A Republican convention to cultivate above all the personality of Trump

Fabien Deglise

Published at 0:00 Analysis

• United States

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Tensions between the establishment and a handful of fanatics new to the party, members of a faction called “Truly Grassroots for Trump,” forced the reorganization to the last minute of the list of 54 citizens who will travel to Wisconsin next week to celebrate the choice of Donald Trump as Republican candidate for the November presidential election.

“Alarming irregularities,” emphasizes the Missouri Independent, had managed to sideline old hands from the conservative political party in this state, such as two candidates for governor: a senator and a secretary of state. These longtime Republicans now dominate the delegation, which leaves the radicals a little further on the margins.

In Arizona, three Republicans recently indicted for seeking to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election in order to keep Donald Trump in power were chosen by local Republicans, with full knowledge of the facts, as delegates leaving for Milwaukee in a few days. The group is also made up of notorious conspiracy theorists and insurgents. And the problems come with…

Donald Trump's campaign team recently cleaned up its ranks of those Arizona delegates after being informed that a small group was seeking to foment a rebellion against Donald Trump at the convention, the < reported i>Washington Post. These delegates dreamed of replacing the ex-president with his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a leading ultraconservative figure within Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement.

< p>Concerns about the ex-president's new criminal status and his possible imprisonment following his conviction in New York in June, but also fears about his entourage, to whom he would be too close, according to several of these extremist militants from the deep state — this state fabricated by conspiracy theorists to simplify their understanding of the world — would have justified the movement… nipped in the bud at the approaching the republican high mass.

“It is theoretically possible that some delegates will oppose Donald Trump at the Milwaukee convention, but this remains highly unlikely,” noted political scientist James McCann of Purdue University in Indiana in an interview. “Of course, there may be visible anti-Trump activism in Milwaukee, driven by both the moderate and radical sides of the party, but nothing to disrupt the ex-president's nomination. »

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Avoid hiccups

Donald Trump's entourage is working hard behind the scenes for months so that nothing hinders the destiny that the populist has been writing for years. And, above all, to avoid the hiccups that accompanied his rise within the Republicans during the 2016 campaign.

During the convention that year, cries were heard, calling for the rejection of this candidacy considered at the time unserious and above all too egocentric.

“During the primaries, Republican voters showed little desire to abandon Donald Trump as a candidate, despite his 2020 defeat and his convictions and indictments for multiple crimes,” said Rosalyn Cooperman, director of the Department of Science. policy from the University of Mary Washington, Virginia, joined by Le Devoirin the last few days. “Donald Trump has successfully intimidated Republicans in Congress into getting behind him, and especially into not expressing their unease with him so as not to incur his wrath. In this context, there is currently no viable path for another Republican candidate in this presidential election.”

The replacement of a presidential candidate from one of the two major parties chosen by voters in the primaries is an event that has never occurred in the modern history of American political conventions. “There have been cases of internal partisan divisions,” notes James McCann, citing the 1980 Democratic convention, at which Senator Ted Kennedy went to open war with President Jimmy Carter to pull the party to the left. In 1992, at the Republican convention, Patrick Buchanan had also undermined the unity of the party and its candidate, George Bush Sr. “These divisions generally tarnish the image of the elected candidate, but they do not prevent his nomination.”

To avoid this scenario, Donald Trump’s campaign team has pulled out all the stops to keep the choreography of this tight convention (and above all centered) on the former president — and incidentally on the running mate that the populist is preparing to choose.

The vote of the 5,000 delegates from across the country gathered in Wisconsin starting July 15 should therefore be a formality.

Electoral platform

The Trumpists have also stormed the committee of this convention responsible for establishing the party’s electoral platform for the November presidential election, a document that reads like a profession of faith in Donald Trump rather than a statement of the party’s values, although the latter approach is the one traditionally taken. privileged.

Unveiled Monday, the 16-page platform echoes, among other things, the populist’s many statements on the radical regulation of immigration at the southern border and on customs tariffs targeting Chinese products, in addition to renewing his attacks on the administration of Joe Biden, which he holds responsible for inflation as well as the duration of the conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine.

“Political conventions serve above all to promote the party’s ‘brand’ to the general public in the run-up to the presidential election and to highlight certain elements favorable to the candidate who was chosen during the primaries,” says James McCann.

“Internal conflict would distract from these messages. And to avoid this, Trump's entourage risks conducting considerable surveillance during this convention to stifle any form of dissent before it becomes the center of attention. »

A center that Donald Trump, a leader with autocratic overtones whose political strength is partly based on the cult of his personality, necessarily prefers to keep to himself.