In Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016, Donald Trump welcomed the Republican presidential nominee as the leader of a successful political uprising against party elites. Far-right extremists the party had once tried to ostracize came to the convention for the first time.
Along with figures from the far-right media such as Alex Jones, VDare’s Peter Brimelowand Milo Yiannopoulos, white nationalist Richard Spencer was a prominent attendee that year, telling the Washington Post that he and other extremists had enjoyed “one big, bourbon-fueled party” at unofficial locations around the convention center.
Last week, at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, there was no parallel party circuit for the jubilant far-right movement. Instead, extremists dominated the main stage, according to some observers, as well as nearby venues where powerful nonprofits were laying out the agendas they were preparing to prop up a future Trump administration. Far-right rhetoric has moved from the sidelines to the main stage, and from obscure activists to top party figures.
Joe Lowndes, a professor of political science at Hunter College and author of several books on the American political right, said: “In 2016 [Maga] was an effective movement that was rebellious and militant… Now they have the space to develop new forms of far-right politics.”
It starts with the ticket itself.
Related: Conspicuously absent from the Republican convention was any mention of abortion
J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, may have dialed back his acceptance speech somewhat, in keeping with Trump’s desire to shift to a message of national unity. In the past, however, Vance has expressed a desire to see abortion banned nationwide, and he has opposed exceptions for rape or incest. In February, he told an interviewer that if he had been vice president in 2020, unlike Mike Pence, he would have overturned the results of the 2020 election.
In 2022, Vance publicly raised money for the Jan. 6 suspects, while falsely claiming that many were being held without charges. Last December, he demanded that the Justice Department investigate a columnist for criticizing Trump. Earlier, he gave a speech praising Alex Jones as a truth-teller and claiming that “the devil is real.”
Other elected officials speaking this week have expressed similarly extreme views in the past.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s main-stage speech at the party’s convention on Monday night was filled with lies and distortions about immigrants and LGBTQ+ activists, false accusations about “globalists,” and a gratuitous assertion that “there are only two genders and we are created in God’s image.”
In the past, she has espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory (which Greene has since rejected), claimed that the Parkland mass shooting and earlier shootings in Las Vegas and Sandy Hook were staged, and alleged that California utility PG&E colluded with the Rothschild Jewish banking family to start wildfires with lasers in 2018.
Trump has been given the freedom by party elites and voters to devise authoritarian policies that will work
Joe Lowndes, professor of political science
Greene’s attempts to promulgate conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic clichés are well-known, but other speakers with similar views have only recently gained national prominence.
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, now the Republican candidate for governor in the state, also spoke onstage at the convention Monday night. Just weeks earlier, Robinson told congregants at a church in the town of White Lake that “some people need to be killed,” apparently referring to perceived political opponents, such as those who espouse “socialism and communism.”
Robinson, who is African-American, has a long history of social media posts targeting LGBTQ+ people, Jews and black people. Those posts have included claims about links between homosexuality and pedophilia, that black Democrats were “slaves” and that the Black Panther comic book character was “created by an agnostic Jew” and that the film based on the comic book was “made to rip off the shekels” from black people.
On Monday, the night Robinson appeared, the convention stage was the stage for a slate of speakers of color, which may not be representative of the current Republican coalition, but Lowndes said it was a reflection of Trump’s ambitions to expand it.
“In the broadest sense, they’re trying to build a multiracial far-right coalition,” he said. Trump has marginally increased his support in communities of color and “he’s responding and testing his current audience by putting these speakers in front of them.”
The Guardian reported this week that one such speaker, California lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, was greeted with a flood of hateful tweets from Trump’s far-right supporters after he delivered a blessing with a Sikh prayer that same evening.
In addition to elected officials, other speakers at the conference also made a major contribution to the normalization of extremists and their ideals in conservative circles.
Charlie Kirk spoke Monday night. His Turning Point Action Pac event last month featured the likes of Candace Owens, the right-wing commentator with a growing history of anti-Semitic remarks; the Pizzagate conspiracy theory peddler Jack Posobiec, who has extensive ties to extremists; and Alex Jones.
Outside the main stage, extremism is just as evident at the party’s grassroots level.
The chair of the convention’s Arizona delegation, Shelby Busch, said in March of a Maricopa County election official, also a Republican, that if he “walked into this room, I would lynch him.” The comments, reported last month, were recorded during a public meeting.
Busch is a long-time denier of the 2020 election results and co-founded the We the People AZ Alliance Pac, which has raised nearly $1 million since its founding in 2020 from donors including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and organizations tied to Lindell and fellow Trump associate Michael Flynn, according to state records.
Just a stone’s throw from the conference, the Heritage Foundation, one of the wealthiest and most influential conservative nonprofits, reiterated its sweeping Project 2025 plan to reshape the U.S. government in the image of the radical right, laid out in a 922-page document first published in April.
Among other things, the 922-page document proposes that the new administration expand the president’s executive authority over the government bureaucracy. In this regard, it recommends a “massive expansion” of political appointments to agencies including the Justice Department and Homeland Security, which would give the president more direct control over the Justice Department’s criminal investigations.
The plan would also allow political appointees to distribute funds and establish a White House investigation into military promotions to filter out officers overly concerned about the climate crisis or “manufactured extremism,” a term the document uses to imply that domestic extremism in military ranks is a media fiction.
Discussing the plan earlier this month, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said a “second American Revolution” was underway, adding that it would be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Trump has sought to distance himself from the document in a bid to defuse criticism of his ongoing extremist ties. His top adviser Chris LaCivita described the document and Heritage as a “sore mess” on Thursday.
JD Vance, however, has long been a Heritage ally, and the organization is a cornerstone of what Politico calls the “alternative conservative establishment” he’s building in Washington to establish the so-called new right — which wants to take Trump’s populism “in an even more radical direction” — as the dominant force in conservative politics.
The tangle of competing authoritarian ideas may not be coherent, but according to Lowndes, perhaps that is the point.
“The Heritage document itself is incoherent, but in some ways it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Assaults on liberal democracy have come from all sides since 2016. Now Trump has been given license by party elites and voters to dream up authoritarian policies that will work.”
