Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

The Donald Trump Show

Sunday Review / International New York Times | 23 July 2016

Ross Douthat

USUALLY political conventions are attempts to tell a story — a story about what a party stands for, a story about where its presidential candidate came from, a story about what kind of chief executive he would be.

The Donald Trump National Convention in Cleveland (technically the Republican National Convention, but let’s be real) wasn’t really much for storytelling. Its messages were muddled, its shared agenda boiled down to hating Hillary Clinton, many of its speakers didn’t want to talk about the candidate and one declined even to endorse him.

But if the convention didn’t tell, it definitely showed: It was less an advertisement for Donald Trump than a perfect synecdoche for his entire ascent, with every element of the Trump phenomenon distilled into four strange days of drama.

First, it was a showcase for the institutional failure of the Republican Party in the face of Trump’s assault. The party’s past presidents were absent, and many of its younger politicians also. The ones who did appear found varying ways to cover themselves in dishonor — some with pained, phoned-in endorsements, some with opportunistic zeal, and some by simply being good apparatchiks and squashing the last attempt at delegate dissent.

Almost none of these figures made a positive case for Trumpism, or attempted to explain how his ethno-nationalism fits with their professed Reaganite worldview. But then that worldview also seemed threadbare — a concatenation of clichés so rote and unconvincing that its abandonment by Trump’s voters looks almost inevitable in hindsight.

Meanwhile the convention was also a showcase for Trump’s unique political style, which is basically ramshackle and improvised, and which treats the controversies that most politicians fear as part of the fun, part of the show, a reason for voters and viewers to tune in. Trump literally said this, after his wife’s speech bizarrely plagiarized Michelle Obama and his campaign even more bizarrely let the controversy spin for days: “Good news is Melania’s speech got more publicity than any in the history of politics,” he tweeted, “especially if you believe that all press is good press!”

And he does. How else to explain the stage-management of Ted Cruz’s deliberate non-endorsement, a striking and admirable moment of defiance that Trump’s campaign actually seemed to hype — by apparently whipping boos against Cruz from the floor, and by having Trump show up in the hall as the speech wrapped, as though the two men might stage a W.W.E. confrontation.

That this reality-television approach is poorly suited to an office with the powers of the presidency is, well, obvious enough. But not content to let us draw the inference, Trump also used the convention week to offer a case study in the damage a reckless president can do, by giving an extended interview with this newspaper in which he casually undercut America’s commitment to our NATO allies in the event of Russian aggression in the Baltics.

One need not be any kind of Russia hawk to recognize that this is the kind of thing that encourages brinksmanship, aggression, war. (It also dovetails, rather creepily, with Trumpworld’s conspicuous Russian ties, Vladimir Putin’s history of backing right-wing European parties, and Russian television’s conspicuous pro-Trump propaganda.) And nestled amid the whole ramshackle convention, it was a reminder that the greatest danger of a Trump presidency might not be his transparently authoritarian tendencies, but rather the global chaos that a winging-it Great Man in the Oval Office could unleash.

But then, finally, there came the Great Man’s acceptance speech itself, which was everything that critics charged — exaggerated in its law-and-order fear-mongering, free of policy beyond the promise of quick fixes and delivered with a strongman’s permanent shout — while also pulsing with an ideological message whose power will outlive Trump’s wild campaign.

That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade. It was an attack on George W. Bush’s Iraq war and Hillary Clinton’s Libya incursion both, on Nafta and every trade deal negotiated since, on the perpetual Beltway push for increased immigration, on the entire elite vision of an increasingly borderless globe.

No recent presidential nominee has given a speech like it. But it gave full voice to sentiments that are widely held on both sides of the Atlantic — sentiments rooted in the broken promises of both right and left, in 15 years of economic disappointment and military quagmire, in the percolating threat of globalized jihad, in an ever-more-balkanized culture governed by an ever-more-insulated elite.

At his convention as in his entire rise, Trump was a walking spectacle, a carnival barker, a man without normal caution or foresight or restraint. And those flaws should doom him in the end.

But his speech wasn’t just a spectacle. And after this strangest of elections is over, Trumpism will come around again.