Trump's Nuremberg Rally: The 2024 Republican National Convention

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I started writing this at 9:15 p.m. Pacific time on Thursday, July 18, just a few minutes after Donald Trump gave his closing speech at the end of the 2024 Republican convention. It was an unusual speech only in its sheer length – about 93 minutes – and in the shameless manner with which he began it by milking the audience for sympathy over his narrow survival of the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.

Trump began the speech with a tear-filled recitation of how he would have been killed if he hadn’t opportunely turned his head away from the crowd to look at a giant chart he was displaying that purported to prove the Biden administration had unsealed the U.S.-Mexico border and let in 18 million undocumented immigrants. Like other speakers on the convention’s closing night, including his son Eric and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, Trump literally attributed his survival to divine intervention.

He even had the Jumbotron screens in the hallway broadcast still photos of his head after the bullet grazed him, showing the blood dripping down his ears, while he explained that his doctors had told him the ears bleed more than any other part of the body. The message came through loud and clear that GOD ALMIGHTY WANTS DONALD TRUMP TO BE PRESIDENT AGAIN, and if God Himself wants him to be in the White House once more, who are we mere voters to stand in his way?

Another ominous point about how the 2024 Republican Convention dealt with the attempted assassination of Trump just two days before it started was the way in which they hinted that Biden and the Democrats had had something to do with it. They didn’t come right out and make the accusation, but they blamed the Democrats’ rhetoric calling Trump’s re-election “a threat to democracy” and said that had probably inspired Trump’s would-be assassin.

Trump also brought out a mannequin with the helmet and field jacket of Buffalo firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed at his Butler rally trying to shield his family, and in a weird move he hugged and kissed it before returning to the podium for the rest of his speech. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of the rally a few years ago in which Trump similarly hugged and kissed an American flag on the stage.

Otherwise it was a pretty standard recitation of Trump’s Greatest Hits. Time and time again he described something – both good and bad – as the greatest/biggest/worst thing anyone in the world had ever seen before. He spoke in front of a moving platform that arose and ascended from the stage – for a moment I thought they’d have Trump himself ascend from an elevator, but they stopped short of that one – in front of a huge display of lights spelling the name “TRUMP” reminiscent of the way entertainers used to perform on TV with their names literally in lights behind them. (Judy Garland was famous for doing this in virtually all her TV appearances. She was also a lifelong liberal who caught hell from the Right-wingers of her time for daring to campaign for Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.)

Trump stayed resolutely on message in blaming “illegals” for virtually all of America’s problems. As he’s been doing since he first entered electoral politics nine years ago, he denounced them as murderers, rapists, cannibals (a relatively new wrinkle in his rhetoric, which he explained was what his reference to Hannibal Lecter at a rally a few months ago was about), gangsters and mental patients. In my review of the June 27, 2024 debate between him and Joe Biden – whose name he uttered only twice that night, as if it were some sort of swear word – I said that immigrants are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler. He said it again on July 18, characterizing the alleged influx of immigrants as “an invasion” and pledging a massive deportation operation. Trump cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s notorious “Operation Wetback” of 1953-54 – in which immigration agents swept up just about anyone who looked Latino, including American citizens, many of them U.S.-born – as a precedent.

According to Trump, other countries’ leaders are bringing down their own crime rates by sending all their criminals to the United States and dumping them on us. In one of the most fascinating rhetorical tics of his speech, again and again he boasted that he’d been able to get the leaders of other countries to bend to his will essentially by blackmailing them. Trump said again and again that various countries – most of which he didn’t name – had stopped doing bad things to the U.S. when he threatened to cut off their aid money.

One thing Trump didn’t say in 2024 that he famously said in 2016 was that the country’s problems were such that “only I can fix it.” He didn’t say that this year because he didn’t have to; he’s speaking to an audience of Republican faithful who already believe him to be a Messiah. The reverence with which he was greeted on July 18 included a speech and benediction from Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son and (unlike his dad) a hard-core Christian nationalist who’s signed on whole hog to the Republican agenda.

Trump in turn spoke reverentially of the Grahams, saying that his father, Fred Trump, had taken him to see Billy Graham’s big evangelical rallies in Yankee Stadium. It was one of the few moments in Trump’s speech that sounded even slightly genuine emotionally. Trump’s whole political appeal is to return America to what it was in the 1950’s, when Blacks were in the back of the bus, women were in the kitchen, Queers were in the closet and it was just routinely accepted that white men with money were supposed to rule the world. (I was watching the speech on PBS and their cameras scanned the crowd in vain looking for a Black face. They finally found one.)

