REUTERS
Let’s play a game.
Let’s entertain the thought that the Republican Party should get a new name that reflects the new future Donald Trump envisions for it.
In that case, the GOP would become The Workers Party.
Not, of course, in the socialist sense, for Trump remains the ultimate capitalist.
Rather, the new party emerging before our eyes at the Milwaukee convention is one whose No. 1 focus is the well-being of working-class Americans.
They are the forgotten people who elected Trump in 2016, and as he aims for the White House again, he is making it absolutely clear that they are the core constituency driving his agenda.
Farewell to the Chamber of Commerce and good riddance to Mitt Romney.
Hello, restaurant workers — no taxes on tips, Trump pledged.
And get this — even big unions could be invited to the party.
Diversity in action
The change inevitably will lead to a much more diverse Republican Party, as demonstrated by the numerous non-white speakers Monday.
The lineup wasn’t a hint that Trump is chasing a progressive-like DEI agenda, as some of his supporters complained on social media.
The clear justification came with the most controversial of those speakers, model and rapper Amber Rose.
She hit it out of the park with her personal story of how she found “my people” in the GOP.
As Van Jones said on CNN, her remarks were a “bunker buster” and “dangerous” for Democrats because her experience strikes at the heart of the left’s view that Trump and all Republicans are racists.
In fact, a more diverse GOP is a natural outgrowth of a heightened focus on workers because the working and middle classes obviously comprise many black, Latino and Asian workers as well as whites.
And most of them have seen their family finances decline under Joe Biden.
More evidence that Trump is rebranding the party came with the fact that Monday’s keynote speech was delivered by Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien.
His mere appearance at the podium was a shock to the old system, never mind his fiery challenge to the traditional GOP establishment of big business and union-free shops.
Many delegates were stunned into silence by O’Brien’s message, uncertain whether to cheer or boo him off stage.
They were probably wondering if he had stumbled into the wrong convention.
Trump, who loves to stir the pot, seemed subdued following the assassination attempt but appeared to welcome O’Brien’s forceful pitch that big companies such as Amazon and Walmart are wildly successful largely because many of their workers are underpaid.
Besides, there’s zero chance O’Brien just happened to stumble into the prime-time slot by accident. He was there because Trump wanted him there and wanted delegates — and a TV audience — to hear his views.
It’s worth recalling that Trump generally had good relations with tradesman in his New York construction days despite the fact that the industry was completely unionized.
Stronger than Reagan
Two other observations are relevant to what is unfolding at the convention.
First, Trump’s remake of the GOP is possible only because the party is his to a degree that few politicians of any stripe ever achieve.
As he told me recently, “about 90% of the party is MAGA,” a far cry from his first term where he was often thwarted by congressional Republicans who viewed him as an alien outsider who would soon be gone.
Ed Rollins, the architect of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory and his White House political director, says he has never seen anyone with so much control over the party, and that includes Reagan.
“There were factions even then,” Rollins told me Tuesday.
“Despite Reagan’s success, the Bush people were always around, looking to do things their way.”
Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate should be seen as part of this control and his new focus.
Vance, the author of the famed autobiography “Hillbilly Elegy,” initially rejected Trump’s populism and the man himself but has come to be one of his most forceful and articulate supporters.
To underscore the point, Trump, in making the veep announcement, noted that Vance’s book “championed the hardworking men and women of our country” and added that Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and far beyond . . .”
The assignment illustrates the second point — the political dimension that is both cause and effect of a new GOP.
It’s hard to become the majority party if you keep losing the popular vote.
The Democrats’ blue wall in the Electoral College depends on some of the very Rust Belt states Trump has assigned to Vance — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Without them, Dems can’t win the White House, as Trump proved when he won all three and defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Joe Biden flipped them back in 2020, and also took two normally red states — Georgia and Arizona.
Most polls now show Trump leading in all or nearly all of those battleground states and putting several reliably blue states in play, including Virginia.
It doesn’t hurt his chances that Biden still hasn’t locked up the support of his own party.
Dems in disarray
A survey showing that Trump is beating him among independents in contested states also showed that Biden generally has the support of only about 86% of Dems in those states, while Trump has the support of 92% or more of Republicans.
The movement by Barack Obama and others to get Biden to step aside has temporarily calmed down but is likely to flare up again when the president inevitably stumbles and mumbles through another event.
It was telling that while the GOP was opening its convention with confidence that Trump will prevail in November, Biden was feuding with NBC’s Lester Holt.
When Holt pressed him on his debate debacle and the party revolt, the president had no answers except lies and he repeatedly kept trying to shoot the messenger.
“What’s up with you guys? Come on, man,” an exasperated Biden whined at one point.
When a Dem is feuding with the top anchor at NBC, it’s the equivalent of a shootout in a lifeboat because they’re on the same team.
One wild card in all these developments is whether and how the assassination attempt affects Trump and his outlook.
The large bandage on his right ear is an inescapable reminder of how close he came to death.
In my interview with him Sunday en route to Milwaukee, he was grateful and seemed like a man with a new lease on life.
“I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead,” he told me and Byron York of the Washington Examiner.
The first impact of his harrowing experience was that he tore up his acceptance speech for Thursday night, saying “I had all prepared an extremely tough speech, really good, all about the corrupt, horrible administration.”
In its place, he hopes to begin the process of trying to unify the country.
He acknowledged the difficulties, but the fact that he wants to try is encouraging.
Perhaps we are seeing the first fruits of that goal already.
Conventiongoers, as if the failed assassination gave them a new lease on life too, are brimming with confidence and enthusiasm.
After all, turning the party’s focus and power to working-class Americans is by definition an uplifting approach because those workers cut across racial, ethnic, religious and geographic differences.
Naturally, there are potential pitfalls.
The nation’s exploding debt must be curbed and excess protectionism will stymie the very growth that could lift all boats.
Also, America First policies, if carried to extremes, could give our adversaries a free hand to menace us and our allies around the globe.
The challenge, then, is finding the right balance.
Trump and Vance surely know that, but first they have to win the election.