There’s No Zealot Like a Trump Convert

Good evening from Milwaukee, where I had a relish tray last night. Today, I’m looking at how the Republican National Convention has become a conversion story. Then, we zoom into a light-blue state where Republicans think they have a shot in November.

When Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio takes the stage in Milwaukee tonight to accept his party’s nomination to be vice president, he will complete the final stage in his transformation from foil to acolyte of former President Donald Trump.

His long history of disparaging Trump, whom he has called an “idiot” and “cultural heroin,” does not make him less suited for elevation within his party. Rather, it makes him a better avatar for the tale Trump wants to tell.

Vance is a political convert, whose remaking of himself and his political image in order to thrive in Trump’s Republican Party proves and reinforces Trump’s power. And he will serve as a capstone for a convention that has been a conversion story unto itself.

Conversion is a defining feature of today’s Republican Party, given how full it is of Republicans who did not much like Trump when he cannonballed into politics in 2016, and how far it has moved from the Reaganesque tenets that once defined it. The intraparty unity on display here is possible only because a lot of people have changed their minds about the former president over the past eight years. Trump himself, a former Democrat, has changed his politics, too.

Trump cares little about whether his converts are doing so for pragmatic reasons or moral ones, just as long as their fealty is public, and over the course of this week, Trump has paraded his converts for all the country to see.