Like most political writers, I was looking forward to the rare spectacle of a contested convention in Cleveland this summer before Donald Trump killed that dream by winning the nomination. But he’s got some other exciting plans, as I discussed today at New York:

[I]t’s obviously too late to kill off these quadrennial snoozers this year, but leave it to Donald J. Trump to undertake the next best thing: transforming the Republican convention into a cheesy four-day TV special featuring maximum exposure of his own self. If by necessity it’s going to be an empty spectacle, it doesn’t have to be a boring empty spectacle, does it? Nosiree, according to a report from Politico:

“This is the part of politics he would naturally enjoy, and he wants to control it 100 percent,” said a high-level Trump campaign source. “This is a massive television production and he is a television star.”

And the star isn’t about to be confined to a single Thursday night acceptance speech.

Whereas the vice presidential nominee has generally spoken on the third night of the convention and the presidential candidate has taken the stage on the fourth and final night, Trump is considering a scenario that puts him on stage, delivering remarks on all four nights, reaching millions of potential voters, and driving ratings, according to one source.

Recall that presidential nominees did not even appear at conventions until FDR broke that taboo in 1936. As for appearing prior to the acceptance speech, there are only two precedents I can think of: Ronald Reagan showing up in 1980 to announce George H.W. Bush as his running mate (or, to be more precise, to preempt out-of-control speculation that former president Gerald Ford would join the ticket and perhaps create a “co-presidency”), and Bill Clinton’s brief live remarks each evening from a train hurtling toward the Chicago convention site in 1996.
Framing the whole event around the maximum number of prime-time speeches by the nominee simply pushes the devolution of conventions to a logical end — an event that’s entirely about the nominee and not at all about the party. And the good thing about nominating a candidate the entire party Establishment opposed is that he’s probably not going to let the traditional courtesies afforded to other politicians of his party get in the way of the convention’s show-business potential. It’s not like any of these birds lifted a finger to help Trump win the nomination, right?
Once you get rid of all the precedents, there are plenty of ways to exploit the convention for drama and high ratings:

And Trump plans to create news events too, not just line up speeches by up-and-coming members of the GOP. He’s toying with unveiling a running mate at the convention rather than before. He’s even considering whether to announce his would-be Cabinet.

Ah yes. One could imagine the darkened arena, and then the dramatic voice-of-God PA announcer intoning: At attorney general, 5-foot-11, 300 pounds, out of Mendham, New Jersey — Chriiiiiiiis CHRISTIE! as flares shoot up from the arena floor and the New Jersey governor trots onto the floor wearing a warm-up suit with TRUMP emblazoned across the front and back.

Yeah, Cleveland could be fun after all, and like most things to do with Donald Trump, at the same time shameful.

One of the things we learned this week about Donald Trump’s general election campaign is that he doesn’t think he needs no stinkin’ data as I discussed at New York:

Donald Trump utters so much self-conscious b.s. about his campaign that you initially don’t know how seriously to take things like this:

Trump has no plans to invest in the kind of data-driven voter-targeting operation that powered Obama’s two White House wins and that Mitt Romney tried to emulate in 2012.
“I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Trump told the AP. “Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
Instead, Trump will rely on a large rally-based get-out-the-vote effort.

Maybe he’s just jiving us, but the idea of a data-free general-election campaign, horrifying as it must be to Republican professionals, is entirely consistent with everything else we know about Trump’s idea of campaigning.

A personalized, event-based GOTV strategy obviously plays to characteristics that once led Trump’s most recently announced supporter, Bobby Jindal, to call him an “egomaniacal madman.” In a very real sense, Trump’s message, transcending any issue positioning, can be summed up in Pontius Pilate’s presentation of Jesus Christ to a mob in Jerusalem: “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man!). So maximum exposure to the candidate in retail settings makes some sense.
There’s also obvious rhetorical consistency value for Trump and his supporters in the idea of lumping together pointy-headed data nerds with other elites who for all their pretensions actually don’t know their asses from page eight. It’s reminiscent of one of George Wallace’s favorite lines:

