The GOP's long history of Trumpian-style politics
National Post, 17 July 2024
The former president's ideological lineage can be traced all the way back to the Republican convention of 1912
On Saturday morning, I was reading about Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign in 1912 and watching archival videos of the 1992 Republican National Convention (RNC). The latter opened with Ronald Reagan’s last convention speech, a victory lap for the man who won the Cold War.
Before sundown, Donald Trump had joined Roosevelt and Reagan as Republican presidents who survived assassination attempts. That will influence the RNC unfolding this week in Milwaukee, the very city where Roosevelt was shot in 1912.
There are deeper echoes still. Trump’s RNC this week has its roots in the conventions of 1912 and 1992, where his positions were argued long beforehand.
In 1912, Roosevelt was a former president, having succeeded William McKinley after his assassination in 1901, and having been re-elected in his own right in 1904. In 1908, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s preferred successor, was elected when Roosevelt declined to run again.
By 1912, though, Roosevelt was disillusioned with Taft’s conservatism and his preference for open trade and commercial interests over Roosevelt’s progressive focus on the working man against the monied class. It is more complicated than that, but those were the main lines of argument when Roosevelt launched a populist challenge to Taft for the Republican nomination.
In a time when party officials controlled the nomination process, Taft’s domination of the Republican apparatus ensured that he would win the nomination. Roosevelt bolted from the Chicago convention, vowing to run as a third-party candidate, which he did for the Progressive party, known as the Bull Moose party.
Trump has done what Roosevelt did not do; he did not need to form his own party, but took over the existing Republican one. And there are further similarities between Roosevelt and Trump.
They both indulge in insults — Roosevelt was not above making fun of Taft for being fat. They both come from privileged families but style themselves as populists with an unusually charismatic following. And the apocalyptic rhetorical style of Trump was matched, in that summer of 1912, by perhaps the most famous line ever spoken at a Republican convention.
“We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” thundered Teddy Roosevelt in Chicago to his fellow Republicans. He repeated the line later that summer to his newly fellow Progressives.
Roosevelt would lose in the fall. The Republican vote split and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected. Wilson carried 40 states, Roosevelt carried six and Taft only two.
While Taft suffered an election loss, he won the party argument. The Republicans would be the party of small government, low taxes and open trade. They would follow the new consensus eventually worked out by Wilson — and later FDR and Harry Truman — of an internationalist foreign policy. Roosevelt was the most attractive candidate in 1912 personally, but he lost the policy argument decisively.
Yet no argument is ever permanently won or lost in politics. At the 1992 RNC in Houston, the embers of 1912 were being stirred up. The Cold War had been won, President George H. W. Bush was running for re-election. He had been riding high after the 1991 Gulf War, but an economic downturn set in and he was paying a political price for violating his no-new-taxes pledge.
Patrick Buchanan, a conservative commentator and former White House aide — for both Richard Nixon and Reagan — launched a primary campaign against Bush. After a surprisingly strong showing (but defeat) in New Hampshire, Buchanan’s campaign fizzled, but it struck a chord.
The themes then are familiar now, as Buchanan inveighed against a “globalist” Bush, the “Brussels bureaucrats (building a) European superstate,” mass immigration and a “new world order” that would cost American treasure and blood abroad.
Buchanan is more refined, learned and coherent than Donald Trump, but he lacked the latter’s celebrity and timing. What Buchanan started in 1991 took 25 years to prevail, but it did in 2016 with Trump’s election. From 1912 to 1992 to 2016, a line — but not a straight line — could be drawn from Roosevelt to Trump.
In a bid for party unity, Buchanan was invited to address the 1992 RNC on the first night. It was expected that no one would much remember what Buchanan said, as the featured speaker that night was the great man himself, the Gipper returning for one last performance, his “goodbye” to America.
“This fellow they have nominated claims that he is the new Thomas Jefferson,” the old man said. “Well, let me tell you something, I knew Thomas Jefferson.”
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