Good morning, it’s Tuesday, July 18, 2023. Seven years ago today, the Republican National Convention kicked off in Cleveland, Ohio. I wrote about it that morning and was prescient in one regard and spectacularly misguided in another. I’ll give both examples in a moment.
On Monday morning, July 18, 2016, delegates, journalists, lobbyists, Republican officials, local citizens, activists, protesters, and peace officers from around the United States arrived at the first of the two quadrennial presidential nominating conventions.
Kicking off that event, yours truly wrote the following: “And now,” as author Maurice Sendak famously wrote, “let the wild rumpus start!”
I continued:
| If it seems to party regulars that Donald Trump’s supporters have aced out the GOP establishment and given their party’s banner to a political neophyte who hasn’t even been active in their movement, well, it seemed that way 64 years ago this month, too. The 1952 Republican convention also took place in mid-July, in Chicago, which is where Dwight D. Eisenhower wrested the presidential nomination away from Robert A. Taft of Ohio. The son of a president, and the most powerful member of the Senate, Taft’s nickname was “Mr. Republican.” But that prominence among political insiders proved no match for the mass appeal of the five-star general who’d commanded the Allies in Europe against Hitler. Dwight Eisenhower’s political base was the grassroots, among an electorate that knew him simply and affectionately as “Ike.” |
Trump and his loyalists were replacing venerable Republican stalwarts, yes, that was truly happening. It’s a revolution still being fought, although unless the 2024 presidential polling is completely wrong, Trumpism is dominant in today’s GOP.
Such transformations take place from time to time. It also happened in 1980 when Ronald Reagan remade the Republican Party in his own image.
But Reagan had served two terms as governor of the most populous state in the nation and had nearly wrested the nomination from an incumbent Republican president in 1976. So comparing Trump to Reagan never made much sense. (Not to mention that the Gipper was the soul of rectitude.)
As for the Eisenhower analogy, well, that analogy was even weaker. Let me put this down there where the goats can get it: I gave Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt in 2016. But he hasn’t resembled Ike for a single day in those seven years. Then again, Dwight David Eisenhower was never an easy act to emulate.
Carl M. Cannon
