Trump and the perils of Cleveland

The press likes to write about campaigns as a series of turning points that determine the final outcome on Election Day. Yet, in reality, campaign gaffes, awkward interviews and sundry other gotcha moments that flare from time to time don’t in the main have much impact on the final vote.

This July’s GOP convention in Cleveland may be the exception to that pattern, however. Assuming Donald Trump is within striking distance of Hillary Clinton in the polls, this convention may go far to determine how united the Republican Party actually is behind Trump, and whether or not Trump can ultimately shed the he-is-an-unhinged-racist-and-too-crazy-to-be-president narrative that is currently taking a firm (and legitimate) grip on American politics.

It has gotten so bad for Trump that Mark Kirk, a vulnerable Republican senator from Illinois — Trump overwhelmingly carried the state in its primary — rescinded his endorsement of Trump last week. Politically more damaging to Trump, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan blasted Trump’s comments labeling the Hoosier judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit as a biased “Mexican” as “racist.” And Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief executive and high-profile Republican donor Meg Whitman, who recently likened Trump to Hitler and Mussolini, indicated that she may very well vote for Clinton.

The rhetoric from the Quicken Loans Arena stage is going to be minutely picked over and carry more impact politically than is typically the case; in recent decades, conventions have mostly been tightly scripted affairs in which every word uttered by a speaker is vetted, edited and approved by the campaign’s loyalists. There hasn’t been much drama. But Trump is entering an event that will be strewn with more than the typical share of political landmines. There are opportunities for the bombastic Manhattan mogul, to be sure, but also numerous perils in his path.

Trump bills himself as the P.T. Barnum of our time. The master showman has criticized past GOP conventions as “boring” and has vowed to put his own must-watch stamp on this summer’s proceedings. Can he pull off such a show, and will the over-the-top theatrics advance or undercut his public standing? More importantly, Trump will be searching for a way to demonstrate that the party that he now leads is actually united behind him and following him into battle. His acceptance speech (Will he dwell on “building the wall” and his proposed Muslim ban, or will he deliver anodyne, poll-tested sound bites desired by Republican leaders not named Trump?) will draw more than the usual share of coverage for the nominee.

Then there will be those conspicuous absences at Quicken Loans Arena. Both former President Bushes and Mitt Romney have already declined to attend Trump’s gala, and Sen. Marco Rubio recently vowed to refuse to endorse Trump from the stage. These, too, are storylines that Trump’s campaign should be concerned about. Will Trump manage to persuade vulnerable Republican senators to grace the stage, such as Ohio’s Rob Portman so that he can bask in the acclaim of a convention held in his home state?

Ryan, as convention chair, will be expected to deliver a strong endorsement. But how is he going to be able to do so credibly after having essentially denounced Trump’s rhetoric as racist? As the “I’m with racist” New York Daily News cover (subsequently pulled and replaced by one with Hillary Clinton) underscored, getting out from under the impression that the highest-ranking elected Republican is championing Trump after calling his comments racist isn’t going to be so easy.

Of course, contentious conventions are not necessarily the death knell for presidential campaigns. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower won the nomination after a contested convention, and he went on to defeat Adlai Stevenson in November. Yet the divisions on display during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nominating convention, Gerald Ford’s 1976 convention and George H.W. Bush’s 1992 convention call to mind how swiftly conventions can unravel before the eyes of millions of viewers.

During the 1964 brawl at San Francisco’s Cow Palace — one historian called it the “ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912” — moderate Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller urged the delegates to put a plank in the party platform that decried extremism, and was greeted with a chorus of toy trumpets, horns, cowbells and lusty boos from the pro-Goldwater delegates. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, having lost his surprisingly strong challenge to incumbent Ford in a bitterly divisive nominating contest, was called up to the stage by Ford and delivered an eloquent defense of the idea of freedom that was also noticeably lacking in a robust endorsement of the president himself.

In 1992, columnist Pat Buchanan, who had mounted his own bruising primary challenge to incumbent President George H.W. Bush from the right, endorsed Bush. But, in doing so from the convention stage, he also declared a “cultural war … for the soul of America,” ridiculing same-sex marriage and a proposal to assign women to combat Army roles, while endorsing prayer in public schools and depicting “Clinton & Clinton” as un-American. (His speech also cut into and upstaged Reagan’s primetime speaking slot.)

Those convention moments offer living, cautionary reminders that Trump’s campaign heads into Cleveland in a few short weeks with what may be a last-ditch chance to limit some of the internecine warfare roiling his party. Those past convention moments — departures from the candidate’s preferred official script — did more to harm their nominees’ fall chances than actually advance their party’s general-election prospects. In all three examples, Republicans lost the White House.

Trump’s greatest challenge isn’t to entertain a big television audience hoping to watch another version of reality TV. Rather, the biggest danger to his candidacy is that Republican officials, his erstwhile supporters, ostensibly speaking on his behalf, will opt not to advance his message and agenda but rather to position themselves to thrive in a still-as-yet-undetermined Republican future. Whether or not Trump can diminish the tension pitting Republicans’ leaders own political interests and calculations against Trump’s racially charged and nationalistic agenda may help shape the party’s image this fall — and long after Trump has departed the stage.

Matthew Dallek, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, is the author of “Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security.”