He seemed to derive the greatest satisfaction from taunting the “thousands of bureaucrats toting brief cases in Washington who don’t know why they’re there … I’ll bet if you opened half of their briefcases all you’d find would be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”

You can almost hear Trump taunt data geeks as bozos whose computers (or “data-processing machines” as he called them in the interview mocking the idea) are loaded with nothing but video games.
There’s still another motive for Trump’s trashing of data analysis: It was robustly endorsed in the post-2012 RNC “Autopsy Report,” which in so many other respects he’s stomped on and tossed in the trash. Check out this language from the report, which comes after an appreciation of the Obama campaign’s superior deployment of data-driven voter targeting:

Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the RNC and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an “environment of intellectual curiosity” and a “culture of data and learning,” and the RNC must lead this effort. We need to be much more purposeful and expansive in our use of research and more sophisticated in how we employ data across all campaign and Party functions.

Whatever else you want to say about the Trump campaign, it does not offer much in the way of an “environment of intellectual curiosity,” unless that means openness to conspiracy theories spread by tabloids and word of mouth.

Unless this is a head fake and Trump is actually maintaining some secret Skunkworks somewhere full of data geeks, this is one area where Democrats may well have an uncontested advantage.

One of the little-known but important tremors set off on the political Right by Donald Trump’s emergence involves that pillar of the GOP, the Christian Right. I offered some analysis of this phenomenon earlier this week at New York:

Trump pretty evenly split the conservative evangelical and traditionalist Catholic vote with Cruz and others in the GOP primaries, to the chagrin of many conservative Christian leaders who viewed Trump as a man whose policy views, personal morality, and all-around hatefulness made him an inappropriate candidate for people claiming to follow the Prince of Peace.
Now that Trump has triumphed, however, there’s a stirring among Christian conservatives that goes far beyond the usual pre-convention demands that the party and its candidate make social issues a priority and eschew any heresies. It’s best reflected in the war of words that has broken out between Trump and his camp and Russell Moore, chief political spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. Throughout the 2016 primaries, Moore has excoriated Trump and warned conservative evangelicals to reject his devilish charms. But now he’s lashing out at Trump-supporting evangelicals with a level of contempt usually reserved for liberal secularists (per this passage from his recent New York Times op-ed):

A white American Christian who disregards nativist language is in for a shock. The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking “foreigner” who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again.”

In a tweet after Trump started attacking him as a “nasty man” via social media, Moore cited chapter and verse (1 Kings 18:17-19):

“When he saw Elijah, he said to him, ‘Is that you, you troubler of Israel?'” the verse reads. “‘I have not made trouble for Israel,’ Elijah replied. ‘But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals.'”

What Moore is doing is urging his fellow believers to take a prophetic stance — a protest
against fundamental social wickedness — against Trump and the Christians who support him. No prominent conservative Christian has done anything like this with a Republican political leader since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign rang in the political marriage of conservative Christians and the GOP that created what we know as the Christian Right.
Moore doesn’t speak for all Christian conservative leaders, obviously. Some, like longtime Christian Right leader Tony Perkins, seem to be following the old formula of fencing in the GOP nominee with platform planks and pledges on particular issues before putting on the party yoke and supporting him. And a few others, most famously Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., dived into the churning waters of Trump’s brand of cultural conservatism from the get-go. But the fact remains: This once unified movement has split and could for the first time in decades stay split through a general election.
One of our most insightful observers of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner recently observed that Trump may represent a subculture of American Christianity that’s declaring its independence from the larger tribe:

Deliberately or not, Mr. Trump may be the perfect candidate for an evangelical subculture that has increasingly become enamored with the prosperity, or health and wealth, gospel. In trying to build a singular religious faction that agreed on some core issues (like abortion), the Republican Party has courted that subculture, even though many evangelicals consider prosperity theology to be heretical. Mr. Trump acts more like a televangelist than an evangelical.