Trump also followed through on his well-known admiration for dictators. He paid tribute to Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s no-nonsense leader, who had actually paid Trump what amounted to a state visit two weeks ago while he, as the leader of a NATO member country, was ostensibly in D.C. for a NATO meeting hosted by the U.S. and President Biden. Trump also said he looked forward to renewing his fabled friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un – of whom he said during his Presidency, “We fell in love,” even though Kim murdered people, including several members of his own family, to achieve power – and justified it by saying that when you have a potential adversary with nuclear weapons, you’d better be nice to them.

One of Trump’s many boasts was that during his Presidency he literally kept America out of war. He said that Russia would have never dared to attack Ukraine if he’d remained in the White House after the 2020 election. Trump said that the sheer force of his will would keep other nations from attacking us, and he offered us bullying and bluster as his key strategy for keeping the nation at peace. He even accused Biden of blundering the world onto the brink of World War III.

Trump also claimed that by essentially bankrupting Iran and threatening other countries to cut off all American trade if they did business with Iran, he’d kept Iran’s proxy Hamas from attacking Israel. Then, Trump said, Biden lifted the Iran sanctions and thus gave the Iranians millions of dollars with which to underwrite Hamas’s attacks on Israel and allowed Iran to develop a nuclear bomb. The fact that Barack Obama negotiated a deal to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons and Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of it was, of course, unmentioned.

To the extent that Trump’s speech mentioned actual policies – which it barely did; the overall message was that the sheer force and power of Trump’s personality would overnight end inflation, make homes and groceries affordable, and usher in the New American Millennium – they were predictably ghastly. He didn’t mention abortion in his speech at all, and as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) rightly pointed out on Stephen Colbert’s show afterwards, Trump’s promises to “drill, baby, drill” starting on day one and end the electric-car mandate imposed by Biden will just speed the self-annihilation of the human race through uncontrolled climate change.

The instant coverage of Trump’s speech from the Associated Press (https://apnews.com/article/trump-republican-national-convention-nomination-assassination-attempt-5f1f337ac39477e9d1c53d3e027edda3) and the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post (https://nypost.com/2024/07/18/us-news/donald-trump-delivers-heartfelt-and-harrowing-rnc-address-calling-for-unity/?utm_medium=browser_notifications&utm_source=pushly&utm_content=All%20Push%20Subscribers&utm_campaign=5082243) emphasized Trump’s pro forma calls for “unity.” But it was clear from the overall context of the speech, and even clearer from his Truth Social messages calling on “Democrat prosecutors” to drop all the other charges against him in the wake of Florida District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the classified documents case, that the only “unity” Trump is interested in is one in which 100 percent of all Americans follow his orders without question.

Watching Trump’s July 18 convention acceptance speech was like watching one of Adolf Hitler’s notorious party rallies at Nuremberg. The mindless adulation of the crowd and even the similarities in the ways his audience members dressed (I found myself wondering if every man had been required to wear one of Trump’s red bib-like ties and every woman a red dress) gave the whole event a Nazi-like air. So did Trump’s stated determination never to allow himself to be voted out of office again. The cult of Trump is so powerful that here, as throughout his political career, he was able to get away with things that would have been the kiss of death for other, lesser politicians – as when he appeared to be wrapping up his speech with what he promised would be a “strong closing,” then droned on for half an hour after that.

Democrats’ Fratricidal War Only Helps Trump

And where were the Democrats when all of this B.S. (to use an abbreviation for a word Trump told his audience he’s not going to use anymore because Franklin Graham told him not to) was going on? Engaging in a useless, counterproductive and destructive fratricidal war over Joe Biden’s political future and whether he still has one. If it had been Donald Trump who’d turned in a wretched performance on the June 27, 2024 debate and Joe Biden who made sense, the Republicans would have all rallied around Trump and defended him to the death.

Instead, since Biden’s awful debate performance there has been a drumbeat of prominent Democrats, including elected officials in Washington, D.C., who have demanded that Biden actually abandon his campaign for re-election. They claim that not only can Biden not win re-election, he will do so badly he will drag the rest of the Democratic Party down with him, the Republicans will win back the Senate and keep the House, and Trump will have the “trifecta” and be able to do absolutely everything he wants.

Maybe they have some private polls that show that Biden can’t win, but that’s not what the public polls say. They show Biden losing the nationwide popular vote to Trump by one percentage point, while if Vice-President Kamala Harris takes over the nomination – as many, though not all, of the Democratic never-Bideners are suggesting – she’d lead Trump by two points. Both of those are within the polls’ margin of error, and neither result suggests either that Biden is doomed or that Harris would have a clear shot.

