The Hard Zone

There was​ lightning in the sky over Chicago, and I was waiting at the airport. An announcement echoed across the departure gate: there was going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a literary man – symbol had the power to push him into actions more heroic than himself.’

I picked up. ‘Are you safe?’ my 20-year-old said.

‘There’s none of us safe in the world.’

‘No, I’m serious. Trump’s been shot or something.’

I got up CNN on my phone. ‘Loud bangs heard at rally; Trump whisked away with blood on face,’ the headline said. It was all symbols. The red cap that said ‘Make America Great Again’. The tight little fist raised in defiance. The Stars and Stripes fluttering at the edge of the photograph. One of Trump’s favourite phrases is to say that a person or a thing is from central casting. And now he was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, with the junior Trumps behind them.

In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our business.’ He was wearing a blue cap that said: ‘Trump. 45th President’. He then spoke to CBS. ‘Someone else died – we’re horrified at that. But this is not going to stop Republicans from participating in the democratic process.’

‘What about security?’

‘I think Biden should also give a security detail to Robert Kennedy Jr.’

Since 1968, the number of ‘active shooter incidents’ has grown steadily in America, almost tripling since 2015, with such events now seeming part of American normality. Some shootings scarcely make the news. The numbers – so much higher than Canada, so much lower than Guatemala – are deployed by people at either end of the argument, and the whole discussion is politicised, as if American reality must always be a matter of opinion and prejudice. It took only a few minutes for the attempt on Trump’s life to become the dark centre of competing conspiracies, which is what very often passes for news and analysis in contemporary America. The talk shows lit up with hymns to carnage and theories about which ‘deep state’ forces were behind the shooting. J.D. Vance, author of the dads-and-crawdads memoir Hillbilly Elegy and favourite at the start of the convention to be Trump’s pick for vice president, quickly issued a piercing dog-whistle. ‘Today is not just some isolated incident,’ he posted on X. ‘The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to Trump’s attempted assassination.’

‘Trump was just elected today, folks,’ one supporter said. ‘He’s a martyr.’ America loves a clear-cut victim just as much as it hates a generalised one. What it loves most is a hero. A survivor. The digital sphere was soon crowded with shocked obsequies from political leaders. ‘It was a movie,’ a Turkish man told me when I arrived in the centre of Milwaukee. ‘We have seen that before. He wants to get the firmer support of his followers. Because I can assure you, if someone from the other party shot him, he wouldn’t have missed.’

‘Do you think President Trump would be bad for America?’

‘Very,’ he said, ‘because America will not exist anymore. He will be the ultimate judge and the ultimate policeman. We have seen all these scenarios before. All the extreme white supremacists will take to the streets, I guess.’

In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for ‘glorifying violence’. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In July 2017, he advised police officers not to be ‘too nice’ when handling suspects. He praised someone for body-slamming a reporter and encouraged supporters at a rally before the Iowa caucus in 2016 to ‘knock the crap out of’ protesters, saying he would pay their legal fees. He has a history of inciting crowds: he awaits trial on an accusation of inciting the riot in the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. In Louisville, Kentucky in 2016, when confronted by protesters, he told his supporters to ‘Get ’em out of here.’ Trump has always understood that violence is comprehended by one portion of his base and relished by another. ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters, OK?’ he said at one campaign rally. ‘It’s, like, incredible.’ He has made his rallies places where the threat of violence might now and then be justified.

Milwaukee’s​ mayoralty was held on and off by socialists from 1910 until 1960. The city had German and Scandinavian immigrant roots, and was defined for a hundred years by its progressive and anti-slavery views. It was famous for what was sometimes called ‘sewer socialism’ – Milwaukee’s socialists sometimes boasted about the local public sanitation system – but Emil Seidel, an early mayor, had higher ambitions. ‘We wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness,’ he said. ‘And we wanted everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centres, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all. That was our Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.’ This view of life flourished and then faltered, after a sequence of events that included the introduction in the 1930s of redlining (a sort of credit rationing where ‘good housing’ in ‘good areas’ could only be insured by white people, concentrating and racialising poverty in specific neighbourhoods), then there was the devastating effect of the closing of local industries, followed by prolonged attacks on public sector unions and the denuding of local universities through huge budget cuts. The city was horribly gerrymandered in the 2010s. Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, acted as a wrecking ball on social care in the area and was a friend to people who believe that tax cuts are evidence of enlightenment. The Democrats had grown complacent (Hillary Clinton was so sure she would win Wisconsin in 2016 she scarcely visited). The sport of working-class people voting against their own interests has become a dependable spectacle in 21st-century America. Milwaukee remains one of the country’s most segregated cities, and Wisconsin is a battleground state that was won by Trump in 2016.

