Later this week, Donald Trump will be endorsed by the US Republican party as its presidential nominee. This is not hot news, because Mr Trump dominated the primaries and comes to the party convention which opened in Cleveland today with an unassailable lead over a divided field of unimpressive rivals. Talk of a stop-Trump move at a brokered convention evaporated weeks ago. But Mr Trump’s nomination is still both an extraordinary and a significant event, not just for the politics of the United States, but for the politics of the western democracies generally.
Mr Trump’s victory comes at a time when America is a nation on edge, the divide over policing and the shootings of black men worsening, while Barack Obama struggles to hold the ring. This week’s killings of three officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is unlikely to be the last in a summer spiral of gun violence. Baton Rouge had been tense since two white officers killed a black man, Alton Sterling, two weeks ago. Anti-police protests followed. The chief suspect had a complex radical history. But the fear is that in the current mood of anger, further deaths are just a hair-trigger away in many cities.
The other fear is that Mr Trump will deliberately try to make things even worse because he thinks anger is a winning strategy. He has spent the campaign attacking and denigrating whole categories of Americans – from Latino immigrants to women he deems unattractive, to Muslims and Hollywood liberals. Hiding behind a campaign to rid the US of what he calls political correctness, Mr Trump has in fact made a systematic and unprecedented attempt to deny millions of Americans their human dignity.
This is a conscious break with America’s post-civil rights political consensus. Its consequences are not hard to see. Extreme racist groups have become more active. Previously taboo views like Holocaust denial have been openly promoted. And Mr Trump himself has sometimes encouraged violence by saying he wants to punch opponents. These are not casual remarks and they could easily get worse. Presented with an opportunity this week both to insult the groups whom his core supporters blame for their belief that they have been cheated, there is a real danger that Mr Trump will pour petrol on the simmering embers in places like Baton Rouge, Dallas and Minneapolis because, in the end, he thinks it will help his chances against Hillary Clinton.
Mr Trump has toned down some of his attacks on the Republican establishment lately. He said at the weekend that he was nominating the Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running-mate partly to help party unity – though it is also to help raise funds. But Mr Trump remains fundamentally a divider not a uniter. Many senior Republicans and some corporate backers are boycotting Cleveland. These are all signs of the Republican party’s decline, but the biggest of all is Mr Trump’s nomination.
Mr Trump has capitalised on the working-class insecurity that is a force across the western world. To the familiar post-factual assertiveness he has mixed his own cocktail of egomania, prejudice and destructiveness. But what happens in the US shapes the whole world. That’s why the Cleveland convention matters so much and why Mr Trump faces such an important test in the words he chooses later this week.