Of course, as any American who lived through 2016 (and 2000 before it) will recall, a nationwide popular vote is not how Americans elect their President. Much of the Democrats’ concern over Biden is based on the idea that he will do so badly he’ll not only lose to Trump in the so-called “battleground” states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia) but put must-win states for the Democrats like Minnesota (which hasn’t voted for a Republican for President since 1972), New Mexico and Virginia in play.

Dumping Joe Biden from the Democratic ticket at this late stage will just doom the Democrats to defeat. The party leadership spent the last 3 ½ years telling the U.S. that Biden, despite his 81 years (just three years longer on the planet than Trump!), was still fit physically and mentally and perfectly capable both of running a re-election campaign and running the country for the next four years (which are not necessarily the same thing). Now after a single bad debate performance, they’re running for the hills screaming doom and demanding a new, younger, fresher candidate.

Sorry, guys and gals. The time to have had the debate over whether Biden is too old either to campaign or serve as President was last January or before. There were enough polls early in 2024 showing doubts about Biden’s age and indicating that many voters thought Republicans could do a better job both on issues (like the economy, immigration and crime) and on overall fitness that last February I wrote a Zenger’s blog post called, “Is a Second Donald Trump Presidency Inevitable?” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2024/02/is-second-donald-trump-presidency.html)

My current prediction is that Donald Trump will win the 2024 election, and will win it fair and square, no matter what the Democrats do. If his opponent is Joe Biden, already fatally weakened by the inexplicable Democratic attacks on him, Trump will win by a substantial margin. If his opponent is Kamala Harris – who’s got some major strikes against her (she’s a woman, she’s part-Black, she’s part-Asian, her 2020 Presidential campaign collapsed quickly, and during most of her vice-presidency her approval ratings have been even worse than Biden’s) and whose record will be prime fodder for Republican attack propagandists – Trump will win by an even bigger margin than the one by which he’d defeat Biden.

And if the Democrats do what an unnamed donor suggested and have an “open convention” at which someone other than Biden or Harris is nominated, that person will lose by an even bigger margin than Harris would. That would be an especially grim outcome given that the 2024 Democratic Convention is scheduled to take place in Chicago – and the last time the Democrats convened in Chicago, in 1968, it was not only figuratively but literally a bloodbath in the streets. Rightly or wrongly, today’s American voters regard a party’s ability to manage their convention smoothly as an indication of how well they’ll be able to run the country – and the Republicans performed flawlessly on that score this year. The Democrats, by contrast, are scrambling.

And the people running the Democratic Party have only themselves to blame. Shortly after the June 27 debate disaster, MS-NBC interviewed Julián Castro, former Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration. He claimed that the Democratic National Committee had threatened to blacklist any party campaign manager, consultant or company who took on a potential primary challenger to Biden and make sure that person or company could never work for the Democratic Party or any of its candidates again. The way he said it, it sounded like Castro had considered mounting a primary challenge to Biden himself – and had given up on the idea for precisely that reason. Their logic was understandable – the historical record shows that every time an incumbent U.S. president has been faced with a primary challenge, whether or not the challenge was successful, that party has always lost the general election – but the Democratic Establishment has saddled itself with a candidate they’re now frantically trying to throw overboard because they’re convinced he can’t win.

Biden’s critics within the Democratic Party have a point. Though Bernie Sanders on Stephen Colbert’s program called Biden “the most progressive President in my lifetime,” he’s either muffed or missed altogether golden opportunities to skewer Donald Trump. In the June 27 debate, when Trump boasted that thanks to his three Supreme Court appointees reversing Roe v. Wade, abortion policy had been returned to the states where he said it belonged, Biden should have said, “So, if Congress sends you a nationwide abortion ban, will you pledge to veto it?” And after July 13, Biden should have challenged Trump, “So, now that you’ve been shot and nearly killed by a man with an AR-15, will you join me in getting these deadly weapons of war off our streets?” (The ironies became even weirder when Jason Aldean, the country singer who headlined the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas concert which ended in a mass shooting that killed over 60 people, starred in a Trump benefit concert on July 18, 2024.)

But such blazing attacks on a political rival’s hypocrisy are just not Joe Biden’s style as a politician. Ever since 1972, when he became one of the youngest U.S. Senators in history (an ironic contrast to his status as our oldest-ever President!), where he served until Barack Obama tapped him as his vice-president in 2008, he’s been “a creature of the Senate” in more ways than one. Biden’s entire career has been carried out within the norms of civility that used to obtain in American politics (with some exceptions; 19th century Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was famously beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor by a cane-wielding pro-slavery Congressmember) but have been smashed to smithereens by Donald Trump and today’s Republicans.