In Milwaukee, the mayor had received $75 million to host the RNC – ‘all gone in expenses,’ an official told me, ‘we didn’t make a dime’ – and it was hoped the uplift to the local economy would be considerable. The area around the convention centre was called the Hard Zone by the security people. With assault weapons, batons, stun guns and, for all I knew, lasers, every entry was a Checkpoint Charlie. The surrounding streets were empty, filled with the vivid estrangement you experience at Disneyworld – the same stranded sense of jollity, bunting and junk food, at the still point where wonder meets commerce – all of it made stranger yet by the military paranoia that held it together. Inside the Hard Zone, everybody had credentials, and security consciousness was a cult religion, with those who wanted to be safe accepting they were chained to a higher power. For the delegates, Christian faith is a form of specialness – the backbone of the ‘American exceptionalism’ we would hear about all week – and its lessons seemed clear. It meant that God would protect them, as he protected Trump from the wicked shooter. God was very much in evidence, if never in actual attendance, in the Hard Zone, the cartoon world of the kettled Elect, alone together in this embattled world, cheek by jowl with the merchandise. ‘WANTED,’ it said on many drinking vessels, with the police mugshot of former President Trump. There were gold lamé boots with a huge ‘T’. A mountain of teddies. Shot glasses. There were baseball caps for $30 and ‘Never Surrender’ T-shirts in Republican red. ‘I’m Voting for the Felon 2024,’ another T-shirt said, next to one giving parenting advice to Trumpian couples: ‘Raise Lions Not Sheep.’

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Fifty dollars for two,’ he said. (Apparently nobody wants just one.)

There were bumper stickers. ‘Rigged 2020’ was said to be very popular, along with ‘Mean Tweets 2024’.

‘It’s got this beautiful soft brown cover on it,’ a woman said of the Trump-endorsed Bible she got for $75 plus tax. ‘I love it,’ she added. ‘It shows how much our future president is leaning into his faith.’

I spotted a man who was selling The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump. ‘It’s a breakthrough in literary development,’ he said, ‘and it’s fun to have out when people come over.’ I pondered on this. Maybe I needed new friends. The man was from Nashville and said I could have Volume One for $45. (Volume Two was coming soon, and, if Trump got elected, there would be a third volume provisionally titled ‘The Return of the King’.) ‘I think he’s the greatest poet of our generation,’ the man said.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘I think he has done more to call attention to the use of the English language than anybody else in our time and he has been more creative with the usage.’

‘Is he a modernist, a romantic?’

‘One of the things that defines him is that he defies all boundaries. And he is constantly reinventing himself – a bit like Picasso.’

‘As a politician?’

‘The politics are kind of secondary for us. We’re here for the art.’

‘I know you’ll say he’s incomparable,’ I said. ‘But if you had to compare him with another artist, who would it be?’

‘It would be Picasso,’ he said. ‘Or Shakespeare, who’s a bit of a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’

The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it said,

the assassination attempt on Saturday was the climax and confirmation of a story that Mr Trump has been telling for years. It is the story of a fearless leader surrounded by shadowy forces and intrigue, of grand conspiracies to thwart the will of the people who elected him. A narrative in which Mr Trump, even before a gunman tried to take his life, was already a martyr.

History often starts with a photo. The transfer from digital capture to T-shirt might take less than an hour. And there it was on the morning the convention opened, the latest instalment in the commercialisation of savagery. Interestingly, the violent culture Trump promoted is now beatifying him as its most famous victim. He had mouthed ‘Fight! Fight!’ as he was pulled off the stage and thereby brought his own bullet-points into company with their resounding dénouement, a bullet that clipped its mark. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op. ‘Let me get my shoes. Wait. Wait,’ he said. In a country where a combined $2.7 billion will be spent on presidential campaign ads, Trump knew by instinct that he was about to have a priceless advert that would play for ever on the networks and define him as the hero of his own hour. The real heroes, of course, were his security detail, who threw their bodies over his, and whose lives he risked by breaking cover and presenting himself to the cameras. ‘Fight’ was the word he used to the agitators on 6 January 2021, when he encouraged them to defend democracy and go to the Capitol, a journey that led to five deaths (nine if you include the suicides of four police officers). The blood this time was not on his hands, it was on his face, a fact that served to reverse engineer all his warnings, making him seem like an American saviour who took a bullet for his own people.

