This might be Trump's Republican Party for many years
Speakers deliver once-unimaginable messages to convention delegates
In this one moment, Trumpism felt less like a passing phase for Republicans, and more like a long-term passing of the torch, toward a more nationalist party.
Mitch McConnell, perhaps the party's most powerful figure over the last two decades, was booed mercilessly on Monday at the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee.
The Republican Senate leader was drowned out while trying to register the primary results for his state of Kentucky in the presidential nomination roll call. Nancy Pelosi would hardly have received a worse reaction from this crowd.
About an hour later, out walked Sen. J.D. Vance onto the same convention floor. And one song was played over the arena loudspeaker, again and again, on a loop, as Donald Trump's running mate worked the celebratory room.
That song was country legend Merle Haggard's America First with lyrics complaining about the U.S. helping the world — exporting democracy, building roads and bridges elsewhere — while needing help at home.
Trump's selection of running mate seems intended to entrench this worldview for years to come. It may be shamefully premature to speculate about the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, but Vance may well lead the party into the 2030s.
The first-term Ohio senator shares Trump's opposition to arming Ukraine, free-market trade and asylum-seekers, and has also proposed more robust business regulations.
There are implications for Canada: If Trump wins this election, Ottawa could find itself under intense pressure to boost defence spending and to negotiate exemptions from new tariffs, not to mention other trade issues.
It's also notable this week's convention features speakers delivering once-unimaginable messages for a Republican gathering — union leaders have bashed big business, others have bashed NATO — as the party's centre of gravity shifts toward populism and nationalism.
Perhaps tellingly, the party's past is under-represented at this convention. Not a single living Republican president, presidential candidate, vice-president or vice-presidential candidate is speaking in Milwaukee.
One conservative commentator quipped that the torch has been passed from the philosophy of Ronald Reagan to that of the Trump-like Pat Buchanan.
And that's a good thing in the view of some attendees.
Asked to explain the booing of McConnell, one 22-year-old mentioned Reagan. And he didn't mean it as a compliment, which a few years ago might have been viewed here as political apostasy.
"He's still with the old guard," said Garrett Weldin of Delaware, referring to McConnell. "Sort of a Reaganite is what I would refer to him as."
He said the old guard should learn to read the room; and the reason McConnell got booed, he said, is members no longer feel he represents the base.
Weldin said he's thrilled by the choice of Vance as the vice-presidential candidate, who he said better represents his values.
In any case, McConnell is resigning as the party's leader in the Senate after the November elections, while Vance seems likely to play a leading role for years.
The choice of running mate divided Trump's circle across ideological lines. There was a vicious power-struggle between nationalists like Tucker Carlson who favoured Vance, versus internationalists who favoured Sen. Marco Rubio or North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
The winning side argued that Vance not only better represented the MAGA movement, but also made an eye-poppingly gory appeal — according to the New York Times, Carlson told Trump that, if he picked Rubio or Burgum, U.S. intelligence agencies might kill him to make one of them president.
One delegate from Ohio in his mid-50s said he felt bad to hear McConnell booed. "I don't think he deserved that," Tom McCabe said.
"Mitch McConnell's done a lot for this party."
But he agrees that Vance is a solid choice who represents the Republicans' future.
"Our party is a Trump party now. It started in '15 and '16 and he solidified the hold," he told CBC News at the Milwaukee convention.
"I think Donald Trump changed our party. It's more – you can call it populism, it is. I think Vance is a great transition to this younger generation."
Meanwhile, a longtime Republican, watching from his home in Virginia, was disheartened by what he was witnessing at the convention.
Brian Riedl is a financial policy expert who has worked for presidential candidates, senators and conservative think-tanks.
He calls himself a proud Reagan-style free-market Republican and worries about the trajectory of his party.
He feels like younger conservatives are buying into unfair stereotypes about the Reagan years, not appreciating the miraculous economic turnaround they helped spur.
He said the same of the attacks on McConnell, who, Riedl says, has spent decades getting conservative judges confirmed and bills passed, while blocking Democrats.
"A lot of Republican voters and delegates get too much of their political information from tweets and angry speeches," he said.
"They simply judge Republican conservatism by how bombastic it is rather than what it accomplishes. Virtually every conservative accomplishment of the past 20 years has Mitch McConnell's fingerprints on it…
"[But] he is seen as a weak sellout compared to blowhard lawmakers who do nothing but tweet and give speeches."
Riedl lamented that there's nothing in the Republican platform about controlling the country's finances, which he said are trending toward a debt crisis.
There's nothing about increasing revenue or cutting spending. Instead, he said, it's talk of tariffs while bashing trade, international alliances and corporations.
"The Reagan GOP in the 1980s would wake up today and wonder, 'Who are these Democrats?'" he said.
"On economic policy I would argue that we've got two Democratic parties."
Riedl said U.S. voters aren't being told the truth by either party about the real risk of a fiscal crisis within a few years.
"We're screwed," he said.
The former top Republican in Congress espouses a more sanguine view of the party's situation.
In a long question-and-answer session with foreign reporters at the convention, Kevin McCarthy spoke, in detail, of his view that the U.S. should keep supporting Ukraine, comparing the current global situation to that of the 1930s.
He said there's still a lot of the old Reagan party in the current GOP. In fact, he noted, Trump's own slogan, "Make America Great Again," essentially copies Reagan, who in 1980 campaigned on the slogan "Let's Make America Great Again."
But he said every party adjusts to deal with the challenges of the time.
These days, Republicans, and Democrats, are both fixated on reshoring manufacturing jobs, after years of outsourcing that has devastated communities, left the U.S. dependent on China for critical goods, and coincided with a spike in deaths of despair and a lower working-class life expectancy.
In addition, McCarthy said, it's normal for different strands of thought to co-exist in one party, and this is true of Republicans.
"Each party — if they're honest — has more than one party inside it," McCarthy said.
"So we're going to have different beliefs, probably in foreign policy, on states' rights.… Those are healthy to have. And I still believe the fundamental principles of Reagan are still the [Republican] establishment."
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