Former President Donald Trump has entered the fall election as the architect of the biggest tent Republicans have run with in decades.
“This election should be about the issues facing our country and how to make America successful, safe, free, and great again,” Trump said Thursday night. “In an age when our politics too often divide us, now is the time to remember that we are all fellow citizens — we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.”
The former president’s historic speech capped off an even more historic week for the GOP, whose celebrity convention speakers ranged from Amber Rose to Kid Rock as the party forged a colossal coalition to finally crack the Democrats’ monopoly on “inclusiveness” this election.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) opened the four days of events by adopting a reformed party platform that removes explicit endorsements of traditional marriage and includes a statement that leaves abortion policy up to the states. The new platform delegates passed calls for an end to the “Left-wing Gender Insanity” that includes biological men competing as women in competitive sports and child transgender treatments, both of which are overwhelmingly opposed by most Americans.
The novel platform also toned down the party’s opposition to abortion, moving from support for a federal ban to support for states to decide the limits on their own in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
“We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments),” the GOP’s national platform reads.
The changes on abortion also more closely reflect where the majority of Americans are, which is that abortion should be legal, but with restrictions. Just roughly 1 in 5 U.S. adults believe the deadly procedure should be “legal in all cases” with “no exceptions,” but even fewer, less than 1 in 10, believe abortion should be “illegal in all cases,” according to the Pew Research Center. Opposition to abortion rises with later stages of pregnancy, and 73 percent of Americans want restrictions after 15 weeks.
The party’s extended reach was exemplified by Rose, a rapper and television personality who addressed the Republican convention on the first day and appeared in a Trump-themed parody of “Ice Ice Baby” on the second.
“I realized Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love,” she said. “And that’s when it hit me: These are my people. This is where I belong.”
Rose’s appearance as an ex-stripper might have offended the sensibilities of those on the right who are understandably frustrated over the GOP platform change, but the performance terrified Van Jones, who called the prime-time address “the most dangerous speech for the Democratic coalition.”
“That is a young woman of color. She is describing the experience a lot of people have, feeling that maybe, if you’re around too many liberals, you might get criticized too much or you might not be able to speak your mind, and she spoke to it really well,” Jones said on CNN. “And she’s way more famous than any of us up here — I’m going to tell you that — way more famous. And so, to the extent that these guys are trying to bust up our coalition, that was a bunker buster right there.”
But do Republicans who are upset about the party expanding its appeal want to win this election or not? Anyone with moral qualms about the party’s moderation on abortion and marriage might be reminded about all of the warmongers who were still given premium speaking slots, such as Nikki Haley. In fact, some of the new platform’s most vocal opponents are also some of the most prominent supporters of spending endless American tax dollars in Ukraine. Political parties, however, are supposed to unite around a single candidate, not on every single issue. The latter is a recipe for authoritarianism.
“Unity is for dictatorships,” Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi wrote Tuesday. “In an ideologically, culturally, and religiously diverse country, we just need Americans to accept that their neighbors are going to disagree with them.”
“And, yes,” Harsanyi added, “appeals to ‘unity’ have historically been little more than euphemistic calls to accept left-wing cultural mores.”
Building a big tent isn’t synonymous with cultivating some bizarre obsession with inclusive identity-politics nonsense. Building a big tent in a democracy means rallying a diverse coalition of factions to realize their collective interest in the defeat of a rival candidate. Just because “diversity” has become a buzzword made toxic by narcissistic ideologues obsessed with virtue signaling, that doesn’t mean it’s politically useless — especially ideological diversity in a country as pluralistic as 21st-century America. Republicans are also far better at the tolerance game compared to Democrats, whose version of “coexist” means government-compelled uniformity with leftist ideology.
Ric Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, who was also the first openly gay presidential cabinet member, summarized the nominee’s stance on diversity again on Wednesday.
“Donald Trump doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, black, brown or white, or what gender you are,” Grenell said. “He knows that we are all Americans, and that it’s time to put ‘America First.'”
Reforming the party platform on marriage and pregnancy isn’t mandating a priest conduct a gay wedding at the convention or giving out abortion pills as party favors. Those are standard exercises in the state-mandated validation game of the left. Nor is the party’s outreach to minority Americans a shameless offer of racial patronage, but instead a plea for a colorblind meritocracy.
The wife of Vice-Presidential Nominee J.D. Vance, Usha, reminded voters why America is exceptional in the first place on Wednesday.
“That J.D. and I could meet at all, let alone fall in love and marry, is a testament to this great country,” Usha said, who is Indian-American.
Trump, meanwhile, is on his way to doubling his support with black voters, again. The Manhattan businessman received just 6 percent of the black vote in 2016. The Republican president doubled that total to 12 percent four years later. Now, some polls are suggesting Trump could win as much as 30 percent of the black vote this November.
The reason Trump’s inroads with minority voters have worked without alienating the party’s white base is because the former president’s activism has been genuine, without the routine pandering of politicians who clearly couldn’t care less.
Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway explained the contrast between Trump’s strategy to win black voters versus the Democrats’ in a May column after the former president spoke at “a wildly successful rally in South Bronx.”
“When [Trump] discussed his economic and immigration policy proposals for getting the country back on track,” Hemingway wrote, “he argued that his policies would help everyone in the country.”
President Joe Biden, on the other hand, continued to lean “into racial grievance politics.” Hemingway outlined three speeches the Democrat incumbent delivered around the time of Trump’s address to voters in the Bronx.
“He claimed there was an ‘insidious’ resistance and an ‘extreme movement’ led by his political opponent to hurt black people” at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and at Morehouse College, Biden told black graduates “the country was under the ‘poison of white supremacy.’”
Because nothing must be more inspiring to black voters than telling them their country hates them and they’ll need state handouts in order to succeed. Rose, in contrast, summed up Trump’s Republican Party on Monday night: “It’s all love.”