Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Meredith McCarroll and Danny Postel
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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The mood at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week has been “jubilant,” New Lines Politics Editor Danny Postel tells The Lede host Faisal Al Yafai.
Postel has been at the convention all week, meeting delegates and getting a feel for the atmosphere after a huge week in U.S. politics that saw an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday.
“The emotional intensity at the heart of Trumpism is so palpable.”
That assassination attempt, says Postel, “definitely brought people together within Trump World in a newfound way. There’s a sense of rallying around the leader.”
The shooting has also prompted a discussion about the tone of political language, although Postel notes — paraphrasing political theorist Jeffrey Isaac — that the “ideology of political violence has actually been Trump’s main legacy thus far.”
Nevertheless, Postel says, “I just don’t think that this assassination attempt is going to change the outcome of the election. I think Trump was already poised to win. He remains poised to win. And I think, on balance, we’re going to see that the assassination attempt really will not have affected the outcome of the election.”
For Postel, one of the notable aspects of the convention was how Trump has managed to broaden the demographics of the Republican Party. That realization came through a conversation with rapper Forgiato Blow, a Trump supporter who was attending the convention. “There’s a connection there to this realm of people who are not the traditional Republican types,” he says.
Another of last week’s major political developments was the announcement of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate. Al Yafai spoke to Meredith McCarroll, author of “Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film,” who wrote a profile of the Ohio senator for New Lines in early 2023.
“I want people to understand [Vance] as someone who is willing to align himself and position himself in order to be in power,” McCarroll says. “A lot of people are not taking him seriously enough to listen to what he’s saying, and that feels dangerous.”
Vance, McCarroll argues, evinces a “pull up the ladder” mentality after successfully pulling himself out of an impoverished background. “Now that he has brought himself out of that place, he turns back and blames the people for still being in the situation that they’re in, rather than looking at systems of poverty, rather than looking at institutions, rather than looking at the pharmaceutical industry and the opioid crisis,” she says.
Further reading: J.D. Vance and the Myth of White Exceptionalism