. . .has never been a Trump fan. Her conservatism is as genuine as her forthright honesty about politics. After noting she supported neither major party for the last two elections, she heralded the GOP convention (and by implication the party) as stupendous and a triumph. The conversion of the GOP to a populist national party is complete, irreversible, and Trumpian. She seems to approve.
The convention was wild in the way things that are alive are wild. Harmeet Dhillon covered her head with a shawl to sing a Sikh prayer; Amber Rose, the beautiful young woman with face tattoos being cheered for speaking about what it is to support
Donald Trump in her media world, and why she is willing to pay the price; Shabbos Kestenbaum, the Harvard grad suing Harvard for discrimination over its failures after Oct. 7; J.D. Vance’s mother throwing kisses to the crowd as it chanted her name, and her son saying maybe they’ll have her 10th anniversary clean and sober in the White House. The citizens were so much more eloquent than the professionals.
And of course Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters, railing against corporate greed to a Republican convention whose delegates warmly applauded.
And none of that was even the headline. The headline: This wasn’t a divided party, it was a party united. It wasn’t only Mr. Trump’s party, it was an explicitly Trumpian party.
We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.
Read the whole thing.
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