Trump’s Wholesale Renovation of the Republican Party

The Republican Party gathers in a triumphal mood in Milwaukee. Polls favor the GOP in 2024. The long-awaited vice-presidential pick has been made. And Donald Trump prepares to accept the nomination again, just as President Joe Biden faces calls across his party to step away from another run. Four months before the election, the contrast between the two parties is stark.

Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta is in Wisconsin for the Republican National Convention and sees a confidence there unlike anything he’s witnessed in his years covering on the GOP. It is now the party of Trump, and as Alberta has reported, his campaign is planning for a landslide win. But after two prior runs, what is different about the Trump campaign of 2024?

On this episode of Radio Atlantic, Alberta joins guest host Adam Harris from the convention hall to give an inside view of the party. Listen to their conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: What a week in American politics. The Republican Party has gathered in Wisconsin to renominate Donald Trump for president. The convention follows a near-miss assassination attempt on Trump and the announcement of Ohio Senator J. D. Vance as his pick for VP. All the while, President Biden faces calls from within the Democratic Party for him to step aside.

I’m Adam Harris, and this is Radio Atlantic. Hanna Rosin is still away, working on a special project. For this episode, I’m hoping to understand what’s different about Trump’s 2024 campaign, and what, if anything, Saturday’s assassination attempt has changed. To do this, I’m joined by staff writer Tim Alberta from the RNC convention hall. Hey, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Adam. What’s happening, man?

Harris: Not too much. Thanks for coming on. You’ve covered Republican politics for a while now. You’re currently in Milwaukee covering the RNC. What’s the feeling there?

Alberta: The feeling here is like an election-night victory party that started four months early. I’ve been to a lot of Republican conventions. I’ve spent a lot of years covering Republican politics, and I can safely say I have never been around a more confident—even cocky—bunch of people who are just entirely convinced that this campaign is already over and that they are marching to victory in November, the only question being: How big of a victory is it?

Harris: You know, leading into this week, we all thought that the big news was going to be the announcement of Trump’s VP pick. So what was the reaction to Trump picking Ohio Senator J. D. Vance?

Alberta: You know, from what I can see, the reception has been pretty enthusiastic. You know, this is a really self-selecting group here in Milwaukee. I mean, the party as an institution has been completely remade by Donald Trump from the top down.

You know, Donald Trump picking someone who is seen as kind of an heir apparent to this populist, America First empire that Trump has created is, of course, going to be received really well in a place like this. The question obviously is, for folks who exist more in the center-right—you know, moderate, establishment, business-friendly lane of the Republican Party—there is, I think, some hesitancy, some doubt about J. D. Vance, particularly not just even from the moderate wing but from the defense-hawk wing of the party.

And the J. D. Vance pick is a pretty concrete signal that, to the extent there’s been a civil war inside the Republican Party—over foreign policy, national-security issues, the fights over funding Ukraine, obviously, in this past year—I think that those questions and those criticisms do exist here, but they’re very much on the margins, because this is, at the end of the day, Trump’s party.

Harris: Yeah. Coming into this national convention was a little bit different, right? There was always something that was looming over it, and that is the events of Saturday. And so what impact has the assassination attempt on Trump had on Republicans?

Alberta: The thing that is most striking, Adam, is there’s sort of an added layer of invincibility to Trump. If you thought that the party was already sort of a cult of personality and that there were already some of these kind of subtle undertones of a messianic complex attached to Donald Trump, then certainly the events of Saturday—and, you know, specifically the sort of getting up, bleeding from the assassin’s bullet, defiantly pumping the fist, and saying to fight—I think it’s created this sense of Trump as invincible, Trump as immortal, Trump as, you know, You can’t kill Trump. They tried. Right?

Like, so there is almost an added supernatural dimension to the conversation. And we’ve heard that from some of the speakers this week: People, you know, stating very plainly that God has his hands on Trump, that God wants Trump alive, that God kept Trump alive, and that he has a plan for him. So I would say that is a pretty discernible shift in tone and sort of an escalating of the ways in which Trump is sort of lionized by the party faithful at an event like this.

Harris: Yeah. You know, you’ve covered conventions before. How does that kind of cockiness compare to conventions that you’ve covered in the past or that you’ve seen in the past?

Alberta: There’s really no comparison. If you think back to 2008 and then 2012, Republicans did not think they were going to beat Barack Obama. I mean, especially in ’08 but then even in ’12, there was just really—there was some enthusiasm around Romney, but there wasn’t a lot of swagger there. There wasn’t really any discernible confidence.

And then 2016, look, Donald Trump—half the people at the convention in Cleveland in 2016 were anti-Trump. They were delegates who were bound to cast their votes for Trump because of how he had performed in their states, but they were not happy about it. And they had come to the convention, some of them, to make a stink about it and really were hoping for a floor fight to try to even stop Trump from becoming the nominee.

