Donald Trump: inside the Republican Convention

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This was published 7 years ago

Donald Trump: inside the Republican Convention

Breakfast with birthers, an afternoon flag-burning, and lots of hateful Hillary masks. Welcome to the circus.

By Nick O'Malley

Sunday

Joe Hockey is standing on the shore of Lake Erie between Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Great Lakes Science Center, holding a beer and beaming. "Can you believe it?" the Australian ambassador says, gesturing around him.

<em>Montage: Fairfax Media, AAP,  Getty images, AP</em>

Montage: Fairfax Media, AAP, Getty images, AP

Thousands have laboured through security fence lines and Secret Service checkpoints to attend a kick–off party for the Republican National Convention. The conventions – first the Republican, then the Democratic – are ostensibly held to elect candidates and set platforms for the November presidential election. In truth, these are just formalities. The real purpose is to secure four days of media coverage as the election campaign intensifies over summer. They are also bacchanals for lobbyists, donors and media. Which is why Cleveland, Ohio is hosting 55,000 people hoping to gain access, one way or another, to the lumbering American political machine.

I'm here to find out how Donald Trump – a man who is neither conservative, nor until recently a Republican – was able to create a movement powerful enough to stage a hostile takeover of the Grand Old Party in one short year. By meeting his most ardent supporters, I want to understand the anger that is fuelling a campaign that, so far, has not only wrong-footed 16 more experienced primary rivals, but nearly every political commentator in the country.

A Montana alternative delegate.

A Montana alternative delegate.Credit: Chip Somodevilla

In the days after the convention, Nate Silver – think of him as America's Antony Green – estimated Trump has a 42 per cent chance of winning the election. It is now a serious possibility that a serially bankrupt real-estate developer-cum-reality TV star with a demonstrable authoritarian streak and a tortured relationship with the truth could soon be running the most powerful nation on Earth.

It is warmer than usual in Ohio, nearly 30 degrees as the sun sets. The mood is good among 13,000 guests who wander in and out of the marquees. Open bars serve Coors Light and Blue Moon beers and food trucks dole out barbecue ribs, pierogi and duck rillettes.

Were it not for the flags at half mast, you could forget the tension outside the barricades, where police are preparing for pro- and anti-Trump protesters. Given that Ohio is an "open carry" state, where it is legal for people to carry their guns in plain sight on the street, many say they will attend the protests armed. Hours earlier, three police officers were shot dead in an ambush in the Deep South city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and, as the party proceeds, authorities are still searching for accomplices. (In the end, they will find the gunman acted alone.)

It has been a summer of unprecedented violence in a country known for it: 10 days before, five police officers in Dallas were murdered during an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, which followed the murder of 49 people dancing in a gay nightclub in Orlando by a man who claimed allegiance to Islamic State.

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Delegates cheer as Donald Trump delivers his address on the fourth and final day of the Republican Convention.

Delegates cheer as Donald Trump delivers his address on the fourth and final day of the Republican Convention.Credit: Getty Images

A helicopter clatters overhead hauling a banner that reads "Hillary for Prison 2016." The slogan is championed by Infowars, a website run by the raging conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He believes that both the moon landing and the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre were faked, that the September 11 attacks were an inside job and that Donald Trump would make a fine president.

A crowd gathers around the comedian Stephen Colbert, formerly of the satirical The Colbert Report, who is filming a segment for the show he now hosts, The Late Show. Despite his transparent contempt for Trump, the audience seems giddy to be around the celebrity. Playing a game called Trump or False, with a beer in his hand, he asks a lanyard–wearing delegate, who gives his name as Paul, if it is true that Trump once said, "My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well-documented, are various other parts of my body." Paul gets it wrong. Trump did once say that. His sensitivity to teasing about his small hands is another weird mark of this weird campaign. Colbert charges off to find another victim and the happy mob surges with him.

Police hold back crowds after a protester burns an American flag outside the convention centre.

Police hold back crowds after a protester burns an American flag outside the convention centre.Credit: Washington Post

"Not many blacks," someone in Hockey's little huddle observes, looking at the groups around us. It's true, and also not surprising. After all, Trump has made race central to his campaign. Of the nearly 2500 delegates in attendance this week, just 18 are African-American.

