From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
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The Economist
The anti-globalist MAGA enthusiast is more consequential than the average veep pick  ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
America has passed through one of Lenin’s weeks in which decades happen. Had Thomas Matthew Crooks fired an inch to the right, had Donald Trump not turned his head, he would now be dead. Fortunately, Mr Trump was not seriously hurt. And fortune blessed him in other ways, too. In Florida a judge dismissed the strongest case against him, and his enfeebled opponent, Joe Biden, remains in the race, though more Democrats are urging him to drop out. At the Republican convention in Milwaukee this week Mr Trump’s presence was greeted as a sign of divine providence. Delegates sported baseball caps with “45/47” on them. That used to be an aspiration; today it looks like a prediction.
One of the best arguments Democrats can use against Mr Trump is that he threatens democratic norms. Yet his courage in the moment of the shooting made him seem, however briefly, more like a defender of American values than a threat to them. His calls for unity afterwards buttressed his claim to be a strong leader in a dangerous world. Yes, any effect on the polls may be temporary. America is so partisan that the nominees have a reinforced-concrete ceiling. The conciliatory mood of both parties will fade, too. However, some effects of the shooting and its aftermath may last.
For one thing, this week has crystallised how utterly Mr Trump dominates the Republican Party. When it last gathered to nominate him in person, in 2016, it contained so few high-profile enthusiasts that a prominent convention role was given to the general manager of Trump Winery. Weeks before the election that year, the then Republican speaker of the House said he could no longer defend Mr Trump’s behaviour. In January 2021 Mr Trump was dragged out of the White House in disgrace. Earlier this year Nikki Haley, a former rival for the nomination, said that “Many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him.” In Milwaukee she was one of a procession of such people who endorsed him, the first candidate to be nominated three times by a major party since Richard Nixon.
This week also offered clues as to how Mr Trump will govern. In 2016 he picked a social conservative as his running-mate, to placate pro-life voters. So confident is he of victory today that he has tapped J.D. Vance, an articulate anti-globalist, anti-big business, anti-immigration, pro-worker, maga enthusiast who has little experience and does nothing to broaden Mr Trump’s electoral appeal. Mr Vance has said in the past that were he vice-president he would not have certified the 2020 election result. Now he has become Mr Trump’s heir apparent. maga politics, which started as an erratic vehicle for one man’s ambition, now looks much more likely to become a programme for government that will endure beyond 2028.
One consequence is that Reagan Republicanism is all but dead. In recent years the Republican Party has been united around personality, not policy. It contains free-traders and supporters of universal tariffs; internationalists and isolationists; champions of corporate America and people who believe big companies are rapacious and unpatriotic. In the past Mr Trump has done enough to please all these people that they can claim he is really on their side. The choice of Mr Vance tips the balance towards the strand of maga that is most worrying for America’s economy and for its allies.
In foreign policy, Taiwan and Ukraine are test cases for the Reagan Republicans’ view that it is in America’s interest to cherish order, norms and alliances. On Taiwan, Mr Vance’s views are unclear, while Mr Trump says the island should pay for American protection from China. On Ukraine, Mr Vance has gone further than Mr Trump, saying that he does not care which side wins, to the alarm of European allies. Recently he has backed away from this. The most hopeful interpretation is that Mr Trump realises that allowing Vladimir Putin to rampage across Ukraine would make him look weak in the same way that Mr Biden looked weak after pulling out of Afghanistan—and more than anything Mr Trump hates looking weak.
For America’s economy, Mr Vance’s views mix online meme culture, venture-capital-speak and some lefty policies that would thrill Bernie Sanders. He wants the state to protect blue-collar workers from competition and raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Like Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission who has riled tech bosses, he thinks big tech companies should be broken up. He belongs to a movement on the right that views big firms as un-American for stretching their supply chains across the world. He sees restricting immigration and raising tariffs as a way to raise productivity at home, boosting pay and strengthening American industry.
Were he to become vice-president, Mr Vance’s views would not automatically become the positions of Mr Trump’s government. The office is weak: one former veep said it was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”. Mr Trump’s fans say that he likes to play off opposing views in the room. His treatment of Mike Pence does not suggest that he will let Mr Vance run the White House while he works on his putting. Yet Mr Trump is old, too: if he wins, he will be older than Mr Biden is now when he leaves office. And, crucially, Mr Vance’s views fit with Mr Trump’s all-caps electoral platform.
MAGA 2030
Mr Trump leaves the convention in Milwaukee stronger than seemed possible only a few months ago. His legal cases no longer threaten him, his party is in thrall to him, the polls promise a clean sweep of Congress and the White House. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has cut back legal scrutiny of the presidency and cramped the freedom of government agencies. The prospect of a dominant Trump presidency is troubling for those who, like this newspaper, believe that foreign policy should be more than a transaction, that international trade spurs productivity and that immigration is a source of renewal and vitality. But that increasingly looks like what America and the world will get.
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