The Haley-Scalise Track

On the second night of the convention, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley ascended to the podium. It was a big moment. She was the last candidate standing against Trump at the end of the 2024 Republican primaries, just as Ted Cruz had been Trump’s last rival in 2016. At the 2016 RNC, Cruz infuriated the crowd by pointedly refusing to endorse Trump — who had, after all, attacked Cruz’s wife and even suggested that Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.

Haley put any such worries to rest at the beginning of her speech:

My fellow Republicans, former President Trump has asked me to speak at this convention in the name of unity. It was a gracious invitation and I was happy to accept. I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear. Donald Trump has my strong endorsement.

She went on to address listeners who might still have doubts about Trump, saying that “you don’t have to agree with President Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him.” She rattled off Trump’s accomplishments as president, with a special emphasis on foreign policy. He “got us out of the insane Iran deal.” He assassinated Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. He always had Benjamin Netanyahu’s back. Meanwhile, Biden “surrendered in Afghanistan,” he’s “pressuring Israel instead of the terrorists,” and he lifted sanctions on Iran.

Governor Haley’s description of Biden’s alleged dovishness was detached from reality. But forget that. What fascinated me was seeing the Republican convention delegates gathered to nominate Donald Trump and J. D. Vance cheering at the reminder that Trump brought us closer to war with Iran than we’ve been at any point since the hostage crisis from 1979 to 1981 and duly booing Joe Biden for allegedly being soft on Hamas. I’ve been hearing for years about a “realignment” that’s made the GOP the party of anti-interventionism. But you certainly wouldn’t know it from listening to the convention.

Similarly, the “realignment” of the political parties is supposed to have involved Republicans rejecting free-market orthodoxy to embrace economic populism. But the convention cheered House majority leader Steve Scalise for reminding them of President Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and promising that within the first hundred days of a second Trump term with a Republican majority, those tax cuts would be made permanent. Trump himself bragged about instituting “the biggest tax cuts ever.” Apparently, none of these Republicans received the realignment memo.

Let’s call that the Haley-Scalise track: praising Trump by reminding viewers that he was president for four years and he might as well have been Mitt Romney.

The Vance-Carlson Track

If you tuned in to Tucker Carlson on the final night, though, you got superficially populist framing in spades.

I didn’t hear a single specific policy recommendation in Tucker’s speech, but he sure sounded anti-elitist and anti-interventionist. He said Trump is talked about as a threat to democracy, but Trump is really about restoring democracy. Real democracy, he explained, is about seeing the people of the country as the “owners” of the country, not just “tenants,” such that politicians “have to do what we want” after “fifty years” where politicians ignored the will of the people. The politicians step over Americans dying of drug overdoses, he said, to cast votes to spend money on things like the war in Ukraine.

As it happens, Tucker Carlson is a former Cato Institute fellow whose worldview has changed far less over the decades than his rhetoric would suggest. He’s against Medicare for All, he’s against a $15 minimum wage, and on foreign policy his primary objection to the war in Ukraine is that he thinks that “our main enemy is China” and that “the US ought to be in a relationship with Russia, allied against China.” But if I didn’t know all that, he’d sound like a populist and an anti-interventionist.

Trump himself made multiple references to the cost-of-living crisis in America and how crushing inflation feels to many Americans, but offered little of substance beyond vague hand-waving (“We will end the ridiculous and actually incredible waste of taxpayer dollars that is fueling the inflation crisis. They’ve spent trillions of dollars of things having to do with the Green New Scam. It’s a scam”) and a call for United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain to be fired. Trump claimed “we’re going to bring back car manufacturing and we’re going to bring it back fast” by instituting “a tariff of approximately 100 to 200 percent on each car.”

“Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back, and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before, and we’re going to do it very rapidly,” Trump said, heavy on bluster but light on details. He feinted toward nonintervention throughout the speech, but then pledged to build a “great iron dome” system for domestic military defense that “will be built entirely in the USA.”

Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, really managed to sound like a populist and anti-interventionist when he spoke on the third night in a shockingly raw and direct way about the pain caused in places like the one he grew up by the policies of bipartisan elites — the way human lives were mangled as “jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war.” That sounds convincingly populist.

It’s hard to remember what a recent development that is for Vance. Not so many years ago, in his bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, he finger-wagged the “hillbillies” he grew up around for their alleged culture of poverty, writing that “too many young men” were “immune to hard work,” calling some of his neighbors “welfare queens,” and emphasizing that these cultural problems “run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy.” While the success of Hillbilly Elegy remains a big part of his story, repeatedly mentioned at the RNC, the book’s main themes of blaming Rust Belt victims of deindustrialization for their own condition have been awkwardly memory-holed.

In his convention speech, Vance showed that he had gotten the “populist realignment” memo — at the least at the level of rhetoric. He painted a picture of economic devastation, and (accurately) nailed then senator Joe Biden for supporting NAFTA and the “disastrous invasion of Iraq.” So far, so good. But what does Vance actually want a future Trump-Vance administration to do?

As Nikki Haley reminded the crowd the night before, Trump was a far bigger Iran hawk than his predecessor or his successor. Does Vance want him to reverse course and pursue détente with Iran in his second term? That would be the true anti-interventionist positions. If so, it seems odd that he didn’t say so. And if not, Vance is coasting on the stolen valor of retroactively opposing the invasion of Iraq two decades before he was elected to office while supporting a confrontational policy that could lead to an even more disastrous war with Iraq’s neighbor Iran.

And what does Vance want to do on the domestic front? Did he champion any economically populist policies to go with the rhetoric? If so, I missed it.

I did hear him falsely claim that workers’ wages “went through the roof” in Trump’s first term. In reality, there was modest but steady wage growth in the last years of the Obama administration as the economy slowly recovered from the 2008 crash, and the trend simply continued in the early years of Trump.

Meanwhile, workers’ power to win increases in wages beyond what macroeconomic trends can deliver on their own depends on their ability to organize, bargain, and if necessary go on strike. But Trump’s National Labor Relations Board raged a relentless war against unions. Does Vance have a problem with that? Again, if so, he didn’t show any sign of it. The only appearance of the word “union” in his speech was a line about how Donald Trump is supposedly a “leader who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.”

That combination of words felt like it had been vetted by a roomful of consultants. Not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man? Great. Strong populist energy. Say the word union? Good. You’ll get points for boldly diverging from Reaganite orthodoxy. But better make sure to add “and nonunion” to signal to your friend Peter Thiel that you haven’t gone too far off the reservation.

This, at the end of the day, is what “realignment” means. Trump’s GOP will continue to cater to business interests at home and project imperial military power abroad. Comparatively honest ghouls like Nikki Haley and Steve Scalise will sell this package with good old-fashioned Reaganite branding, excitedly reminding their listeners that Trump is the president who tore up the Iran deal and passed a big tax cut for the rich. Tucker Carlson and J. D. Vance will use different words — ones designed to excite people who prefer to believe that reelecting a billionaire union-buster to the presidency will somehow stick it to big business.

Either way, the product is the same.