The Scene
I arrived in Milwaukee with the story of the Republican National Convention half written.
“The media story of the week is going to be — Republicans saying this is the media’s fault bc we spent 8 years comparing Trump to Hitler,” I wrote to colleagues in Slack, bracing for the sort of raw anger journalists faced in Butler, Pa., where minutes after the shooting Trump supporters yelled, “It’s your fault.”
That anger had defined the last big Trump convention, the 2016 gathering in Cleveland. Protesters fought out front, factions faced off inside, and a colleague got into a physical altercation with Rudy Giuliani’s security detail.
Here in Milwaukee, everyone in the media was ready for conflict. Television networks, in particular, beefed up security around their recognizable talent, as Semafor’s Max Tani reported.
Instead, we found the happiest place on earth. The MAGA takeover of the Republican Party is complete, and so this convention has proceeded with less internal tension than any since perhaps Obama 2012 or Bush 2004.
Nor is there much external tension. Republicans are, reasonably at this juncture, totally confident of victory in November. Fox, ubiquitous on TV screens, reports that Joe Biden is out of friends and money, and that he has COVID. Inside the hall, the big screens show a supercut of Trump dancing to The Village People’s “YMCA.”
The upshot has been the friendliest media environment we’ve seen in years. Delegates are glad to chat. Members of Congress and religious activists alike are loose and chatty. The “fight fight fight” chants are delivered with the cheerful good spirits of a college fight song. The big screens in the Fiserv Forum.
The only reporters having any trouble are the ones assigned to cover protesters, who are hard to find. The only time I’ve been roughed up is when I made the mistake of getting in the way of an NBC journalist’s security detail.
Many Republicans also believe God had something to do with that terrifying near miss, and that he’s on their side.
(An alternate explanation comes in a joke I’ve now heard three times here. It goes:
“How do you know the shooter was a Democrat?”
“Because he missed.”)
The convention is also full of nonsense.
Barack Obama secretly runs America, Donald Trump Jr. suggested to cheers. Democrats rely on illegal immigrant votes, according to a country singer dressed as Uncle Sam. But its core characteristic is a happy confidence that has extended, if briefly, to the hated media.
Ben’s view
This election appears, again, to be changing fast, and the polarized politics of America mean that victory and defeat are always close.
And yet this triumphant, self-consciously blessed convention felt like the beginning of a new moment. One prominent conservative media figure who has made his peace with Trump texted:
“I wonder if this isn’t the moment when Obama and the Clintons and the Dem establishment just accepts he’s going to win again and he is no aberration but a major figure in American history who they need to find some way to coexist with.”
The global media is wrestling with the same set of questions about Trump and his generation of leaders around the world.