The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was wearing a T-shirt for a YouTube channel called DemolitionRanch, which has 11.7 million subscribers. He was a registered Republican who donated $15 to ActBlue, a register-to-vote pressure group. He was killed instantly by Secret Service snipers who had failed to see him climbing onto a neighbouring rooftop with an AR-15.* A person familiar with local gun laws told me it wasn’t unusual to see people at Trump rallies or in adjacent car parks and towns carrying rifles. ‘Crooks hadn’t actually done anything illegal,’ he said, ‘until he climbed up on that roof.’

I couldn’t help but see all of this as the ultimate political fiction of the modern era. I kept imagining it as a short novel, in which a nominee, desperate to achieve completion and electability, stages his own attempted assassination, drawing on all his reality TV expertise, all his dark arts, surrounded by willing performers, even a willing shooter, who is ‘shot’ at the scene by pretend shooters, and taken away, as the candidate is, while the world’s media covers its mouth in disbelief. This fantasia, a fiction inside a fiction inside a reality, had the vital energy of seeming more plausible than the truth. And that is our world. Conspiracy nowadays may be as fleet as thought, and theories of fiction gather around every true event. ‘Theories that Trump had engineered the shooting himself for votes,’ Fiona Hamilton wrote in the Times,

or the opposite narrative that it had been carried out by the ‘deep state’, got hundreds of thousands of engagements within hours. Experts warned that up to 50 per cent of accounts spreading key false narratives were themselves fake. Imran Ahmed, managing director of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, told the Times that ‘we saw a vast proliferation of false and speculative narratives. It’s almost inevitable that when an event of such seismic magnitude occurs, people are typing to reconcile what they know with what they already believe and feel,’ he said.

Hashtags like #stagedshooting got tens of millions of views.

At the dead centre​ of the Hard Zone, in the Fiserv Forum, the balloons were inflated and netted aloft, ready to be released in a few days’ time. Making my way through the delegates, I heard the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr had been given Secret Service protection.† Trump said on Truth Social that this was the right thing to do, ‘given the history of the Kennedy family’. There was extra buzz around the iconic lookalike (actually lunatic anti-vaxxer) because of the shooting, but also because his son, the punitively named Robert Kennedy III (a ‘writer-director-actor’) had released a recording on X of his father and Trump having a bonkers conversation about the vaccine. Kennedy isn’t going away. I was told that Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old tech billionaire who dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination in January after finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses, had considered the relentless RFK Jr as his running mate. In his bid to become president, Ramaswamy also suggested that he would pardon Trump, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, and that he intended to fire 75 per cent of federal employees. Anyone who thinks that Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page document about what should happen in Trump’s second term, advocating the transformation of institutions and the replacement of 50,000 government employees with Trump loyalists – does not reflect the deeper wishes of Trump’s younger circle should watch Ramaswamy as closely as they watch J.D. Vance. For these guys, RFK Jr is closer to the mainstream than he’s imagined to be by the party faithful, who are yet to be persuaded by the more frightening ideas of Trump’s anti-globalist youth movement. (They will be. And some.) I was surprised by all the fuss about RFK Jr – a man who thinks that if children drink tap water it will make them transgender.

Before going into the convention hall, I encountered Ramaswamy and held up my recorder as he expounded on unity. It takes a truly intelligent man to be so stupid. He wanted to oppose ‘the fake astroturf version of unity’ and go for something real, he said, but he didn’t acknowledge for a second how divisive Trump is. He believes ‘the deep enemy is the void at the heart of our country.’ A former libertarian, Ramaswamy had the shaped eyebrows and the tailored trousers of the Millennial puritan, the sort of self-discovered American who loves the idea of the future and is obsessed with evil. His parents are ‘legal’ immigrants from India, and his own story of success in making multi-millions has convinced him that everywhere is set fair for brown and black people in modern America. (He fools himself in the same way as every one of the black politicians who were happy to mount the podium for Trump, men made stupid by their own good fortune, who claim there is no prejudice in Trump’s heart.) Ramaswamy wanted to be suavely philosophical about the shooting: it was a lesson, not an opportunity. ‘This is an occasion for all Americans to step back and ask ourselves “Who are we?”’ he said. ‘Do we actually care about this country and preserving one nation under God?’

