His defining rival may still be Joe Biden, Obama\u2019s vice president, who ousted Trump from the White House in 2020, a loss so shocking to the president and his allies that they tried, and failed, to overturn it. Biden remains the only candidate of either party ever to beat Trump in a campaign. And even as Trump returned to power in 2024, chasing Biden from his re-election bid after a disastrous debate and then defeating Vice President Kamala Harris that fall, he never got the chance to defeat the man who had defeated him.<\/p>\n
The party Biden led has spent the two years since asking how it lost to Trump again, after all it had done to center its strategy on running against him.<\/p>\n
\u201cLooking back in the history books, I hope that Trump is seen as one of the most divisive presidents our nation has ever seen, and that he should have never been re-elected in 2024,\u201d said Jane Kleeb, a national Democratic party leader from Nebraska. \u201cAnd obviously as Democrats, we have a responsibility that we own of allowing him to be re-elected, that we lost touch with so many voters that they lost faith in us as a party that they thought that he was the only hope to put more money in their pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Absent a main opponent this November, Republicans have gone looking for one. In this, they\u2019ve taken two tacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
First, they\u2019ve reached back to the last one. \u201cTo the American people, look: I know many of you are still struggling thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats,\u201d North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, the leader of the House Republican campaign arm, told the crowd. Visible during the convention were signs saying \u201cBiden & Harris Broke It \u2014 Help Is On The Way.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s precisely the absence of Biden or any single defining leader that has left Democrats riven and opened room for a surge of democratic socialism among those who concluded that the party\u2019s old blend of center-left and progressive ideas was no match for Trump. That, in turn, has given Republicans a foil, if not a lone foe \u2014 one they can describe as aberrant \u2014 and license to cast Trump as the only route to a prosperity they say is otherwise out of reach.<\/p>\n
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\u201cTo the American people listening, I say: If all you want out of life is what little these communists are offering, I guess that\u2019s your right,\u201d House GOP Majority Whip Tom Emmer told the audience in Texas. \u201cOr you can join Donald J. Trump and Republicans, and have the opportunity to realize your greatest dreams, to achieve your greatest potential, to live free in the greatest country the world has ever known.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump used his own turn onstage to ask the country to defy the gravity of a midterm year, when the president\u2019s party is usually rebuked, and keep siding with him instead. On the convention\u2019s first day, he promised a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen if Republicans hold both chambers of Congress \u2014 a proposal with neither a plan to implement it nor accounting for how it would be paid for, let alone the ethical concerns it raises.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know what happens if you don\u2019t vote? You go to hell,\u201d Trump said on the second night of the convention, earning laughter from the arena. \u201cYou know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don\u2019t want that to happen to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among his supporters, some come for the policy, and some for the bluster. The convention had its share of attendees in MAGA-coded red, white and blue, attracting the attention of cameras. It also had people who back him for the plainer reason that they believe he has made their lives better.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is probably a once-in-a-generation type of person. Love him or hate him, I love him, but you know the other side doesn\u2019t,\u201d said Laura McCravy Hunter, a South Carolina Republican. \u201cIt is impossible to say that he has not had an extreme impact on the party.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not every GOP candidate who will decide control of Congress came to Dallas. Some stayed home to keep the focus local, aware that Trump drives Republican passion but draws out opposing voters, too.<\/p>\n
Stewart Rhodes, the Texas man whose sentence for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was commuted almost as soon as Trump returned<\/a> to office, made his way around the arena one evening this week. Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, was found guilty of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison before the president\u2019s wide-ranging clemency for those convicted over that day.<\/p>\n Almost all the Republicans in Congress who tried to hold Trump accountable for the stolen-election falsehoods that led to the riot have since left office or lost.<\/p>\n Yet hours before Trump spoke in Dallas, there Rhodes was \u2014 a reminder of how the president has wielded his power, as Republicans ask voters to stick with them and the man they follow.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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