Trump’s Amazing Political Comeback

Say what you will about Donald Trump – and I’ve hated, loathed, detested and despised him since the first time I heard of him in 1987 – you have to give him credit for one of the most extraordinary political comebacks of anyone in history, anywhere. After the riots on January 6, 2021 by a mob Trump openly egged on, his political stock seemed more worthless than a degree from Trump University. Both Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy denounced him on the floors of their respective houses and said Trump was to blame for the violence. McConnell even said that the Senate needn’t vote to convict Trump on an impeachment – which would have barred him from ever running for office again – because the criminal justice system would take care of him.

Instead, to appropriate a Trumpian phrase, he’s mounted a political comeback the likes of which the United States, and possibly the entire world, has never seen before. For someone who’s been criticized for having a low attention span and being easily distracted, he’s industriously built up a cult of personality around himself that has completely taken over one of America’s two major political parties and bent it into an implacable instrument of his will. He has repeated lie after lie after lie, and millions of Americans believe his every word. He’s also accumulated an unorganized but implacable gang of thugs whom he’s so totally brainwashed that every time Trump calls out an individual by name, whether a federal judge or a lowly election worker, that person receives death threats the police find credible.

Trump has been impeached twice, indicted four times, criminally convicted once and been adjudged in civil courts to be guilty of fraud (in several instances) and sexual assault. He’s also gotten away with describing himself as a “populist” even though his record is diametrically opposed to everything the original Populists stood for, particularly curbing the influence of the super-rich over American politics. And he’s pledged, among other things, to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels and eliminate Biden’s hard-won gains for energy efficiency and a transition to electric cars. If Trump gets back in the White House (and, quite frankly, that’s looking more like “when” than “if”), the Earth itself and its ability to sustain human life will be the ultimate victim.

In his drive not only to regain the Presidency but to wield absolute power, Trump has had plenty of enablers, most notably the three hard-core Right-wing revolutionaries he put on the U.S. Supreme Court. Just four days after the June 27 debate with Biden which seems, at this writing, to have abruptly and ignominiously ended Biden’s political career, the Supreme Court reversed its decision in U.S. v. Nixon 50 years ago and declared that, for all intents and purposes, Presidents are above the law. The shocking statement Richard Nixon made to David Frost in 1977 – “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal” – is now the constitutional law of the land. While the court conceded that a President could still be prosecuted for “non-official acts,” they made that so hard to prove that in practice Presidents are now immune from prosecution for virtually anything, from accepting bribes to appoint an ambassador to ordering the murder of a political opponent.

So the increasingly likely outcome of the November 5, 2024 election is not only that Donald Trump will return to the White House, he will return with the full powers of an American dictator. He’s already said he’d be “a dictator on day one,” and the joke after he said that was he’d use that power to declare that “day one” will last for four years. He’s likely to come in with majorities in both houses of Congress, and whoever replaces Mitch McConnell as the Republican Senate leader will almost certainly get rid of the filibuster so Senate Republicans can pass whatever legislation Trump wants with just a simple majority vote – while the shrunken number of Senate Democrats look on helplessly in despair. Trump will also probably declare January 6 as a national holiday the way Adolf Hitler did with November 9, the anniversary of his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The 2024 Republican convention was filled with speakers who had once rightly criticized Donald Trump and who were now being put through the ritual humiliation he demands. Among his former critics turned diehard supporters were Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and his new running mate, J. D. Vance. Meanwhile, the trophy room at Mar-a-Lago is filled with the heads of principled Republicans who dared to defy Trump, including Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Justin Amash, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the last of whom Trump has threatened to have tried for treason by a military tribunal for having dared to serve on the House committee that investigated January 6, 2021. (That’s an ironic bit of karma given that it was Cheney’s dad, Dick Cheney, who as George W. Bush’s Vice-President came up with the idea of military tribunals in the first place.)

Trump’s trophy room includes Democrats, too, most notably Hillary Clinton. There’s a space waiting for Joe Biden as Trump, with the surprising connivance of the Democratic Establishment that once went out of its way to ensure Biden wouldn’t have a primary challenger in 2024 and now can’t wait to get rid of him because “he can’t win,” gets ready for Biden’s (and Kamala Harris’s, or whoever the Democrats nominate if and when Biden goes) scalp. But the ultimate trophy on Trump’s wall will be the very idea of America as a representative democracy. Just as Julius Caesar’s ascension to power (interrupted by his assassination but resumed by his grand-nephew Octavian, who became Emperor Augustus) killed ancient Rome’s 500-year-old experiment with republican government, so will Trump’s return to power kill the 250-year-old American Republic and inaugurate the American Empire.