You mentioned the theme of tonight,
Chris. I'm into themes. The official theme,
as you say, is Make America safe once again.
But judging by the speaker's list,
tonight could just divisively been called the night of 1000
humiliations.
Primetime speakers, as you may know,
include two of Trump's fiercest Republican primary opponents,
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki
Haley.
Now, while losing candidates often speak at the victors convention,
Trump's humiliation of these particular rivals reached a different order
of magnitude during the Republican primary.
The problem with Rhonda Sanctimonious is that he needs a
personality transplant.
He's not a talented politician.
Obviously, Rhonda Sanctimonious was walking off the stage
and his feet. It's weird
because his cowboy boots, so they have a high heel
outside,
but inside you got a big deal going on
and he's walking away.
After mocking Governor DeSantis for allegedly wearing lifts in his
cowboy boots,
DeSantis eventually dropped out and Trump focused his attentions on
Nikki Haley,
who in the closing hours of her candidacy called Trump
not qualified to be president.
Trump, in return, zeroed in on Haley's race,
suggesting her parents status as immigrants from India might somehow
disqualify her from the presidency.
Trump misstated Haley's given name,
Nimrada, repeatedly calling her Nimbra and Nimrada.
And he explained to Fox News that those mistakes were
definitely intentional.
She says that you're using a nickname based on her
given name, Nimrata. You called her Nimbra in the post
the other day.
Why do you do that?
Why do that with a lot of people with her?
It's just something that came.
It's a little bit of a take off on her
name.
You know, her name, wherever she may come from,
wherever she may come from.
In addition to the thinly veiled xenophobia,
Trump also engaged in explicit misogyny,
calling South Carolina's first female governor essentially a bimbo.
But if you think that bird brain,
I mean, Nikki becomes president,
she's not tough enough, she's not smart enough,
and she wasn't respected enough.
She cannot do this job.
Despite the never before heard humiliations and apparently significant reservations,
last week Nikki Haley released the 97 delegates she won
during this year's Republican primary so that they in turn
could vote for Donald Trump.
Yesterday and tonight, both Haley and DeSantis are choosing to
publicly pledge loyalty to Donald Trump
despite the fact that Donald Trump does not plan to
meet with either of them this evening,
even after they address his convention.
I mean, not even bothering to meet with them is
really just the last humiliation.
Maybe. I'm not quite sure.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things I find fascinating
about this,
and we've seen it time after time after time.
JD Vance, of course, being one of the most extreme
examples,
this sort of trajectory of
the trajectory of of supplication,
of submissiveness, right, of of these sort of politics of
domination where you make fun of someone,
you cow them, you bully them,
and then they sort of end up,
you know, kneeling before you.
Yeah. And this happens time and time and time again.
And it's a huge part of the sort of Trump
mystique and shtick within the base that he's the powerful
one.
He's he's the sort of dominant one.
What I find remarkable is there's these two twin impulses
in any human,
human psychology like these folks,
which is ambition and ego and self regard and is
wild to watch.
Like I just feel they're very divorced from one another
in this.
That's my point. They're in Total War with each other
in a weird way.
What I find remarkable is to watch.
I just feel like just speaking,
speaking for myself, like I don't have it immediately myself
that way because my,
my, my ego's too big and I have too much
like
vanity. I just what I find amazing.
The thing is that they don't they just they everyone
and you.
I will say Alex Wagner sitting at this desk or
actually another desk,
you were like Haley's going to fall in line
on those primary. I have to say I was the
naysayer.
I didn't believe it. I don't understand what the point
of her candidacy was.
I know someone who does understand fearless forecaster.
Yes, someone who does. Joining us now live from the
arena there in Milwaukee,
McKay Coppins, staff writer for the Atlantic.
McKay, let me, let me ask you this first,
because Alex made this point.
So this is always the case at conventions that the
you know,
there are unity events and particularly after contested primaries,
they feature the, the the other contestants,
right? So that that is part of what a convention
is for,
right? That we're all rallying behind the nominee.
And look, we have all these people in 2016,
Ted Cruz famously did not do that.
I was actually inside watching him give that speech when
he said vote your conscience.
It does feel like there is a added dimension,
though, here and now in Milwaukee and in the modern
Republican Party
that's above and beyond just the like normal falling in
line.
I think you're right. As you two were talking,
I was thinking about how in some ways this feels
like the same story we've been doing for eight years,
right? This story of dominance and submission,
of humiliation, of, you know,
abject loyalty tests. We've been talking about this since 2016,
But I was thinking back to that convention in 2016.
I was there, too. And there were still,
back then signs of kind of the fractiousness within the
party.
You know, there were. Ted Cruz famously did not endorse
Trump during his speech.
You had Mike Lee, along with the Utah delegation on
the floor screaming their protests to Trump's,
you know, formal nomination there.