It had been twenty years since I last wandered the blaring halls of a Republican National Convention, but this time it was extra-jubilant, no doubt because the God who appeared to lift the room had actually shown himself, if you go in for that sort of thing, in a concatenation of luck for Trump that defies belief. In a few short weeks, his opponent, President Biden, had made a catastrophic showing at their first TV debate, then Trump had survived a volley of bullets from a young lone-wolf member of his own party, and then, on the first day of the convention, a judge in Florida had dismissed the federal criminal case against him for hoarding classified government documents at his Palm Beach estate. He has other cases to face, but the sun was certainly shining on Trump. Within days, he had transformed all of his follies into glories, all of his previous convictions into conquests, all of his party enemies into loyalists, and all of his personal, egotistic weaknesses, abundant and profound, into a show of strength that would baffle political science. To the ordinary mind, Trump’s return may represent the victory of shamelessness over accountability. Reality is no longer a thing to agree on, but a battle you’ve almost certainly lost.

The notion of Trump’s heroism did not diminish at the convention: it was raised beyond the roof, with senators calling him ‘America’s Braveheart’. (I took more than ordinary exception to that one, but never mind.) The lies and distortions in Trumpian politics are so wild and continuous it’s impossible to tame them, and no reckoning with their own deep violence was ever likely to occur. Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina was due to speak that first day, a black man deeply committed to the happy fiction that Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of violent talk who opposes violence when it touches the dispenser of his political privilege. ‘Some folks need killing,’ he said in a sermon on 30 June at the Lake Church in Bladen County. But from the podium in Milwaukee he thanked his God and Saviour, before telling the audience about his former poverty, how he lost two jobs, a car and a house, before being saved so that he could tell the story. ‘There is hope and I am proof,’ he said. The audience hollered as if the truth was as clear as spring water. There were few black people in the hall, but the ones who were up on stage had nothing to say about that, repeating instead that America would only be safe in the hands of Donald Trump.

I had breakfast with a guy I won’t name. He came from outside the world where outsiders make a living in American politics. He had the facts. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there are racists among the Democrats too. You can be against slavery without being against racism.’ This seemed almost Hemingwayesque in its clarity. ‘A lot of urban Republicans might vote for Trump, but they don’t want to,’ he said. ‘Outside the city it’s Trump signs and “Fuck Biden” signs, just remember that.’ At the convention centre, the people were bussed in from places that don’t have TV studios. ‘The problem is the Trump-curious, but I have to tell you I’m stunned and terrified that he even has a chance.’

‘I want to kiss his poor ear,’ one of the delegates from Kentucky said. She and her friend were cosying up to a giant Trump poster in the foyer of the forum. I was shattered all over again by the blunt-force orangeness of the man, and it didn’t help – given my native Catholic hopes about the beauty of the saints – that, despite his personal unbecomingness, he had lovingly been raised to a condition of latter-day martyrdom. Down on the floor, Governor Tate Reeves was describing his state, Mississippi, as ‘home to B.B. King, Elvis, Faulkner and the best catfish in the entire world’. Surrounded by blonde women, Reeves stood in the glory of his self-belief, his pink cheeks swelling. (‘Dreams have only one owner at a time,’ Faulkner wrote. ‘That’s why dreamers are lonely.’) In my worst nightmares, people are pink and full of acclamation and they sleepwalk into theocracy, just like this. Yet humour lurked in quiet corners. The delegation from New Jersey barked on cue and were, to the roots of their hair and the silk of their ties, like a bunch of strip-joint habitués, a side contingent from the Bada Bing. ‘I want you to want me,’ sang the band, a collection of brainwashed hipsters from 1973, drilling for sound so far down the middle of the road that it was coming out in Australia.

I sat down for a while and considered the matter of Gerald Ford. ‘The political lesson of Watergate is this,’ he once said. ‘Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to bypass the regular party organisation and dictate the terms of a national election.’ But the delegates from Texas were not listening to my thoughts; they were waving their cowboy hats. Well into the first evening the speeches tumbled forth: the poor ones flowed together, and nearly all of them were poor, a tam-tam of unspeakable prejudices masquerading as public policy. Take it from me that they abused the word ‘Again’ and always gave it a capital ‘A’. Make America Great Again – or ‘Once Again’, as if to underscore the implausible redux – was repeated so often that one began to wish for the tepid days before nations had to be great. I say that, of course, as a person from Great Britain, who wishes for a life less excessive (Again).