"There's one," says someone in Hockey's huddle, nodding to a man strolling along the waterfront.

Donald Trump’s steady rise has blindsided nearly every US political pundit.

Donald Trump’s steady rise has blindsided nearly every US political pundit.Credit: Jeff J Mitchell

At the gates near the Q the mob has grown more boisterous. I'm watching on when someone taps me on the shoulder and says, "Hey Nick, are you here for the flag burning?

"Nah, that's the Ghanaian ambassador," says Hockey.

Before I can check if he's joking, we are joined by Colorado Senator Cory Gardner and his wife, Jamie. Gardner looks like a senator out of central casting. His suit is perfect and his skin unblemished by the heat. He has bright American teeth and perfect American hair. He is also a classic old-school politician with a trajectory to match: flipping from left to right in college, graduating from a good law school and working for a GOP member before moving through the House of Representatives to the Senate.

Someone asks Senator Gardner if he will support Trump, whose surge has so divided the party that many delegates are still plotting a coup on this convention eve. Gardner doesn't miss a beat. He smiles and says that he is looking forward to hearing from Trump's running mate, Mike Pence. (The Indiana Governor has been chosen to provide the Trump campaign with a thin veneer of establishment conservative respectability.)

Gardner and Hockey, who have met in the past, chat amiably before the latter ambles off to find a shuttle bus back to the distant hotel the Australian embassy has secured. Hockey and his team of five are set for a busy week, gently making Australia's case for an outward-looking, internationalist America with a party which is not in a listening mood.

The event disperses before midnight and the crowds move on to Cleveland's bars and pubs, whose opening hours have been extended till 4.30am. After midnight, Flannery's Irish Pub is still packed with conventioneers. A lobbyist for a large manufacturing company buys me a drink. He is wearing cargo shorts and a short–sleeved shirt and looks like he has been enjoying the night. He had a high–ranking government job before he went to the other side and is frank about what he does. His job, he says, is to buy access to politicians via donations.

That sounds corrupt, I suggest. "Oh, it is corrupt," he says. "It's legal, but it's corrupt." His contempt for the system is palpable. He runs me through the going rates. Around $US3000 buys a handful of meetings with a member of the House, including ongoing access to senior staff. The cost is higher if the member is facing a tough election, or has made it onto a useful committee. The asking price for a senator, he says, is around $US5000.

Sometime before 1 am, the bar calls last drinks, prompting cheery outrage. The crowd filters out to look for Ubers, watched over by ranks of police who have been bolstered by reinforcements from around the country.

"I got a ticket from an Alaskan state trooper, can you believe it?" a taxi driver complains to me at one point. "Busted by an Eskimo."

Monday

The police are especially tense this morning. As the first official day of the convention, this is also the first day of planned protests. The New Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter supporters are gathering downtown, and a Citizens for Trump rally is scheduled for a riverside park.

Things are calm at Settlers Landing Park when I arrive at midday. There are only a couple of hundred people; turnout is far lower than expected. Following the previous day's killings in Louisiana, organisers agreed at the last minute to suggest that protesters leave their guns at home. There are no assault rifles in the crowd, but you can see the odd holstered pistol. One is on the hip of a man who looks to be a Biker for Trump. He tells reporters he carried it in in case police needed any help with the "thugs".

Behind a stage, the Cuyahoga River slides by. It was once so polluted it used to catch fire with some regularity, a problem which spurred the passing of the Clean Water Act in 1972. That kind of government interference would appal this crowd of Tea Party libertarians, bikers and white nationalists.

Alex Jones takes the microphone, and bellows with his distinctive rasp, "Hillary for Prison!" Jones has made a career out of slandering enemies real and imagined. His latest campaign is based in part on revelations that Clinton mishandled secret information as US secretary of state by using her own email server. Jones and his supporters also believe the Clintons somehow forced the Justice Department and the US attorney-general not to pursue charges against her.

"Donald Trump's a great guy and has amazing courage but listen, we can't put our faith in any one individual," he says. "It's all of us together … We're identifying the globalists, we're identifying their program of control, we're identifying what their operations are. And once the general public understands the paradigm, it's game over." Unless you've listened to his interminable radio show, you'd have no idea what he was talking about.

