President Donald J. Trump speaks at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Sept. 10.
Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News
We predicted the Republican midterm convention in Dallas would bring division and demonization, even as we wished for a better political world where the GOP might cast a positive, conservative vision.
There’s an old saying about wishes and horses, and reality prevailed with empty rhetoric, canned insults and gaudy, over-the-top Americana posing as patriotism. As far as we can tell, Dallas hardly paid attention, and the nation seemed to yawn. This show is tired, and we’re all tired of it.
You might expect the energy of a political convention to ripple through the host city, fed by the enthusiasm of attendees and the curiosity of everyone else. We failed to feel any intensity from our perch downtown just a hop, skip and jump from the American Airlines Center. If you weren’t in the epicenter, the streets were empty; the restaurants weren’t lacking for open tables.
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President Donald Trump’s rally masquerading as a party convention couldn’t even galvanize enough people to fill the arena.
He lied about that the way he lies about so many things — reflexively, cavalierly, without regard for what people can see with their own eyes.
The pitch to voters, to the extent there was one, seemed to be: Don’t worry about our plan; look how awful those democratic socialists are! This editorial page has been blunt about the dangers of progressive policies and the toxic anti-Americanism of the Democratic Socialists of America, but the Democratic Party tent is bigger than that.
Worse, the fiery attacks against Democrats can’t paper over Republicans’ own failures to meaningfully improve the lives of Americans today. The president has alienated our allies and marched us into another war in the Middle East while doing little to cool inflation. In fact, Trump borrowed a strategy from the socialist playbook by offering every adult American a $5,000 check if Republicans win the midterms.
We don’t believe that all this vitriol, all this disingenuousness, is the tone or message most Americans want.
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Mayor Eric Johnson opened his speech with his practiced line that Dallas is a “sanctuary city from socialism.” He’s right that progressive cities have wrongly tolerated encampments, cut police funds and chased away businesses. But in his telling, he, a Republican mayor, is our city’s savior.
We know his actual record. Yes, Johnson gets credit for beating back calls to defund the police in 2020. Yet the city’s growing investments in policing have been the decision of the full City Council, not just his. And where was the mayor when homelessness was spinning out of control downtown? Business leaders finally got the city to commit to a crackdown after a rash of violent crime in late 2024. The mayor was nowhere to be found. And as businesses fled the center city, where was he? We can tell you he wasn’t rolling up his sleeves to keep them here.
Vice President JD Vance nodded at something resembling optimism when he spoke of his newborn son and his three other children, and the America he wants for them. But surely there’s a way to wax poetic about the American dream without poisoning it with xenophobia and disdain for political opponents. Vance said “our country was stolen from us and then handed out to strangers” while calling Democrats “the party of hatred.”
For those of us hoping for better politics and a more unified country, the bright spots were few and far between at Trump’s convention. So much time was spent denigrating the other side, and so little on a positive conservative vision for our nation, that we don’t know what those who attended thought they should do, other than despise their neighbors who see the world differently.
One brief moment did stand out as the type of political world we wish we lived in. It was the sort of moment the two political parties that control our democracy hate because they despise independent thought or any threat to total fealty.
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It was a 60-second recorded video of Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, introducing his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Republican Dave McCormick.
Fetterman has his shortcomings, but the breath of fresh air he represents is a willingness to get out of line with his own party.
In his trademark black hoodie, standing in front of a U.S. Steel mill, Fetterman told the crowd he is a common-sense Democrat.
“I’m always going to stand with America. I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life,” he said.
What he would do is work across the aisle to find common ground. And common ground for him and McCormick is making sure American manufacturing jobs remain strong.
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We might quibble with the underlying ideas about free trade and tariffs. But Fetterman was expressing a mode of politics that we should support. Blind loyalty is poison to our American individualism.
We are supposed to live in communities, not in some mindless collective.
The Democratic Party despises Fetterman because he refuses to get in line with a progressive vision that has embraced a dangerous antisemitism.
What if every American politician embraced that spirit of independence? We would be so much better off if Republicans whom Trump insulted one day, praised the next and belittled again actually had the spine to stand up for themselves and say, “You can’t speak to me that way. I’m an American, and I have self-respect.”
It’s a mystery to us why people like Sen. Ted Cruz or even someone as ethically weak as Attorney General Ken Paxton are willing to accept being personally insulted, or having their families insulted, by another man.
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It’s opportune that this convention coincided with the buildup to ceremonies marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of us can remember exactly where we were on that terrible day and the sorrow and unity we felt in the days after.
Harder to trace in our minds is how we got to where we are today, a nation so divided by our politics that we’ve come to view our own neighbors and fellow Americans as enemies.
The Sept. 11 attacks, painful as they were, showed the world the courage, sacrifice and goodness of ordinary Americans — of people like us, like our neighbors.
We are one nation. Can we remember that?
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Part of our series The American Middle, this editorial describes the failure of the GOP midterm convention to unite Americans around a positive vision.