This might be Trump’s Republican Party for many years
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.
Donald Trump has named J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential running mate. The junior senator from Ohio is a staunch supporter, but it hasn’t always been that way. The National breaks down how he went from ‘never Trump’ to the former U.S. president’s top pick for the job.
“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.
The people of Middletown, Ohio, J.D. Vance’s hometown, hold him in high regard — former U.S. president Donald Trump has picked him as his running mate. ‘Everything he’s done, he’s built on his own,’ says a former city councilmember.
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.”
Ohio Senator J.D. Vance’s former political adviser Jai Chabria tells Power & Politics the vice-presidential nominee is ‘often underestimated’ and will ‘rise to the occasion’ as Donald Trump’s running mate.
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.”
Published at Sun, 14 Jul 2024 01:06:12 +0000
Has Ukraine’s mobilization effort during ongoing war with Russia turned a corner?
Ukraine’s push to recruit more soldiers in its ongoing war with Russia has been heating up this summer, with signs emerging that Kyiv’s much-debated mobilization efforts may be turning a corner.
Bohdan Senyk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military, told Reuters that recruiters had seen a “positive trend” in May and June, with conscription levels doubling compared with the two months prior, without providing any figures.
And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a news conference on Monday that mobilization efforts are going “according to plan,” although he said training facilities must be expanded to accommodate them.
While Ukraine welcomes any boost in troops, analysts say Kyiv’s job doesn’t end with simply sending more soldiers to the front lines.
“What the Ukrainians are showing us now is not a surprise,” George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., said, adding that some estimates suggest Ukraine will be able to generate at least 10 brigades through recruitment — with each brigade comprising 3,000 to 5,000 troops.
Barros said the question for Ukraine is not whether it can find enough recruits but whether it can provide them with the tools they need on the battlefield.
Mathieu Boulègue, a defence analyst with the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, said the training and effective deployment of these incoming troops will be critical.
He told Reuters that Ukraine must “invest human capital smartly and efficiently where it is needed. Because inasmuch as you can get anyone to drive a truck or clean toilets, you can’t get effective warfighters that easily.”
Prior to the summer, Ukraine took steps to increase the pool of potential recruits it can draw from following Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
The government lowered the draft age, limited the exemptions for serving and pushed Ukrainian men living abroad to consider their obligations at home. It also allowed some prisoners to enlist in the military — a step it had not taken previously.
But the process of deciding who can be pressed into the war effort has been contentious. With the war in its third year, tensions have not abated over this issue.
On Monday, Ukrainian police in the western region of Lviv reported that someone threw a grenade at a recruitment office in the city of Busk overnight. No one was hurt in the incident.
Media reports suggest some men in Ukraine are hiding from recruiters, in a bid to avoid being drafted.
The problem with demobilization
Alyssa Demus, an international defence researcher at the RAND Corporation, a U.S. global policy think-tank, said mobilization remains “a really controversial issue” in Ukraine, as does the related issue of how to provide long-serving soldiers relief from duty.
Some Ukrainians have been fighting on the front lines since the start of the all-out war.
At this point, those veterans have vital skills and experience that can’t easily be replaced by rookie recruits — a reality that Demus said has given Zelenskyy pause on how to deal with the demobilization issue.
“There are new recruits that have zero military training,” she said, adding that also means no combat experience either.
Yet the veterans have spent years away from their families and the lives they had before the war, and they have been under intense stress.
“That takes a huge toll on someone,” Demus said.
Despite this group’s collective burden, there’s no timeline on when these veterans will be going home.
Continued U.S. support unclear
The U.S. election in November could mean a change of leaders in the White House — and that could affect Ukraine.
The Oval Office incumbent, U.S. President Joe Biden, has been supportive of Ukraine’s fight with Russia.
His Republican rival and presidential predecessor, Donald Trump, however, could prove less reliable for Ukraine — as he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin at the start of the invasion and has repeatedly claimed he could end the conflict quickly.
While noting that much of the world is awaiting the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at Tuesday’s NATO summit that his country cannot wait until then for the ‘strong decisions’ needed to repel Russia’s invasion.
Zelenskyy said on Monday that he expects Ukraine will work with Trump if he wins the U.S. election.
“I’m not afraid of this,” he said, adding he believes that “the majority” of Trump’s Republican Party supports Ukraine.
Barros, of the Institute for the Study of War, agreed that Ukraine currently has “very strong bipartisan support” among U.S. legislators.
“I have to remain hopeful that we will continue to support Ukraine,” Barros said.
He said uncertainty surrounding who will take the White House in November may serve as motivation for European nations to invest more in defence.
The RAND Corporation’s Demus said the support that Ukraine gets from the U.S. and other allies is part of a series of inter-connected issues that Kyiv must manage when it comes to mobilization.
The armed forces need to be well supplied for troops to do their job, she said, and the public perception of how well they are supported plays into the willingness of people to sign up for military duty.
Barros said that what the U.S. has committed to sending Ukraine won’t include enough heavy equipment — such as tanks and armoured personnel carriers — to outfit all of the expected brigades.
If that doesn’t change, incoming troops will be limited in what they can do for Ukraine, he said.
Published at Wed, 17 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000