Next up is Trump's political godfather Roger Stone, turned out in a fine eggshell-coloured suit. Stone's first job in politics was on former president Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President, which was later revealed to be little more than a criminal gang. Today he is as famous for the big Nixon tattoo on his back as he is for his natty suits. Stone introduces himself as "Italian from the waist down" and then delves into his favourite theory, that the White House advisor Vince Foster did not in 1993 commit suicide – as authorities found – but was murdered by the Clintons.

A 15-minute walk away through fortified streets is the site of the convention itself, the Quicken Loans Arena, a basketball stadium known locally as the Q. It holds about 20,000 people. Motorcades and media shuttle buses are allowed through the barricades from a nearby staging area, but it is much more fun to get in on foot, battling through thick crowds to the main pedestrian access on 4th Street, which is little more than a laneway lined with bars and restaurants.

There are 15,000 accredited media covering the event, and many can be found jammed into 4th street. At The Washington Post's HQ, in a restaurant, I talk with a conservative commentator about Trump's two grown sons. Donald jnr and Eric are slick embodiments of East Coast privilege, best known before the convention for posing with an elephant they had shot while on a game safari in Zimbabwe in 2012. A few glasses of wine in my companion and he refers to them as Uday and Qusay. He announces he is going to vote for Hillary.

At the entrance to the Q perimeter, militant Christians wearing T–shirts and fatigue pants are raving about hellfire and Sodom. One tells me he's from a group called the "Bible Believers" but he won't tell me his name or say where they are from. A woman objects to the group's signs and the preacher yells at her through a megaphone that she needs to "shut [your] legs and forget [your] flesh". A group calling themselves Communist Revolutionaries have turned on a bunch of kids wearing Punks for Trump T–shirts and begun a chant: "Fascist punks off our streets!"

Inside the Q, the state delegations take their seats, each given an assigned area on the floor of the stadium. Delegates are party representatives who are selected by the primary votes to attend the convention and formally elect the candidate.

A band of so-called #NeverTrump delegates, mostly hard right Ted Cruz supporters, is preparing for its last stand. The rebel delegates' bid to change the rules to allow a broader vote against Trump is soon quashed by the Republican National Convention officers presiding, leading to boos, chanting and a walkout in the first hour of the convention's first session. These will become the first images of the convention to receive national attention, further horrifying Republican operatives.

By comparison to previous conventions, the line-up of speakers is transparently thin. So reviled is Trump by the GOP establishment that most senior Republicans refuse to attend. There will be no Bushes, no John Boehner, no Lindsey Graham nor John McCain. Mitt Romney chose to label Trump a fraud via Twitter rather than attend. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake said he could not make it because he had to mow his lawn. Ohio's Republican governor John Kasich, whom Trump defeated in the primaries, is in town to mingle, but refuses to attend the convention or endorse the nominee. This is a particular catastrophe for Trump. No Republican has ever lost Ohio and gone on to win the presidency.

The headline speaker on this first day is Trump's Slovenian–born third wife, Melania. Commentators on CNN are praising the speech when an out-of-work journalist watching from a Starbucks in Florida blows the whole thing up, reporting that the speech lifted a key section from Michelle Obama's speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention.

It was not until Wednesday afternoon that a speechwriter with close ties to the Trumps, and no political experience, takes public responsibility, but even then Trump declines to accept her resignation.

Tuesday

This morning a distressed 23–year–old autistic man fled a group home in Miami, pursued by one of his carers, Charles Kinsey, a behavioural therapist and an African-American. When Kinsey caught up with him the two sat talking in a gutter as Kinsey sought to calm his patient, who was cradling a white toy truck. Soon they were surrounded by police officers with weapons drawn. Aware of the potential danger, Kinsey lay down on his back with his hands in the air, explaining there was no need for guns, that he was there to help, and that the younger man held a toy truck, not a gun.

That was what he was doing when a cop shot him in the leg. In a bedside TV interview, Kinsey recalled saying to the cop, "Sir, why did you shoot me?"

"I don't know," the officer said.

At the Marriott in downtown Cleveland, the far–right author and Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza is addressing the Texas delegation over a continental breakfast. To the extent that it has one, D'Souza's 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage provides an intellectual backdrop to the "birther" movement.