So, certainly, the idea that he was going to go on to win, that was just kind of fantasy at that point, much less go on to win and be renominated in ’24 and become the face of the party. Nobody could have imagined that.

So I think what feels different about this moment is not just the confidence but the wholesale renovation of the Republican Party to become such a distinctly Trumpian entity. And I think the confidence, in some ways, flows from that. It flows from a sense of, like, We know who we are as a party now. We weren’t entirely sure with McCain or with Romney or even with Trump in ’16. But now, with his third time being nominated, we know who we are.

And I think probably more importantly, Adam, they know who they’re facing. And they’re facing Joe Biden, who is just, objectively speaking, a very vulnerable and diminished candidate from the man that Donald Trump faced just four years earlier.

Harris: Considering where Biden is in his campaign at the moment, what are Trump’s people thinking as they sort of watch the drama unfold around him?

Alberta: The great source of confidence inside of the Trump campaign has much more to do with Joe Biden than it has to do with Donald Trump. The fact is: Joe Biden is, in many ways, sort of a dream opponent for Donald Trump to run against because some of Trump’s own glaring deficiencies—his, at times, incoherent ramblings from the stage, his age, his own visible decline—are sort of neutralized and almost forgotten because, relative to Biden, Trump looks young and sprightly and energetic.

I think there’s also a fundamental contrast—a visual contrast—that the Trump campaign, from day one, has been deeply invested in drawing out, which is strength versus weakness. This is really what animates everything they talk about in the campaign and everything they do. From the voters that they’re targeting to the digital content that they’re creating, the mailers that they’re going to be sending out, everything the Trump campaign is doing is meant to focus on this contrast of strength versus weakness.

And they just believe that when you’re talking about the Southern border, when you’re talking about dealing with the geopolitical craziness happening in the world, when you’re talking about inflation—whatever it may be—that Donald Trump is perceived as sort of an alpha, even to people who don’t like him, and that Biden is perceived as feeble, even to people who like him.

And so all of that, Adam, I have to emphasize: All of that was the theory of the case before the debate, when Joe Biden looked like he had one foot in the grave already, and it was before the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. And so what the Trump campaign now has are the two most vivid moments of this campaign.

Both of them are directly in service of this contrast that they’ve been trying to push. And so the Trump people, now all they can do is cross their fingers and say their prayers and hope that Joe Biden remains their opponent because, from their vantage point, there’s no way he can win.

Harris: What would they think if he dropped out of the race?

Alberta: It would be a fire drill. They have spent the past year and a half engineering this campaign to run a very specific race against a very specific opponent in Joe Biden. And listen, the people running Trump’s operation will say, You know what? Doesn’t matter. Bring them on, whoever it is, that, you know, any Democrat is going to be saddled with Joe Biden’s baggage.

But that’s not true. And they know it’s not true. They recognize that if Biden were to step down, and if someone else were to be at the top of the ticket, it would, in some fundamental ways, send them back to the drawing board and force them to reimagine the messaging, reimagine the targeting, reimagine how they think about the contrasts in this campaign.

It would also represent sort of a reset moment for a Democratic Party that has been in a sort of free fall of late. And Republicans are entirely content to sit back and pop some popcorn and enjoy the show. They feel like there’s nothing that they need to do right now, because the Democrats are doing the hard work for them. But if Biden were to suddenly get out, then that changes everything.

Harris: You know, you recently wrote a deep dive on the campaign with the headline, “Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win.” So what is different about Trump’s 2024 operations and strategy?

Alberta: Boy, where do I even start? Look, Adam, Trump in 2016 didn’t even have a campaign. I mean, sure, I suppose technically he did but, like, there was no real infrastructure. There was no real organization. It was just a couple of guys who were sort of making it up as they went along. And it was kind of almost an elaborate prank, in some ways. I mean it was sort of the reality-TV-show experiment of a campaign for the presidency.

And when Donald Trump became the nominee, that’s really when the Republican National Committee, which was led at the time by Reince Priebus, basically stepped in and ran the campaign for him because Trump didn’t have any sort of a get out the vote. You know, it was a totally nonexistent political operation in 2016.

And then in 2020, you know, Trump’s the incumbent president. So he’s got a lot of money and, on paper, they’re building something out that looks more professional and more conventional, something that we’re used to seeing, but it was a horribly run campaign. They burned through tons of money. And the campaign wasn’t run by very experienced people, and they paid a price for it.

This time around, you’ve got some of the shrewdest and sharpest and most-cutthroat people in the Republican Party who are in charge of the campaign, and they have, from day one, stressed efficiency. They’re really sort of focusing on some of the core competencies of the campaign.

