Senate Republicans, not Democrats, who gave Lyndon Johnson the votes for his civil rights bills.) Without Goldwater having accepted the first Republican Jim Crow Convention delegations at San Francisco, Nixon (and Manafort) could not have executed their Southern Strategy.

Neither trade nor immigration was a major issue in 1964, but one of Goldwater's main attacks on Rockefeller was that his foreign policy represented "America Last." "Unpredictability" in foreign policy? Goldwater trade-marked the concept, as well as Trump's scorn for multilateralism, spectacularly displayed on Wednesday in the promise to abandon NATO's commitment to defend any member nation attacked by the Soviet Union. Nixon and McCarthy were both strong advocates of collective action against communism.

Trump's ambition, and Manafort's, is to outdo these three progenitors. He has already outdone McCarthy, who was taken down by the Republican establishment, after McCarthy's Senate hearings investigating alleged communist influence in the military. Army counsel Joseph Welch was waiting for McCarthy to go too far. When McCarthy repeatedly attacked a young law associate in Welch's firm, Welch skewered him with the comment, "Have you left no sense of decency, sir." This moment, (which I at the age of nine was called in to witness on TV by my mother) was the beginning of the end for McCarthy and McCarthyism.

This year proved that the modern Republican party, at least, has no sense of decency left. November will tell whether Trump gets to exceed Goldwater by winning the presidency. History alone would then record whether Trump's hubris and narcissism produce even more spectacular catastrophes than Nixon's downfall.

But perhaps Marx will prove correct -- that history repeats itself, but only the first time is a tragedy. The second is a farce. Let's hope so.

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