There were signs that there was still some resistance to
Trump.
And the time, I will admit to this,
you know, as a reporter who had covered the Republican
Party pretty extensively,
I was sort of naively surprised for the same reasons
that you just laid out,
that people like Paul Ryan,
like Marco Rubio had been so willing to fall in
line.
Eight years later, I'm not surprised.
And I will say I've been at this convention for
a a couple days and there is no sign of
of resistance. There is no sign of fractiousness within the
party.
Everybody is completely in lockstep with Donald Trump and the
handful of Republicans out there who are not just didn't
show up in Milwaukee.
That's the difference, right? Like if you if you are
not fully on board,
you just don't come and you're really not participating in
the National Party anymore.
I want to bring in Tim Miller,
who once served as the spokesman for the RNC.
He's now, of course, a writer at large from for
the Bulwark and one of our most trusted
sooth Sayers, Sears on all things Republican.
Tim, you know, McKay makes a point about what the
sort of the the humiliation process is a is different
and more extraordinary this go round
when it comes to people like Nikki Haley and Ron
DeSantis.
But whither the Nikki Haley voter,
Right. Like they're up until the end of this primary
period,
there were still people that weren't voting for Donald Trump
in those Republican primaries.
Do they do they too capitulate?
I mean, do you have a sense that that resistance
even exists anymore?
Yeah, Chris is nodding. Yes,
I think they're divided. Like the Nikki Haley voter
was like basically three different types of people.
Something I kept trying to say during the primary,
people like she's getting 21%.
That means 21% of Republicans aren't poor.
I was like, eh, it was about 8%
probably of Republicans that might go back to Trump.
And then 8% of my people,
former Republicans that are like still registered vestigially from the
past that voted for Joe Biden already in 2020.
And then like 5% of political obsessive Democrats and independents
who crossed over because they hate Donald Trump so much,
right? Super free sickos. Real sickos.
We call them engaged citizens.
Yeah. You know, I literally saw one in one of
our focus groups.
She was like, David Plouffe on MSNBC told me to
crossover.
And so I'm going to do it.
Right. So that's second. So.
So there's some. And that 8%
could very much matter, right.
And I think Nikki Haley speaking to that group tonight
is going to offer them a pitch.
This is where it ties into the JD Vance thing.
The JD Vance pick was not a move for the
Nikki Haley voter.
There's a move from the other side of the horseshoe.
The, you know, running out numbers even more about working
class white men.
Yep. Running out numbers even more with like younger based
voters.
Yeah, you know, and based based,
not based voters. The Nick the the the Vance pick
makes the Haley speech tonight absurd.
Actually, it would be interesting to watch.
Good point. You know, because she's like,
oh, I'm doing this because Donald Trump will still make
people safe.
But it's like he both of them now want to
give Ukraine to Putin.
Yes. Although one of the things I'll say,
and McKay, I'm curious if just,
I mean, we've been listening to some of the speech,
which again, let's just be clear,
your median convention speech is just not great oratory and,
you know, eminently forgettable. That's true of all parties and
all the conventions I've been to.
But McKay, when am I looking here?
Where am I looking? Thank you.
McKay, The, the, the question I have for you is
so one thing that conventions can do very
effectively. And and I think you saw this in 2020
with the Trump convention when he swore in the,
the new immigrants in the White House is to play
against type,
right? You're you're trying to get,
you're trying to get people to
vote for you. You've got this big platform to vote
for you that aren't already there.
You can play against type.
So George W Bush, all the compassionate conservative stuff.
Donald Trump did a little of that in 2020.
I remember watching John Kerry
in 2004 basically was going to like crawl through the
mud to like kill Osama bin Laden himself,
right? That was the there's take there.
Is there any of that happening atmospherically,
thematically from what you're seeing there about sort of playing
against type to folks that maybe are turned off by
like the harder edges of Magaism?
I would say to Tim's point,
if anything, they're they're going the other direction,
right? Like that, that I have not seen a lot
of appeals to Mitt Romney,
Republicans, Nikki Haley Republicans, you know,
Reaganism like that, that that is so fully in the
rearview Mirror Now.
Now, I guess the caveat is that there are a
lot of kind of speeches that are not broadcast in
primetime that are just kind of
very standard anodyne Republican talking points that like you've heard
1000 times.
But for the most part,
the big moments are not appealing to that,
that that left behind faction of the Republican Party.
They've got the Teamsters on stage and I,
you know, they're, they're, they're trying to appeal more to
the,
the kind of disenfranchised or frustrated parts of the Democratic
coalition.
You know, I, I can say for having spent some
time in the last couple days texting with some of
those old guard Republicans,
they, they have not seen a single thing in this
convention so far that makes them excited about Donald Trump.
If anything, they feel more alienated.