And I think the most important thing, Adam, that this campaign has been able to do is that Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who are the co-architects of the campaign—and they are managing it together as a partnership—they’ve really been able to move Trump to a better place, in terms of his own capabilities, his own actions as a candidate.

He is embracing mail voting. He is overseeing a campaign now that is actually using some pretty cutting-edge technology to solicit absentee votes. Whereas four years ago, he was forbidding his own Republican voters from using the mail. So there are a lot of ways in which this campaign is just sort of light years beyond either the 2020 or the 2016 operations.

Harris: And, you know, one of the reasons why, in that last campaign, Trump was effectively saying that, you know, We don’t want mail voting. We don’t want absentee voting, was because Republicans have kind of viewed it as a gamble, right? When there’s more early voting, it typically favors Democrats.

So is that a sort of gamble that they’re taking in this election by emphasizing mail voting, absentee voting? What sort of gamble are they taking with this new approach to the Trump campaign?

Alberta: Well, here’s the thing: We have become very accustomed, those of us who cover politics, to thinking that if turnout is high, that automatically benefits Democrats, because the lower-propensity voters, the lower-engagement voters—and we’re talking about young people; we’re talking about particularly young Black men, young Latino men—we talk about certain demographics that are just traditionally far less likely to turn out and vote.

And the assumption has always been, Well, if you see higher turnout, that means that those people are coming out to vote, and those people are traditionally Democratic constituencies. Therefore, it’s bad for the Republican Party. This election, I think, could really be remembered as a bit of a watershed, Adam, because what we see in all of the publicly available data, as well as what we’re told is in a lot of the private data—the polling being done by both parties right now—is that, for the first time that anyone can remember, a lot of these low-engagement and low-propensity voters are breaking heavily in favor of Donald Trump, breaking heavily in favor of the Republican Party.

And if that bears out come November, I think it’s going to force the Democratic Party to sort of fundamentally reassess and recalibrate their approach to a whole host of issues but primarily just to this question of: How could it be that Donald Trump, the guy who would seemingly be the least likely to penetrate key pieces of the Democratic coalition and steal them away, how could it be that he’s the one who does this? And to be clear, Adam, there are still some skeptics, both in the Republican Party and in the Democratic Party, people who look at the polling and who say, I just don’t buy it. I don’t buy that Trump is going to wind up winning, you know, 20 to 25 percent of the Black vote. I don’t believe it, right?

And until we see it, some of that skepticism is certainly warranted. But I think part of the reason that the Trump campaign has been so confident in making this play—and in emphasizing the vote by mail and the absentee [voting] and trying to connect and engage with some of these voters who have a history of using nontraditional voting means—is because their modeling, they feel like it’s airtight.

Their modeling shows that these people who have been reliably Democratic in the past, that if they vote, they’re voting for Trump. And there’s just no overstating what a sea change that would represent in our politics.

Harris: All right, we’re going to take a short break. We’ll have more with Tim Alberta in a moment.

[Music]

Harris: You know, early on, coming into the campaign, we knew who the candidates kind of were, right? The primary felt like it was already predestined, preordained, that you would have another Trump versus Biden. And Trump was the one coming in with the baggage, right? It’s hard to talk about him without talking about the cases that were looming over him, without talking about the conviction.

But on Monday, just as the RNC began, the federal judge in Florida overseeing his classified-documents trial dismissed the case. What do you make of that news, and what impact will Trump’s legal issues have on this campaign?

Alberta: Well, first of all, I’m sure that the timing was totally coincidental, right? I’m sure that Judge Cannon had no idea that it was the first day of the Republican National Convention.

You know, it’s interesting, Adam, because this thing that was perceived to be a great vulnerability, potentially the albatross around his neck that could prevent him from winning the presidency, it suddenly feels almost like a nonissue. I mean, between some of the court cases getting bumped and bumped and bumped back again to help him scheduling-wise, this one being dismissed, you know, the conviction in Manhattan creating a financial windfall that had actually pushed him ahead of Joe Biden in the fundraising race—and just to pause on that point for a minute, Adam.

Trump was getting trounced financially for the first year of this campaign. He was way, way, way behind, and his cash reserves were really depleted because they had to keep paying all these legal bills. Well, suddenly, he gets convicted in Manhattan, and he raises these record-setting sums of money in the two or three days that follow.

And wouldn’t you know it? We checked the FEC filings, and Trump is entering the month of July with more cash in the bank than Biden is. So it’s really remarkable how, again, this thing that was supposed to be his greatest liability has sort of evaporated and, if anything, almost seems to very strangely have become an asset.

There’s been this long-simmering sense among Trump’s lieutenants that he is a target, that he is persecuted, that he is an enemy of the state, and that they won’t stop at anything to take him down.