The preferred inoculation that day was ‘Make America Wealthy Once Again’, and it felt rich – richest – to close your ears. But I’m a professional man. I watched with all the curdled hope of a reality-poacher, the ruined ambition of a fact-checker, and I felt refrigerated up in the bleachers as the hours burned. At 3.52, the band went south, and ‘Let’s Build America First’ came out all hillbilly, a companion to J.D. Vance as he made his way into the hall, having been picked as Trump’s running mate. Vance, aged 39, the bumpkin latest of a Scots-Irish tribe and the son of a former junkie who once tried to crash her car, with him in it, into a tree, is the first Millennial to present as White House material and brings an amazing combination of brutality and evangelical survival narrative to the table. He ended up at Yale Law School, having escaped from a house, God bless him, in which his grandmother liked to keep nineteen loaded handguns, just in case. Now isn’t that the sort of person whose twitching fingers you want to have on the nuclear codes?

‘J.D. Vance! J.D. Vance!’ the forum chanted.

I’ll take that as a yes.

Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, complained about ‘biological males competing against girls’. I suspect he will never know how sinister he sounds speaking about ‘girls’, but his transphobic contortions were entertainingly undercut by the public address system, which erupted into ‘Y.M.C.A.’ by the Village People, an anthem so queer it almost sashayed away with the whole afternoon. Trump himself, the Nijinsky of dad dancing, was up on the big screen working his elbows and murdering the tune. I was about to ask the woman beside me, from the good state of Kentucky, which member of the Village People she would most like to have sex with if the opportunity arose, but then she started cheering for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, who was telling the hall that Joe Biden ‘gave us Trans Visibility Day instead of Easter Sunday’. Then Greene closed her theatre of hate and headed for the exit in her glittery gold stilettos.

Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota took to the podium to praise Trump and say that nobody had endured as much as he had. ‘They’ve attacked his reputation, they impeached him, they tried to bankrupt him and they unjustly prosecuted him. But even in the most perilous moment this week, his instinct was to stand and to fight.’

‘Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!’

‘Amen,’ a man from New Mexico said. We both knew the word ‘fight’ was now owned by Donald Trump.

Eventually, like a dark knight returning – or a dark night everlasting – Trump appeared on the screen from the bowels of the building. Like a prize wrestler, he was followed by lights and camera into the arena, buoyed, guarded, pimped by his attendants, the music blaring and his face a rictus of childish defiance. It was his first public appearance since the shooting, and hilarity arrived, as it always will, in the shape of a Lilliputian white pillow fastened to the side of Trump’s head, over the injured ear. Swift himself might have enjoyed the drama over the Distressed Lobe.

Former congressman Gary Franks of Connecticut told me the tone of the convention was going to be ‘muted’. They were doing well in the polls, and it was good politics to avoid all the fire and brimstone. ‘The Democrats are wounded,’ he said, ‘so let them bleed out.’

Trump had reached his enclosure. He shook hands with the doom-slinging former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then patted Vance on the arm.

‘Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!’ the delegates chanted, punching the air. The crowd was delirious and ready for action.

‘Now it feels like a convention,’ Franks said.

On 16 July​ , at the convention perimeter, a 43-year-old homeless black man called Samuel Sharpe Jr was shot dead by five police officers from Ohio, who were in Milwaukee to help with the security effort around the RNC. The victim was living in a tent with his dog and was said to have produced two knives and threatened another man living in the same encampment. Alderman Robert Bauman, who represents the area, said that the killing would not have happened if the police officers had been local. They ‘would have known … this is King Park, this is a known area for homeless to camp out, folks with mental disabilities in here – tread carefully, de-escalate.’ The visiting police wouldn’t know King Park from Central Park.

‘Make America Safe Once Again’ was in full swing at the convention. Nobody mentioned guns or police violence. Nobody mentioned nuclear deterrence. Nobody mentioned the climate crisis or pesticides or protecting women’s abortion rights. ‘Safe’, at the RNC, means safe from illegal immigrants, and speaker after speaker spoke of an ‘invasion’. Tom Homan, a sort of minister for deportation, a man from New York who seems proud of his own coarseness, drew tremendous approval from the delegates, particularly the Southern ones, by speaking about ‘a record number of known and suspected terrorists sneaking across the border’. Whom would he classify as a terrorist? Someone seeking humanitarian protection? Like so much else that was said to great applause, to shouts of ‘Amen’, Homan shied away from the available facts, provided by the US Customs and Border Protection Service itself, that ‘encounters of watchlisted individuals at our borders are very uncommon.’

