Trump puts his indelible imprint on the GOP

Actually, given that just moments after deploring divisiveness, Trump alluded to his stolen-election nonsense — a lie that created the preconditions for the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol — and later disparaged the former House speaker as “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” it’s probably best to do the Gipper one better: Be skeptical and verify.

Still, credit where it’s due: Trump achieved something remarkable in Milwaukee. He completed the Republican Party’s transformation into his own personal political movement, one that reflects his ideas, his tone, his populist tropes, and even his highly stylized grammar and punctuation.

And rather than balancing his ticket, he double-struck his MAGA imprint on the party and into the future by choosing JD Vance, a vice presidential nominee whose ambition-driven evolution from skeptic to supplicant mirrors the party’s own transmogrification.

The last time the Republicans met in person at their national convention, in 2016 in Cleveland, Trump had the votes to become the nominee, but he hadn’t tamed the entire party. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who had run against him, refused to endorse him. John Kasich was such an unreconciled opponent that, despite being the host state governor, he didn’t appear at the Cleveland convention. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, a sempiternal pillar of the party’s Washington establishment, was cheered when he addressed the 2016 confab. This year, McConnell had no role beyond casting Kentucky’s delegate votes for Trump — and was roundly booed when introduced to do that.

The Trump of 2016 was not the politically pockmarked figure of today. He hadn’t yet been indicted on either the federal and state level. He hadn’t been convicted of 34 felony counts. He was four years away from ending his presidential term by falsely claiming widespread fraud had cost him victory. Nor had he struck the spark alighting the tinderbox conditions he had created by telling that lie and then calling MAGA to Washington and sending them to the Capitol to pressure Congress to adopt his false-electors scheme.

Yet even with all the baggage, all the alleged and confirmed felonious behavior, the Trump of 2024 has been able to force the entirety of his party, including his primary rivals, not just to bend the knee but to kiss the backside.

Trump has used his MAGA base as a cattle prod to herd the rest of the party into the stable. That’s remarkable for two reasons. First, it has required them to adopt or finesse the former president’s absurd conspiratorialist assertions. Second, with the exception of the social issues, conservatives embracing Trump has meant adopting as prevailing GOP stands what had previously been minority positions.

Under Ronald Reagan, who famously demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, the GOP stood firmly against communism. The party is now led by presidential and vice presidential nominees who don’t see any US interest in having Ukraine prevail against the thuggery of Russian czar Vladimir Putin.

The party that supported free trade and free markets now backs an inflation-fueling tariff regime on virtually all imports. A party that once preached fiscal discipline has scattered those concerns to the wind.

A party that stressed the rule of law, which Vance underscored in his Wednesday speech, has rallied around a man who, as his own former vice president noted, tried to put himself above the US Constitution in his Jan. 6 scheming and later called for its suspension to return him to power.

Now for those who value constitutional democracy and abhor authoritarianism, that last reality is particularly worrisome.

Still, Trump’s ability to transform the party speaks to his skill as a putative populist and salesman. Which is to say, a highly skilled political propagandist.

Nor is Vance a piker when it comes to propounding populism. “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike,” he proclaimed in his Wednesday speech.

Here, however, is the problem for those who would like to see the GOP follow through on its claim to be the party of the working class: As president, Trump talked the populist talk, but on taxes and regulation, walked the wealthy, corporate walk.

The Republican platform tries to paper over the tensions and trade-offs between policies that help the working class and those that aid industry and corporations. “The Republican Party must return to its roots as the Party of Industry, Manufacturing, Infrastructure, and Workers,” it declares.

That assumes that the interests of industry are the same as those of its workers. More often than not, they simply aren’t.

One area where they do come together is protectionism, which shields industry from competition and protects both profits and jobs.

But protectionism imposes economic dislocation and job loss elsewhere in the economy. The 10 percent tariffs Trump wants will raise costs — that is, be inflationary — for everyday Americans. In effect, workaday America will pay more to help offset an extension of Trump’s tax cuts, which are highly skewed toward upper earners.

In selecting Vance, Trump has doubled down on symbolism. But to add substance to symbolism, Trump and Vance would have to actually take the side of workers, in an honest, straightforward, financially meaningful way.

For Donald Trump, that would be a sea change indeed.

Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.