Harris: You know, that language of persecution is important here, because I want to ask you about something you’ve written a great deal about, that we’ve talked about at length. That’s this sort of intersection of faith and politics.

You wrote a book about your journey as an evangelical Christian and as the son of a pastor. And in this election cycle, you’ve warned about how the forces of Christian nationalism are on the rise, both inside the church and inside the Republican Party.

So from your view at the epicenter of the party this week, how do you expect those forces to affect the Trump campaign?

Alberta: You know, this is a really interesting historical moment we’re approaching because this is our first post–Roe v. Wade presidential election. For 50 years, you’ve had single-issue voters—you know, conservative Catholics, evangelical Christians—who really don’t have any appetite for partisan politics and who would otherwise be inclined to just ignore all the noise come every 4th November. But they have been convinced that because presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, and because the Supreme Court—and only the Supreme Court—can ultimately strike down Roe v. Wade, that you have to vote in a presidential election, and you have to vote for the Republican.

I think what we’re about to find out is what number of those single-issue, highly committed, pro-life advocates suddenly find themselves recognizing that the issue is now defederalized, that it’s no longer a presidential issue, it’s no longer a Supreme Court issue and decide that they’re going to stay home because they can’t stomach voting for Donald Trump again.

So I think that is kind of a question mark, Adam, looming over the proceedings here that’s gotten very little attention. But it’s something that I’m going to be really focusing on in the months ahead, especially in light of the changes to the Republican platform that were, I think, obviously very upsetting to some in the social-conservative movement, effectively stripping out what had been the traditional language around the abortion issue.

And also it shouldn’t go ignored, stripping out the language around marriage being between one man and one woman. So there’s a feeling among some of the evangelical activist leaders that they are sort of being pushed to the side. And that’s because they are, in some sense, Adam.

Here’s the thing: Donald Trump and his campaign, they have made a calculation that these folks, the evangelicals, they’re not going anywhere. What, are they going to go vote for Joe Biden? Right? Like, that’s the level of confidence that they have. And so I think some of these decisions, at least at a tactical level, are riskier than I think many people realize. And if this winds up being a close election, there really could be a price to pay for some of these maneuvers that have been made here.

And, Adam, let’s be clear: If Trump is elected, he is going to have some people in his administration, in his cabinet, in his West Wing who are self-described Christian nationalists. I mean, there’s just no question about it. So I don’t think that the threat that I’ve been writing about is diminished in any way or any less relevant.

I just think that the Trump folks are actually pretty smart and savvy in recognizing that the Christian-nationalist menace that has been sort of drawn into the public’s attention, that it is a huge liability for them politically. You know, you see the Handmaid’s Tale memes that go around the internet, right? Like, I think the Trump folks recognize that they need to head that off, and they need to distance themselves from any of that narrative. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t loom large and play a really critical role in his administration.

Harris: So yeah, thinking further about Trump and the Christian right, he’s leaned into an image of himself as a persecuted martyr, and now he’s nearly been killed. What impact do you think the assassination attempt will have for people on the Christian right? Or what impact has it already had for people on the Christian right?

Alberta: You know, it’s hard to say, because this is all moving so quickly. Just being here in Milwaukee this week, Adam, I mean, it’s apparent. And you’re hearing it from the stage. You’re hearing it from delegates on the floor. You’re hearing it just in casual conversations with people, like, in the line for coffee. There’s definitely a sense of the sort of supernatural presence and this divine intervention that has spared Donald Trump and made him into even more powerful a figure than he was just a week ago.

You sense that from others. My big question is will we get it from Trump himself? I have spent as much time as any reporter in America at Trump rallies, listening to him, dissecting his words, kind of studying any evolution in his thinking, even his just one-off riffs, trying to understand, you know, how he might be approaching things in a new or different manner.

I’ve got to say that this acceptance speech he’ll be giving at the Republican convention is, to me, probably the most significant speech he’ll ever give. Because if, in fact, there is any real change in the man based on the events of last week, if some of his advisors are to be believed, he has been talking in kind of strangely spiritual terms and has been invoking God in ways that he has really never been known to do privately.

If there is some kind of meaningful change in Donald Trump himself—forget about the grassroots; forget about the party officials, all of his supporters—I mean, that could have, I think, really significant implications, politically and otherwise, for the party and for the country. So I think that’s the biggest piece of the puzzle here that everyone in Milwaukee is sort of waiting on and wondering: Are we going to hear from the same guy who we’ve been hearing from all these years, or is this going to be something a little bit different?

[Music]

Harris: Absolutely. And we’ll be watching for that. Tim, thank you so much for talking with me today, and good luck at the convention.

Alberta: Adam. My pleasure, man.

Harris: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Hanna Rosin is the host of Radio Atlantic and will return in a couple of weeks.

Until then, I’m Adam Harris, and thank you for listening.