To put it more broadly, Christian Right leaders have for a long time encouraged the people in the pews to conflate their faith with cultural conservatism and nationalism, standing as Christian soldiers against the secularist trends that were transforming God’s Redeemer Nation from its Judeo-Christian moorings in patriarchal families and bourgeois values. What Trump has exploited, like many political leaders in 20th-century Europe, is that a lot of culturally threatened conservative white Christians are willing to throw away the cross in favor of their flag, their race, their tribe, and everything that’s familiar. The big question is whether fear and hatred of the secular-socialist enemy can once again paper over the growing division between Christian nationalists and people who follow Moore in arguing that Christ has no nation….
[I]f Trump goes down in ignominious defeat, his candidacy could actually strengthen the Christian Right in the long run by disciplining or expelling its fascistic elements. But in the meantime, one of the fascinating subcurrents of this election will be the hurling of Old Testament thunderbolts by conservative Christian figures at the leader of the political party their predecessors claimed as Christ’s own.

Selah.

With speculation already underway as to the identity of Donald Trump’s running-mate, I could not help but comment at New York on one familiar name that’s already popping up: Newt Gingrich!

[T]he news that Newt Gingrich was on Donald Trump’s short list for the vice-presidential nomination was both startling and predictable. Gingrich has been buried politically so many times — as a Rockefeller Republican in the 1970s, as an annoying gadfly House member in the 1980s, as a national pariah in the 1990s, and as a failed presidential candidate in 2012 — that yet another resurrection at the age of 73 seems preposterous yet at the same time fitting in such a preposterous political year.
It’s possible Gingrich’s name is being whispered aloud by Trump intimates like Roger Stone as a matter of simple gratitude: For months the former Speaker has defended the mogul like few other respectable voices in the GOP. But there is undeniably a certain congruence to the idea of Trump-Gingrich: A presidential candidate with no coherent worldview could use a front man who cannot go five minutes without articulating some sort of historical or metaphysical perspective on the most banal of subjects.
Indeed, despite the crackpot nature of many of Gingrich’s many policy enthusiasms (his obsession with colonizing Mars is emblematic), his is what passes for a Big Brain in American politics, and as a veep prospect would happily occupy political media in babbling defense of Trump, leaving the Big Guy to wage more strategic battles. His résumé is long enough to cover Trump’s lack of political experience many times over (Newt’s first congressional campaign was on the cusp between the Nixon and Ford administrations), yet his reputation as a bomb-throwing “revolutionary” is as fully developed as Trump’s own. And at a time when Trump is looking for deep pockets to help finance a general-election contest, Newt’s ability to shake money trees could be helpful as well. Just as his name has surfaced as a potential veep, his 2012 sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson has announced he’s one billionaire Trump can count on to write some checks.
You could even make the argument that Newt’s failed 2012 campaign paved the way for Trump’s unlikely candidacy in this cycle. Gingrich made Islamophobia a central part of his presidential bid, constantly citing the phantom menace of Sharia law in his pandering appeals to Christian-right and nativist audiences. He also anticipated some of Trump’s economic-policy heresies, getting into very hot water by disrespecting one of Paul Ryan’s budgets and then going crudely populist in attacks on Mitt Romney’s career as a corporate downsizing consultant.
But Gingrich’s compatibility with Trump has its downside, and choosing him might represent a doubling-down on some less-than-savory aspects of the mogul’s record and personality. Like Trump, Gingrich has been known to flip-flop and backtrack; I once wrote a profile of my fellow Georgian based on decades of close observation that stressed his chameleon-like ability to change with the times (most famously by becoming the epitome of True Conservatism after an early career as a very nearly liberal Republican running to the right of a Georgia Dixiecrat). While he would superficially help repair Trump’s relationships with Republican regulars and movement conservatives, none of them have much reason to trust Gingrich, either.
And then there’s the personal stuff. Between them, Trump and Gingrich have six marriages and enough admitted adultery to turn the average politician into a pillar of salt. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gingrich struggled as much with the hostility of women voters in 2012 as Trump has in the current cycle. As Republican nominee Trump seeks to reverse historically poor numbers among women, does he really want to invite fresh recital of the story of his running mate’s alleged presentation of divorce papers to his first wife (who was, in an added creepy-sounding note, his former high-school math teacher) while she was in a hospital battling cancer? Everything else being equal, probably not.
Trump’s done pretty well, however, defying political logic, and perhaps Newt is just too complementary to him — the nerdy sidekick to the big man on campus — to pass up. If it happens, the happiest man on Earth would be Bill Clinton, who turned Gingrich into his punching bag and perfect foil in the mid-1990s and would probably enjoy beating him up all over again on his wife’s behalf.