D'Souza's book posits that Obama hates the West due to some sort of psychological attachment to his absent father's anti–colonialism. Though the one–time advisor to president Ronald Reagan has renounced the more respectable conservative agenda with which he began his career, he comes across as impassioned and articulate. He also proves an expert panderer. The only thing that can now save America from Hillary and her gang, the Democratic Party, is Texas, D'Souza says to a cheer.

Later on, inside the Q, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie takes to the stage. Christie was once considered a favourite for the nomination this year due to his capacity to reach out to voters from both parties. He is well beyond that now. The former prosecutor leads a call–and–response indictment of Hillary for a litany of crimes real and imagined, from the Obama administration's Middle East foreign policy failures to, bizarrely, Boko Haram's kidnapping of children in Nigeria. Soon the crowd is chanting deliriously, "Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!" The slogan that began with conspiracy theorists on the fringes is now been bellowed across centre stage.

I escape to a rooftop party hosted by The Daily Caller, a conservative DC-based online news outfit whose executive editor, Christopher Bedford, I met a couple of years earlier on a bourbon tasting tour of Kentucky funded by yet another lobby group. Watching the sunset and drinking tinnies of local craft beer, we talk about the other story shaking the Republican Party. It looks more and more certain that, after a series of allegations of sexual harassment, Roger Ailes, the founder and chairman of the conservative powerhouse Fox News, has been abandoned by the owners of the network, the Murdoch family. Bedford believes that Fox cannot maintain its strength without Ailes at the helm. Another blow.

I leave early, hoping to crash what is billed as the party of the week, a gay anti–Islamic bash to be attended by, among others, the Dutch demagogue Geert Wilders and the anti–immigration firebrand Ann Coulter. I don't make it in, and Coulter doesn't show, either, but organiser Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay, right-wing journalist–turned internet troll, is reportedly pleased with the turnout. (He has just been banned from Twitter for inciting racist abuse against Leslie Jones, a black actress and comedian who stars in the recent remake of Ghostbusters.)

Speaking later to some of the gay Trump-supporting partygoers, I found none of them was concerned that, days earlier, their preferred president had endorsed a national platform that would repeal gay marriage and back "conversion" therapy.

Wednesday

In a bar by the river, the McClatchy newspaper group is holding a breakfast briefing with Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right UK Independence Party. In town for a Brexit victory lap, he looks as cheery and smug as ever. The Brexit campaign has become a source of fascination to many Republicans. They have a natural suspicion of international organisations, which are seen as infringing on national sovereignty. But there is more to it than that.

When analysts had time to dig into exit polling data from the shock victory of the Leave campaign, they discovered something that gave hope to GOP strategists. They found millions of voters who had been dormant since the Thatcher years – so long that they had been rendered invisible to pollsters – had turned out to vote for Brexit. If a similar dormant vote existed in the US, so the theory went, Trump might already be ahead in the consistently close polls. Not so much a silent majority as a somnambulistic one.

On my way up to the Q, I look at the souvenir stalls. Make America Great Again hats and T–shirts have been joined by others with stronger, uglier slogans. "Bomb the Shit out of ISIS", "Life's a Bitch, Don't Vote for One," "Trump: At Last Someone with Balls".

At the gates near the Q the mob has grown more boisterous. I'm watching on when someone taps me on the shoulder and says, "Hey Nick, are you here for the flag burning?"

"What?"

"There's going be a flag burning at four."

It is an English writer I had last seen at a Trump rally in New Hampshire earlier this year. Turns out he was right. The Communist Revolutionaries do burn an American flag at four, or try to, but one ends up burning himself in all the pushing and shoving between protesters, police, firefighters and media. Punches are thrown and a handful of arrests made. This will turn out to be the most violent moment of the convention.

Tonight is meant to be Mike Pence night, a chance for Trump's running mate to introduce himself to the American people. To the extent he is known at all outside his home state of Indiana, Pence is known for a newspaper opinion piece he wrote arguing that the Disney movie Mulan, about a brave little girl in Han dynasty-era China, is left-wing propaganda designed to help get women in combat roles in the US armed forces.

Pence, who has dramatic white hair and skin the same lustrous hue of burnt orange as Trump's, makes a good speech, one that any other year would have done him proud. This year, though, it is barely noticed. Before Pence rises to speak, the evening is ambushed by Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas firebrand who was Trump's most determined primary foe.

