Trump's Boomer-Palooza

It’s nearly 9 p.m. inside Dallas’s American Airlines Center, and Trump supporters are waving their cowboy hats in the air. They are slowly rocking from side to side as Lee Greenwood belts out “God Bless the USA” to the party faithful. The mood is triumphant, even euphoric, particularly once the president enters stage left. He is about to announce the dawn of a new golden age, but there’s a catch: “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” he asks. “You go to hell. You know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November.

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one). [...]

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech.

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. [...]

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.”

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel.

I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” [...]

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.”

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

by James Billout, Unherd |  Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Having observed Trump for over 60 years, his MO is pretty consistent: he's either lying, projecting, scamming, or suing - frequently all at once. Not to mention the pathological need for self-promotion. How anyone who experienced his first term and said "yeah, we need more of that" is beyond comprehension. Tariffs, DOGE, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Iran, fishing boat murders, ICE murders and kidnappings, public and cultural facilities screw-ups, Epstein, Putin, Strait of Hormuz oil, rising inflation, election interference, Big Beautiful tax breaks for the wealthy, new Medicaid and Medicare restrictions, media exiles, crytocurrency scams, convicted felon pardons. And more (a free jet in every pot)? All facilitated by a Cabinet of boot-licking, incompetent sycophants. Do his supporters really want more of this, by a president who only cares about half the country? Guess so. What a poltical philosophy to live by (such as it is). See also: Our Increasingly Insecure President (NYT):]

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At least the old political machines used to give you five bucks if you voted for the machine ticket; Trump is giving voters a $5,000 I.O.U., for this money he says he’s going to give them. And this, of course, from a guy who is famous for not paying his debts.

But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do, because he doesn’t want people to talk about the war or inflation, or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it’s a normal midterm election, where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record. Which, as Charlie Cook says — the great political analyst, who’s very careful in what he says — a lot of Trump voters think they were victims of a bait-and-switch, given Trump’s priorities, when they voted for him in the presidential race.

And Trump goes: Here’s $5,000, and by the way, the Democrats are communists, and you can’t possibly elect them.

He’s almost daring voters to judge him on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid, when he essentially has to offer — he’s reduced to offering people money: I’ll give you five grand apiece, American adults, if the Republicans win.

In essence, it’s sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we’ve learned something about Trump, though, it’s that whatever happens in November, he’s going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he’ll say, probably correctly, that it was because of him. It’s because of his coattails, because he asked people to vote as if he is on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it’ll be because, when he’s not on the ballot, people just aren’t excited — because it’s really all about him. He’s always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory even when he loses — sometimes especially when he loses.