As would we all.

With Donald Trump clinching the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, a lot of people are closely watching the exact words other Republican pols are saying about their new titular leader. But they may be missing the real reason Cruz and Kasich dropped out so quickly, and why other GOPers don’t seem to be sweating the general election. I wrote about their motives at New York:

One of the things you do when you are positioning yourself for a future presidential run is to pose as a party loyalist and then volunteer for down-ballot drudge work. That’s how Richard Nixon rehabilitated himself in 1964, and why he had an enormous advantage over Nelson Rockefeller — who attacked Goldwater supporters at the convention and refused to lift a finger for the ticket in the general election — in 1968. When Ronald Reagan jumped into the ’68 race very late and Nixon was trying to hold the line against the wildly popular Californian among Southern conservatives, his loyalty to Goldwater probably saved the day. That’s the context in which we should understand the decisions by Ted Cruz and John Kasich to fold their tents before it was mathematically necessary this year. Why make permanent enemies of Trump supporters? Both these men are almost certainly thinking about giving it another whirl in 2020, after Trump’s inevitable defeat. Being the party loyalist who nonetheless offers the party a very different future is the safest course of action.
Anyone who actually joins Trump’s ticket or gets too close to the fire of the Donald’s rhetoric, on the other hand, is probably not thinking about 2020. The number of pols who find something else to do when Trump’s circus comes to their town this fall will likely show how few Republicans are jockeying for spots in a Trump Administration and how many are looking beyond November.
And what will their post-Trump arguments be? We can already anticipate some of them.
For Ted Cruz and the movement conservatives he represents, the argument is easy: Republicans lost in 2008 and 2012 and 2016 because they did not make their campaigns a crusade for True Conservatism, and thus it’s now time, finally, to give it a try in 2020.
For John Kasich, the easiest argument will probably be that Republicans need to fix their gazes on general-election polls from the get-go next time around, and make electability their principle litmus test for candidates.
There will be plenty of Republicans arguing for a return to the post-2012 RNC Autopsy Report, and an applications of its lessons — lessons Trump’s nomination implicitly and violently rejected. Whether or not Marco Rubio makes a political comeback in 2018, you can expect his name to be mentioned in conjunction with the easiest route to a GOP recovery among Latinos — unless George P. Bush wins the governorship of Texas in the interim (I’m at least half-joking). Nikki Haley will get some early mentions as a potential party savior, and maybe before long Joni Ernst will be deemed ready for the Big Time.
And then you can expect a second act from the Reformicons, the intellectuals who typically wanted the GOP to do a better job of representing the views and economic interests of its white-working-class base, but for the most part were as horrified as anyone else by how Trump fit that particular bill. They probably need a more forceful champion than Rubio or Jebbie in 2020, with an agenda more evocative than the odd family tax credit.
There will be other would-be shapers of the post-Trump Republican Party as well, whether it’s another White House candidate from the Family Paul, or fresh faces nobody’s thinking about. But the great thing about the impending Trump disaster is that none of the survivors will get blamed and everyone can pretend it was a one-off aberration — a sort of natural disaster — that need not recur. It will help enormously that 2018 — like 1966 — should be a very good year for the GOP. Thanks to fortuitous turnout patterns, midterms are now always elections where Republicans should be better than external circumstances might suggest. The midterm in a third straight Democratic administration should be especially strong for the “out party.” The Senate landscape for 2018 is almost impossibly pro-Republican. And on top of everything else, the more down-ballot damage the party suffers this November, the more likely crazy-large gains will be two years later. Indeed, it will be easy for Republicans to point to 2010, 2014, and 2018 and argue that there’s nothing wrong with the GOP that the right presidential candidate cannot fix.
And without a doubt, that candidate is looking at him- or herself in the mirror each morning.
Yeah, it’s groan-inducing to say this, and not something I want to be true at all. But thanks to the newly minted 2016 Republican presidential nominee, the 2020 Invisible Primary has already begun.