Move Over ‘Unity,’ Hello ‘1776’
Following Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the former president and other conservative leaders have been tirelessly spinning the press and the public that the core message of the final four months of Trump’s 2024 campaign is now “unity” and “peace.” But by the time the ongoing Republican National Convention had reached its second full day in Milwaukee, it was abundantly clear how much the party and its kingpin were preparing for all-out warfare on the left.
“Everyone is still planning on drinking jars of liberal tears,” a Republican close to Trump said on Tuesday, adding that any “unity” message has nothing to do with how “viciously” a second term Trump and his administration would behave.
Inside the convention hall — apart from a few spontaneous chants that have echoed Trump’s fist-pumping, post-shooting battlecry, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — MAGA speakers have muzzled much of the movement’s usually free-flowing menace. But at an event hosted by the far-right Moms For Liberty at the nearby symphony hall on Tuesday, the masks were off, as Republicans pounded familiar, dark themes of division. GOP presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy even cribbed the battle cry of the extremist fringe, suggesting Trump’s election would mark a second American Revolution. “I think it is a 1776 moment in the United States of America,” he said. “2024 is our generation’s 1776.”
Early this week, numerous sources close to the former president, GOP operatives working on his 2024 effort, and conservative lawyers in Trump’s immediate orbit insisted to Rolling Stone that any fresh “unity” pitch to independent or swing voters should not be confused with Trump or his lieutenants letting up on their extreme, highly draconian, and retribution-minded agenda. “Nothing,” on that front, “has changed,” another person close to Trump promises, citing recent conversations with Trump and members of his presidential campaign.
Following Trump’s initial calls for his “unity” and “peace” reboot, it didn’t take many hours for him to pivot right back to spewing a conspiracy-theory-laced tirade on his social media website, as he baselessly lashed out at the Biden-era Department of Justice for supposedly orchestrating “ALL” of the recent civil and criminal trials and investigations of Trump, all to help President Joe Biden.
Rolling Stone buttonholed former Trump Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker at a convention afterparty Tuesday. He said it was reasonable to be concerned about Trump’s calls for “retribution,” but offered a less ominous interpretation. “President Trump’s right: Success is gonna be our retribution.” Pressed on whether there would be more to it, Whitaker replied:“We’re gonna follow the law, because we’re law-abiding citizens.”
But another lawyer who is talked up in MAGA circles as a potential attorney general candidate has been far from circumspect about his intentions for a second Trump term. “There will be no unity during my vice-reign,” Mike Davis — a close Trump ally — posted to X on Monday, continuing his streak of taunting the left online about how vengeful a “viceroy” he would be for Trump. “So ordered.”
On the opening day of Trump’s 2024 allegedly unifying nominating convention, the MAGA elite — who yearn for a second term that isn’t hampered by squishy Republican appointees hesitant to carry out Trump’s more horrifying or potentially illegal orders — notched one of their biggest victories yet. On Monday, Trump finally announced that he had tapped Ohio Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as his 2024 running mate. In the past several years, the vice-presidential pick switched from being a harsh Trump critic, who worried that Trump could become the American Adolf Hitler, to a full-throated MAGA diehard and zealous convert to the Trump personality cult.
During his 2024 VP search, Trump had told some of his confidants that one factor that was important to him was that his veep pick had a record of forcefully and publicly backing Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” for Biden, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. (The 2020 election was not stolen, and Trump and Republicans are currently campaigning on a platform of cementing those blatantly authoritarian lies into public policy.)
Trump, the sources add, relished that Vance endorsed the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and that the senator had criticized then-Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to not help Trump steal the election. Trump has also privately lauded Vance for saying earlier this year that he was “skeptical” that Pence was ever in any real physical danger during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that Trump had whipped up.
It was just one of numerous instances in which Vance had demonstrated — as a lawmaker and as a habitual Trump defender — that if he were picked as Trump’s second-in-command, he would not waver or attempt to constrain his boss in such wildly scandalous or corrupt circumstances.
And to the so-called “ultra-MAGA” set who advise Trump and proliferate his possible government-in-waiting, that is one of Vance’s greatest qualifications — and as clear a sign as any that a second term would promise an even more radically unleashed Donald Trump.
“Choosing Sen. Vance is something you do when you want total victory and total control, not if you want fake unity,” says a Trump ally who speaks to the former president frequently. “He’s who you pick if you want to fight, instead of surrendering to those who are going to try to sabotage your administration no matter what.”
Offering further evidence that the convention’s unity theme is a MAGA mirage, the Moms For Liberty event offered GOP devotees much of the red meat they have been missing on the main stage at Fiserv Forum. It featured bombast not only from Ramaswamy but high-profile elected Republicans, including governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas; Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin; Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who insisted “the left wants to groom children”; and Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, who recently ousted Jan. 6 committee leader Liz Cheney from office. The event even featured a cameo from Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has organized the extreme plan for a second Trump term known as Project 2025. Roberts recently threatened bloody, revolutionary upheaval.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich literally demonized the Democratic party — framing the stakes of the 2024 election as a “battle between good and evil.” She described the MAGA faithful as standing up to “the Enemy” — i.e. Satan — who “wants to come in between us and our children.” Echoing Trump’s battle cry, she insisted: “Moms for Liberty is here to ‘fight, fight, fight’ and win, win, win, win. And winning we are!”
Tiffany Justice, another cofounder of the extreme, anti-LGBT group, whose members have crusaded to ban books and take over school boards, openly mocked those who have called on Republicans to tone down violent rhetoric in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump because it’s too “too volatile.” Justice insisted such language was justified: “Radical Marxists are trying to steal our children’s future,” she said, “so we are going to fight like hell.”
Ramaswamy warned the right-wing audience that “the other side will feed our kids” an agenda centered on “race, gender, sexuality and climate — and we gotta stand up against that!” He insisted that the winning vision was instead focused on “the individual, family, nation, and God.”
Hageman — who underscored she’s already trying to put the Project 2025 plan to abolish the Department of Education into action, legislatively — spoke in familiar tones of right-wing grievance. “If you believe in freedom and liberty, they call us ‘fascists,’” she said. “They have demonized us for so many years because they can’t beat us on policy.”
Huckabee Sanders encouraged a similar victim complex, claiming that Democratic depictions of a GOP-led “war on women” were pure projection. “The only war in this country on women is on conservative women from the far left.” (Arkansas has a near total abortion ban at any time during pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest.)
Johnson, when he wasn’t blaming schools for molding the Trump shooter, cast the left-side of the political spectrum as “destructive” and mad for power, seeking to “control people’s lives.”
For his part, DeSantis obviously missed the memo about avoiding bellicose metaphors in this moment of national togetherness. He avidly recounted his many battles against “Marxist” professors, “Hamas” (i.e. pro-Palestine) protesters, and “woke” corporations. “Everything we do, we get blowback from the left and from the media,” DeSantis said with a smile. “That just tells me that we’re over the target.”
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