After a whole day of criminals sneaking across the border – rapists, murderers, Fentanyl suppliers ‘killing our children’ – I wanted to ask a question. Is America itself, along with the Republican nominee for president, living out a fantasy of persecution, ignoring the fact that America has always been a place where vulnerable people could seek a life, as the families of Marco Rubio, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz did? ‘Stop Biden’s border bloodbath,’ screamed the placards presented to Cruz when he mounted the podium, from which he spoke of Americans ‘murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released’. These politicians, with Trump as their puppet-master, are forever talking about America as the ‘greatest nation that ever existed’, yet the irony is that they make it sound like a place of perpetual darkness. When speaking of safety, not one of them spoke about foreign alliances or accords, nor did they mention Nato or Russia. None of them mentioned the Middle East, except to raise a salute to Israel, and none discussed AI. I’ve been to conventions before, but this was the most intellectually empty.

‘Send them back! Send them back.’

On the third evening, the stage went quiet for a few minutes and a small man emerged from the wings wearing full military uniform. His name was William Pekrul. He was 98 years old and the father of eleven children. Pekrul had served in Normandy, and he spoke with zeal and punched the air in support of the American ideal. Everybody stood, just as they had for the ‘Gold Star Families’ who lost serving family members during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and though many of the delegates delighted in Sergeant Pekrul and were moved to tears to think of the Greatest Generation, all the leading speakers made it clear that, in Trump’s world, there would be no standing up to fascist dictators. Vance, the new kid on the block, may wring his heart out over the great defenders of freedom, but he won’t be one himself.

America First. America last. Trump’s march to the podium, baroque Band Aid in place, was encouraged by younger men who already see a life after him. Their eyes are already on 2028. To Vance and the Trump boys and their wives, as well as the young intake who adore Trump’s ‘courage’, earlier Republican presidents had a fatal interest in allies and globalism. The biggest lesson of the 2024 convention in Milwaukee was about ‘economic nationalism’, an America where borders can be shut down and foreign treaties ripped up, to be replaced with tariffs, self-protection, and the art of the deal, with ‘the working man’ a compliant army. Trump’s great gift to the next generation was to teach them that you can say anything. Nothing need be true. You can say what you like and believe what you like, and if you say it with a straight face, other people will say and believe it too. In such a world, the Iraq War can be blamed on Biden, America can boast about being energy dominant (‘Drill, baby, drill!’) and Vance can describe Britain under Labour as the ‘first truly Islamist state’ with nuclear weapons. Allies can be insulted. Dictators fêted. And the convention audience, struck by the ‘ordinariness’ of this rich, soap-operatic family, find they can ignore all the little things and make space for those feelings that move them to tears. ‘I went to prison so as you don’t have to!’ said Peter Navarro, another Trump ally who broke the law. It isn’t true, but it’s nice to have someone who thinks about you like that.

Trump’s​ second chief of staff, John Kelly, used to refer to his boss’s White House as Crazytown. According to The Divider, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s riveting account of Trump’s presidency, Kelly, who thought Trump was the most flawed person he’d ever met, bought a copy of a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (written by 27 mental health professionals) to help him deal with the erratic president. It occurred to me during the week of the convention that if you want to identify a father’s mania, it’s sensible to look at his sons. Donald Trump Jr bestrode the stage like a colossus of nothing, with the self-regard that stands for something with people who believe that wealth is a talent. With the Trumps, having no historical imagination is a defence mechanism. Now is the only place that matters, now is the only currency and now is a narcissist’s bunker. Beneath a helmet of gelled hair, the younger Donald smirked at the TV cameras. The assassination attempt, he said, was an event that had ‘once seemed unimaginable’.

‘Er, no,’ I said to the woman beside me, a delegate from California. ‘It’s exactly imaginable, if you know about Lincoln, Kennedy or Ronald Reagan.’

‘Detail,’ she said.

‘The truth is that my father is a malignant presence, a bully and a liar. This is the day his reign ends. He’s a fucking beast. Maybe the poison drips through. I don’t wanna be you. I can’t forgive you. There are times to be someone. I’m a good guy. Fuck the weather, we’re changing the cultural climate. I’m the eldest boy!’

