Trump Builds A Big Tent

Tuesday night at the RNC was a unity night.

Donald Trump promised a unity convention among Republicans. The unity is obviously materializing.

There is a Marxist materialist view of history that says individual figures don’t matter. It dates back to Hegel, actually predating Marx, and it suggests that we ride the eddies of history, that history is a series of impersonal forces, and that individual figures don’t matter. It would argue that if there were no Churchill, there would have been somebody similar to Churchill who would have performed the same function; if there were no Hitler, there would have been someone like Hitler who performed that same function.

There’s a countervailing view, derisively termed the “great man” view of history, which is the idea that individuals matter in history.

And that idea is true.

Donald Trump is one more example of the fact that individual figures actually do shape history, whether for good or for ill.

The way the Republican Party is coming together around Trump is something absolutely unique. Republicans came together around other candidates. They’ve come together in conventions around Mitt Romney and John McCain.

But the level of enthusiasm for Trump on a personal level, the obvious level of adoration in the hall for him, and the capacity he has to cobble together a coalition that really is non-ideological are unique.

Trump is not an ideological figure, and because he is not, he has not formed an ideological party. That doesn’t mean the actual policies that come out of his administration won’t be ideological; his first term was very ideological, a fairly conservative administration — ideologically more conservative than George W. Bush’s administration, at least when it came to the courts or foreign policy.

But when it comes to Trump’s coalition, it is entirely non-ideological. I’ve heard a lot of complaints, which I agree with on a moral level: Why are some of the people speaking at the convention as if they have nothing to do with conservatism? They’re not spokespeople for conservatism.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

But I don’t think that’s what the RNC is for. The RNC is a showcase. It’s a permission structure for people to join the tent. Politics is all about coalitions. It’s about coalition building. It’s about how many people you can give permission to so they can join your side against the other side.

Trump has built a massive anti-Left coalition. As the Left has gone off the rails again, there’s a reactivity to American politics because Trump is who Trump is. Because the Left went completely off the rails, they forced everybody in the middle to Trump’s side.

What happened, for example, with Elon Musk is similar to what happened with me. I was not a voter for Donald Trump in 2016. I didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016 because, frankly, I didn’t like either candidate. Then the Left went completely off the rails, and Trump gave me more conservative policy than I thought I was going to get.

I voted for him in 2020, and then the Left went even further off the rails. Now, I’ve donated and held a fundraiser for Trump’s 2024 campaign.

JD Vance, the vice-presidential candidate, did the same sort of thing. Vance was more strenuously anti-Trump than I was in 2016. By 2020, he backed Trump. In 2024, he became a vice presidential candidate.

That’s because Trump has a unique capacity as a non-ideological, larger-than-life figure to hold together coalitions that include people who are both pro-life and pro-choice, people who are pro-gay marriage and anti-gay marriage. He’s able to cobble together a coalition between union leaders and people who think that right to work is a top priority.

It’s a non-ideological coalition, and that’s what the RNC is about. People who are criticizing the RNC platform don’t understand that the RNC platform is not an actual policy statement that matters. It just isn’t. That’s not what the RNC is for anymore.

There may have been a time when the RNC platform mattered, but the RNC is not a tool for ideology any longer. It is not where you look to determine what Republicans or conservatives think. It is merely a tool for victory, and it’s particularly a tool for victory for Donald Trump in this election cycle.

So you’re seeing an extraordinarily large tent, a tent that’s largely unsupportable ideologically in the sense that the actual tent poles are so far apart that in any normal circumstance, they would collapse in on themselves.

But because Trump is at the center of that tent and he’s an extraordinarily large and powerful supporting and buttressing force in the center of that tent, that tent can hold.

That’s what you’re seeing at the Republican National Convention right now.