The Republican National Convention concluded Thursday night with a speech by the party’s candidate, ex-president Donald Trump, which was an unequaled display of political degradation. It marked the completion of the transformation of the Republican Party into a fascist political formation.
Before the speech, there were suggestions from Republican Party leaders that, in the wake of Saturday’s attempted assassination, Trump would change his tone and adopt a more unifying message. As he began, the ex-president spent 15 minutes rehashing the events of July 13 in a meandering and subdued tone, in the course of which he claimed that he had been calm throughout the attack because he knew he was protected by God.
Trump referenced a couple times the necessity for “unity,” but what he meant was that everyone must unite behind the fascistic agenda he laid out. He piled filthy lie upon filthy lie, denouncing the supposed “invasion” along the US-Mexico border, blaming immigrants for crime, poverty and every other social evil in America, and celebrating the mass deportations, detentions and other cruelties of his first term, including the separation of parents and children.
The crowd of 18,000, including nearly every prominent Republican elected official, gave ovation after ovation, particularly to every reference to God, which Trump injected frequently into his verbal overflow.
As for the promised more “positive” approach, Trump simply asserted that once he had returned to the White House, he would end all wars and other conflicts, seal the US-Mexico border by finishing the border wall, and create the greatest economy in the history of the world. As to how this miracle was to be accomplished, he did not say a word, in an increasingly deranged presentation which dragged on for 90 minutes.
WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North remarked on X: “Trump’s deranged monologue recalls Trotsky’s description of Hitler’s demagogy: ‘Sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance…They supplied him with the possibility of uniting all types of dissatisfaction in the beggar’s bowl of National Socialism.’”
The corporate media dutifully presented this display of filth and reaction as a legitimate and even profound political event. CNN commentator Van Jones, a Democrat, enthused, “The last time I was at a convention that felt like this was Obama 2008. There’s something happening.” A more appropriate comparison would have been Hitler’s Nuremberg rally.
Indeed, what Trotsky wrote about the culture of German fascism applies to its contemporary American version: “Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.”
There was a deliberate effort to disguise the real content of the Republican Party program, by what has long been the most open advocate of Wall Street and corporate America, as a newly remade party of the working man. A slew of speakers emphasized their humble origins, culminating in the acceptance speech Wednesday of Senator J. D. Vance, chosen by Trump as his vice-presidential running mate.
In reality, as every convention delegate was aware, the platform they have approved would shower tax cuts on the super-rich, subsidize the rape of the environment by the fossil fuel monopolies, and deepen the exploitation of the poor and working people by the capitalist oligarchy.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, American capitalism will not enter the Garden of Eden if he returns to the White House. The United States is plunging into the greatest political crisis it has experienced at least since 1968, another presidential election year punctuated by assassination, war and the collapse of an administration.
The Republican convention opened only two days after Trump’s narrow escape from death, in the first such attack on a president or presidential candidate in four decades.
While Republican convention delegates and elected officials expressed euphoria over polls showing Trump with an across-the-board lead, albeit narrow, in all the most closely contested “battleground” states, the meltdown of the Biden campaign has a downside. Many convention speakers appeared not to know which candidate they would be running against. And gloating over the age and incompetence of the 81-year-old Biden leaves the 78-year-old Trump vulnerable if the Democrats replace Biden with a younger candidate.
At the same time, the reelection campaign of Democratic President Joe Biden is in terminal collapse, following the debacle of his debate performance last month.
Biden has stubbornly refused to withdraw, but there are now widespread reports that the entire leadership of the Democratic Party has decided to move against him. The president himself is watching events unfold in quarantine, having contracted COVID for the third time.
With three-and-half months before the presidential election, the entire American political system is mired in deep crisis and internal divisions in the state apparatus.
Within the ruling class, the divisions center on issues of foreign policy, though both parties are committed to escalating war abroad. There are also deep concerns in sections of the ruling elite that the re-election of Trump could set off an uncontrolled social explosion.
Underlying all these concerns is the fear of both capitalist parties over the intensification of class conflict within the United States, and its revolutionary implications.
The decisive issue for the working class is to intervene in the political crisis with its own program and perspective. The degraded spectacle of political reaction at the Republican National Convention expresses the descent of the ruling class and the capitalist system as whole into barbarism.