That’s what was going through my mind, not Trump Jr’s anodyne nonsense but the ravings of that other daddy-obsessed, spoiled dickwad, Succession’s Kendall Roy. At one point in his speech, Trump Jr acted as if he cared about the price of groceries. He cared about democracy. ‘All hell has broken loose in America,’ he said. But only one thing is certain: Donald Trump Jr knows as much about the price of groceries, or about democracy, as his father does, and the masochism of his empty days involves repeating for a living the old man’s lies. ‘Who’s running things?’ he asked, slick and over-groomed under the lights.

‘Obama!’ the Florida delegation shouted.

‘The cartel,’ Arizona shouted.

On the final night, the audience looked as if the life had been squeezed out of it by the ferocious bear-hug, the repetition of the same dozen phrases that stood in for policy, vision and hope. Tucker Carlson mounted the stage without notes or teleprompter to offer a portrait of his good friend Donald Trump. Like all of them, he found it hard to see the assassination attempt for what it was: a terrible action by a young man who was a registered Republican, and a lucky escape by a politician whose advocacy of violent behaviour should now give him pause. No: the shooter was somehow the latest form of Democratic ‘persecution’, and ‘the president’ a hero, a leader of nations and the bravest man ever to have lived, for putting on his shoes and raising his fist amid a thicket of far braver guardians.

Hulk Hogan, a retired wrestler with a moustache as drooping as his morals (he was caught on a sex tape using the N-word and has been accused of homophobia), suddenly stormed onto the stage. Wrestling is to sport what Republican politics is to morality, falsification in the interests of entertainment. Trump’s politics is like the madder branch of wrestling, a brutal comedy of insults, but the lack of respect for reality means that all the gains are phoney. The only limitations being tested are the limitations of showbusiness. Trump appeared on the stage amid a whiteout of theatrical lighting. He mumbled and preened for the better part of two hours, a toe-curling paragon of fake humility, giving voice to incendiary ideas and untruths that can be disproved in seconds. The day he was shot, there was ‘blood all over the place’, not the trickle we could see in the image above him. ‘Venezuela is sending its murderers to the United States of America … The invasion into our country [is] killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.’ Then he boasted of things he had never done and made promises he can never keep. He has the warped mind, we already know, of a not especially bright 15-year-old who watches too many horror films and takes part in too many apocalyptic combat games. ‘Depression’, ‘despair’, ‘disaster’, ‘danger’, ‘corruption’ and ‘insanity’ – these are the words he used to conjure his American nightmare, a picture of violence in which he himself is deeply etched.

While he spoke, and the energy drained from the hall, people out there in the world of facts were checking everything he said. My favourite correction came from Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers. ‘Trump is a scab and a billionaire and that’s who he represents. We know which side we’re on. Not his.’ Stick that in your ‘hard-working man’ hillbilly piety, J.D. Vance. In fact, as the speech made clearer than ever, Vance just about got it right – eight years before accepting his place on the ticket – when he said that Trump has the makings of ‘an American Hitler’. His intellectual cousins, if such a thing can be said without laughter, are not Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, who were globalists in their own damaged way – no, Trump’s tradition of white Christian nationalism, as well as his middle-finger politics and his ‘America First’ ranting, comes from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the KKK; from George Wallace, the segregationist governor and former presidential nominee; from Joe McCarthy, who thought America was being overrun by aliens; and from lynch-happy Pat Buchanan, protector of the rights of the white, property-owning elite.

I listened to the words and stared for an hour at the netted balloons. High over the arena they waited to drop into all this chaos, all this celebratory prejudice. The man who denied the results of the election, who raised a desperate army, who incited hatred, violence and dismay all around him, who stole documents, who paid people off, who exhibited gangsterism and was convicted for concealing the truth, who was ordered to pay $83 million to a woman he defamed and who accused him of rape, this man – this candidate – was lecturing the people and promising to save America from those who opposed him. I looked at him one last time. Just as he was praising the Hungarian mobster and press-hater Viktor Orbán – to a round of applause – my mind began to wander to that children’s film about the red balloon that drifts above the streets of Paris and is loosed into a universe of hope. Outside, the evening was fresh, and people were gathering to rejoin the city and get away from all this. A balloon popped, and I turned like everybody else to make sure it wasn’t a gun.