Milwaukee’s RNC will highlight the clash between Donald Trump and his own worst instincts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a new, kinder, gentler Donald Trump, just in time for his looming close-up on the national stage in Milwaukee. At least that’s what Beltway pundits are saying as Republicans prepare to descend on Wisconsin for their four-day national convention, at a pivotal moment in arguably the most important presidential election in American history.

With the Milwaukee confab just days away, D.C.-insider journalists Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei of Axios boldly announced “Trump’s new 2024 plan” — essentially an attempt to rein in the presumptive GOP nominee’s worst instincts and clean up his shtick in order to woo a tiny sliver of still-undecided voters in seven key swing states.

There’s maybe a grain of truth here. The 45th president and convicted felon did seem slightly subdued in June’s now-notorious Atlanta debate with President Joe Biden — delivering his stream of more than 30 since-fact-checked lies like a man who’d replaced his normal Adderall drip with Xanax. His Truth Social feed has avoided piling on Biden’s moment of post-debate crisis and seems almost tame — if you don’t count that endorsement of a military tribunal for his enemy Liz Cheney. Team Trump’s efforts to lull the public to sleep with three bland, white male vice presidential finalists, and a head-fake party platform that (falsely) claims to tone it down on abortion, all feel calculated to distract from the extremism of the Project 2025 blueprint and some of the Christian nationalists surrounding him.

But then Trump had to spoil it all by saying something stupid like ... well, pretty much everything he said at a Tuesday night rally in Miami.

Over the course of 75 sweltering, climate-change-overheated minutes at Trump’s Doral resort, Trump veered wildly from the ridiculous (declaring yet again that fictional movie serial killer Hannibal Lecter “was a lovely man,” part of another ugly rant against immigrants) to the sublime, proclaiming weirdly that “we don’t eat bacon anymore.” The ex-POTUS was no better on the substance, insisting he had no real idea what NATO was when he entered the White House and that his government would “take over” Washington, D.C. — something it doesn’t have the power to do — because visitors to the Lincoln Memorial are getting mugged or raped (they aren’t).

Whatever Trump aides are whispering to Axios, it doesn’t change the reality that their candidate continues to run the most politically extreme campaign in U.S. history — punctuated by his continued call for a radical mass deportation regime, with dead-of-night raids in American neighborhoods and large detention camps on the southern border. If that’s Republicans’ idea of moving to “the center,” then America’s moral compass is hopelessly broken.

Go back through American history, and our memorable conventions have been moments of great conflict, from moderates vs. the KKK in 1924 to Vietnam War protesters against the establishment in 1968 to Ronald Reagan vs. Gerald Ford in 1976. But the nation has never really seen a drama like the one that will play out during four hot days in Brew City: Donald Trump vs. himself.

Which version of Trump will we get in the city that made beer famous: a high-end craft brew who sees his dream of another four years in the Oval Office — and the ability to crush the various felony cases against him — within his grasp, if he can convince a few million more voters that he’s not the wannabe dictator his critics say he is? Or will we get the bitter cheap swill of a movement that can’t hide its burning desire to crush liberals or refugees or LGBTQ folks with a powerful “Red Caesar,” delivering podium rants that would have sounded better in the original German?

Based on what we know so far about the four-night schedule in Milwaukee, Team Trump is hoping to grasp the young, disaffected, and often disengaged center. There will be featured appearances from Black and brown B-list celebrities like Philadelphia’s Amber Rose or hip-hop’s 50 Cent, avatars of the kind of voter Trump’s somewhat more polished 2024 campaign team thinks will flip 2020’s narrow loss into a landslide victory this November. Theme nights like “Make America Wealthy Again” are targeting middle-class anxieties over inflation or crime. There will be no “I Am Your Retribution” night, or “Dictator, But Only On Day One” night — at least not on paper.

But much like the legendary scene of German refugee Dr. Strangelove trying to restrain a right-hand salute in the classic 1964 movie, the GOP will likely struggle to control its antidemocratic instincts over four hot days on the banks of Lake Michigan. Trump consigliere Steve Bannon may be imprisoned in Danbury, but we don’t know if fringe extremists like Roger Stone or Alex Jones will show up with a megaphone, as they did in Cleveland in 2016. It will be hard for Team Trump to disavow the wildly controversial Project 2025 while its chief architects, the Heritage Foundation, are staging a daylong policy fest. Any appeal to young voters by the likes of Rose could be drowned out by prime-time, Christian nationalist screeds by Kari Lake or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

» READ MORE: Trump’s new Big Lie that he doesn’t know about Project 2025 might take him down | Will Bunch

And when the TV ratings are highest for Trump’s Thursday night acceptance speech, which Donald shows up? The disciplined if deceitful Donald of Atlanta who “won” the debate by trying not to bring negative attention to his own considerable failings, or Doral Donald who can’t control his strange digressions or his dark fantasies of revenge?

Because the real Milwaukee challenge for the Trumpian cult formerly known as the Republican Party, and for Trump’s “normie” handlers like campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, is less to stage a boisterous and controversial confab than to put on a kind of boring, normal-looking one. Because a normal convention, with balloon drops and traditional campaign rhetoric that doesn’t sound like it comes from Trump’s bedside book of Adolf Hitler speeches, might blind middle-of-the-road voters to the fact that what will happen this coming week is anything but normal.

A nation that used to disqualify presidential hopefuls for minor offenses like an ill-conceived comment on Vietnam, or a one-night stand, or campaign speech plagiarism (yes, that was Joe Biden ... awkward) is about to host a lavish four-day celebration of a man who just last month was convicted by a jury of 34 felony counts for paying campaign hush money to cover up his affair with a porn star. Just a few years removed from a #MeToo revolution against sexual assault, the GOP is sending forth an adjudicated rapist. The speakers on “Make America Wealthy Again” night probably won’t tell you that its nominee made himself wealthy through what a judge ruled was a massive, yearslong fraud scheme.

Because on Thursday night, when those red, white, and blue balloons fall, and the loudspeakers blast the Village People or Toby Keith or whomever, the fervent hope is that Trump will look to casual viewers like the heir to Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush — and not a guy who needs to report to a New York state probation officer.

But it’s not going to be that easy for Trump, Wiles, LaCivita, and Co. — which is why I’m getting up at 3 a.m. Sunday morning to cram onto my Southwest flights to Milwaukee and file daily columns from the Republican National Convention between bites of bratwurst. The reality is that a political party that sees its wet dreams of a Christian America undoing the civil rights movement and women’s and LGBTQ liberation within reach is not going to do any better holding back its true feelings than Dr. Strangelove did. You saw it this week when Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, addressing a conference on “national conservatism,” proudly declared that he is a Christian nationalist. Don’t underestimate the GOP’s capacity for overplaying its hand — and shooting itself in the foot.

They say the RNC will be boring because it will be less a convention than a coronation — a chilling image just days after a corrupted U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed that American presidents are above the law. That’s probably true — which is exactly what makes the next few days so important. One of our two political parties is about to spend four days convincing 50.1% of the U.S. electorate to bless the idea of a convicted felon with SCOTUS-sanctioned dictatorial superpowers marching on Washington to end the American Experiment. I wouldn’t miss this for anything. See you in Milwaukee.

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