Famous as much for his ruthless narcissism as his remarkable rhetorical skills, Cruz gives the best speech of the convention, every line stirring greater applause than the one before it. At about the 20–minute mark, though, floor whips, in their distinctive lime green hats, filter among the delegates, who soon begin to stand and yell, "Say his name! Say his name!" In front of an increasingly bitter, jeering crowd, Cruz is defiant, and refuses to endorse Trump.

A few days later, Donald Trump will restate his claim that Ted Cruz's father was involved in John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, which ties in neatly with Roger Stone's theory that Hillary Clinton murdered JFK jnr in 1999 because he planned to run for the same senate seat.

Another crucial convention night is lost to chaos.

Thursday

The mood in the Q is different tonight. The stands are nearly full at 6pm, hours before the Donald is due to speak, and the passageways are packed with delegates queuing up for hot dogs.

Between the Alaskans and the New Mexicans on the convention floor, a boisterous little group gathers around a man dressed in an orange Guantanamo Bay jumpsuit wearing a Hillary mask and toy handcuffs. On his back is a sign declaring that Hillary is a serial killer above a list of her alleged victims, including the four Americans killed in the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

Delegates request photos with him. "If you want a photo you have to strangle me," he keeps telling everyone, and they cackle and laugh and feign throttling and punching the former first lady, US senator and secretary of state in the face. For the first time in the week, I am stunned.

I pause and look up to see a newspaper photographer who looks like he's having a similar reaction. "You ever seen anything like this?" he asks.

"No," I say.

The violent language that shocked America at the start of the Trump campaign is now being staged as pantomime in the middle of the GOP convention.

I ask the Hillary character for his name, thinking he will refuse to tell me, but he points at a badge on his chest. He is Wes Nakagiri, a Tea Partier from Michigan who once ran for the office of lieutenant governor.

After 9pm, Trump finally arrives on stage in front of a projected screen of flags that would make Tony Abbott blush. He parades around the set that through the week has been silver but is now lit in a more appropriate gold. His speech is a Nixonian nightmare of America rent by violence and decay. After a few minutes the imagery begins to blur.

"America is far less safe and the world is far less stable than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America's foreign policy …"

A ruddy man in jeans and a brown blazer who looks to be in his 50s sitting to my right can't contain his excitement. He periodically stands and does a fat, stiff dance with his elbows out and fists thrust forward, his body bobbing up and down from the knees.

"This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and terrorism and weakness …"

An African-American fan to my left leaps up and begins a Trump chant, which soon circles the room.

"Lock her up! Lock her up!" the crowd shouts, and in the only moment of restraint in his one-hour-and-15-minute speech, Trump responds, "Let us defeat her."

Later, I call Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank, to see what he makes of it all.

Ornstein believes Trump is a symptom rather than cause of the malaise. For years both parties have failed to explain the benefits of the international order – including alliances and trade deals – to the American middle class, and to protect it from the system's vagaries.

Instead they have sought to win elections by retreating into a tribalism that has metastasised from Washington, DC, across the country. The Democratic Party might still campaign on a set of positive ideas, says Ornstein, but, just as Trump and the Republicans seek to excite white racial anxieties, Democrats are now seeking to build an electoral lead by stitching together distinct identity groups. The marrying of political tribalism with racial identity worries Ornstein deeply. Given the tone of the convention, I ask him if it is now fair to call the Republican Party a white supremacist party.

"No," he says. "But the white supremacists who used to hide on the fringes are now in the centre of the tent."

Trump winds up his speech, the longest acceptance address at a convention in 40 years.

"I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored," he reassures the crowd.

Outside, hawkers are desperate to sell the last of their stock before the circus leaves town. " 'Trump that Bitch!' 'Trump that Bitch!' 'Hillary Sucks But Not like Monica!' 'Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica!' 'Trump that Bitch!' Ten bucks for your 'Trump that Bitch' T," yells a man into thick crowds. Eventually someone suggests he tones his language down.

"Go suck a dick!" the hawker shouts back into the man's face. Around the two the swirling mob of Grand Old Party faithful laughs as it streams into the warm Cleveland night.

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