Donald Trump wanted us to share in a collective delusion. On stage at the Republican convention in Dallas, Texas, looking out at a mass of empty seats, he was telling us that they were full. He could see the empty seats. We could see the empty seats. The television cameras could see the empty seats. But it did not matter. You’re meant to suspend your disbelief when Trump speaks.
This pre-midterm convention – the first of its kind – wasn’t really a convention. It was more like a WWE match where the villains – the stinking commies, the scary Islamists, the mad scientists experimenting on children’s bodies – were out there. Fans of the Trump franchise came to see their favourite characters perform in the flesh. Here was the scourge of Big Pharma, the perma-tanned hulk RFK Jr; there was the oblong-shaped treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. UFC fighters, opera singers, comedians and border guards. The arena looked like the inside of a huge zeppelin, bubbled off from the rest of the country. Gaudy yellow balloons hung from the ceiling like golden grapes. These Maga-hardcores didn’t mind the empty seats; they had paid their dues to this bizarre movement for long enough to deserve a real show.
And a show is what they got. On the first night, Trump spoke for nearly two hours. The journalists nodding off around me were the exception; everyone else was captivated. Shoutouts were given to the well-coiffed evangelical ladies from North Carolina, a feature of every Trump rally, as well as Mr Wall – a man dressed as a wall. Regulars, old timers, true believers – the few who still believed. One young man to my left – rotund, hairy-jawed – stuffed his face in a box of popcorn and then humped the rail in front of him with vigour as Trump promised to give his supporters $5,000 if the Republicans overcame all odds and held on to power in Congress in November. The man’s war cry was simple and to the point: “WE LOVE YOU TRUMP!” He shouted it over and over again. He didn’t care what Trump was actually saying. He didn’t care if Trump heard him. He was just thrilled to be able to declare his love for his hero.
The stadium was not packed with the Trump-curious. Curiosity is reserved for things you know little about. After a decade of Trump, we have gone far beyond curiosity. Americans now react to Trump with rage, bafflement, adoration – and, increasingly, boredom. There weren’t that many people in the zeppelin. And only 2.5 million people tuned in to Fox for the president’s speech, a pretty average night for the channel. Trump could not compete with the NFL game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots which was broadcast at the same time. For those for whom the act has grown tired, what is the point of watching Trump talk about himself in a safe space for two hours?
On the first day, around 45 speakers took to the stage to clip farm, aura farm and be seen. Don Jr, looking like a freshly printed Lego character, said the upcoming midterms were about common sense versus extremism. That may be so, but it was definitely not what this convention was about. Speakers wanted to boast about how fecund they were. Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick told us he has six daughters; every other speaker seemed to mention that they had more than four children. One of the scheduled “Everyday Americans” was an 82-year-old grandma who confessed, “I’m here because Trump wanted a grandma from Florida.” She spoke for all of us; we were only there because Trump wanted to bask in his fans’ love.
Later on, a UFC fighter who fought on the White House lawn in June gave a bizarrely earnest speech about how getting up after having your face smashed in was the American dream. Perhaps it is. In any case, the professional brawler got a higher place in the schedule than the treasury secretary. Given that Trump reportedly takes a personal interest in the speaking order, this tells you everything about what the president actually cares about. And that no longer seems to include winning the midterms.
Trump is now an electoral liability for the Republican Party. Look at the sad case of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. Paxton looks like a Family Guy character made real, with a droopy eyelid and a lackadaisical cadence. From his speech, I got the impression that his sole achievement was taking the Biden administration to court 107 times. None of that would matter if Trump didn’t love bullying him so much. “Some may not like the way he dresses. I don’t,” he told the arena as Paxton looked wanly on. “They may not like the way he talks. I can see that” – he kept going – “you may not like the way he looks…” On it went. Bear in mind that Paxton is running for Senate in November in Texas.
On day two, I headed straight for the Daily Wire bar just outside the main arena. The night before, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, who wears an eyepatch after he accidentally shot himself in the face, had been chatting in the corner. Today, two convention-goers with “FREEDOM” on their T-shirts called Zack and Cody were eating lava-coloured chicken wings. “It’s all entertainment,” Zack told me. “The $5,000 thing probably won’t happen. We’ve heard it all before.” But actual policies are not what attracts punters to these events. When Cody sees a “politician like RFK, I just go ‘WOW’. I’m a fanboy. Before Trump, I never felt like this about politics.” He didn’t want this joyride to end but knew that it would. “My dream would be eight years of Vance and then eight years of Rubio!”
I left the bar and walked out to hear the nasal voice of Senator Ted Cruz blaring out across the plaza. “We have a rendez-vous with history,” he said. “We must save America.” Cruz has let rumours about him running in 2028 swirl around Washington. One woman smoking a cigarette scrunched up her face at the massive screen showing Cruz’s head. “I don’t like him,” she said. “If someone cares more about another country, then that’s not OK with me.” For those unfamiliar with the implicit codes of the modern Maga party, the other country is always Israel. Nor was she entranced with Trump’s speech. “It was all the same, we’ve heard it all before – it’s entertaining, that’s all.”
I headed back into the arena for JD Vance’s speech. I thought I might miss it because the lift operator could not get the lift to follow his directions. We slowly trundled up and down a vertical line, picking up and dropping off at random. “Are you going down?” one besuited woman asked when the door opened. “No,” we replied. “Fantastic,” she said and joined us. A silent, wax-like Newt Gingrich appeared in the frame of the lift door on another floor. His staff asked if we were going up. “Yes,” we said. They did not get in, only for the door to mysteriously open a few minutes later on Newt’s Grinch-like face yet again. Where were we all going? What was the point of this convention?
I escaped the lift on to a high-level terrace in the arena and took my pick from the many empty seats to await the heir apparent. “JD! JD! JD! JD!” the arena rang. Vance spoke in an Obamian metre, a rite of passage for any aspirant president. He praised the nuclear family and America’s “sacred inheritance” with a conviction that almost felt improper given the whiz-bang craziness of the past two days. He barely mentioned his boss and went so far as to ask those who have turned on the administration over the war with Iran not to “throw the baby out with the bath water”. Vance was pleading with those whom Trump had alienated to stick with him ahead of 2028. The old-timers loved it. “It’s the Hillbilly Elegy,” said a man beside me who told me he’d been to 20 rallies. He’d not read Vance’s 2016 memoir, but his mother-in-law had and that was enough for him. He proudly showed me a text from a friend: “JD Vance will be president in 2028.”
Vance’s speech did sound positively Obamian compared to what came next. Of course, the president couldn’t let his VP have the final word. Trump returned to the stage and asked the crowd to stand up, raise their right hands and repeat after him: “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States,” he slurred, “that loves us so much he can’t even breathe.” His fans’ pledge to Trump only made explicit what had long been obvious. Trump’s “spiritual adviser”, Pastor Paula White-Cain, once said that saying no to Trump was the same as disobeying God himself; Trump shares a celestial interpretation of his own power. “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell,” Trump said on stage. I couldn’t decide whether it was more sinister or less so that Trump didn’t seem to be taking any of it that seriously.
Trump clearly demanded an unorthodox midterm convention because he knew he’d be less relevant at the proper one in 2028. He still has two and a half years left in office, but it felt like a last hurrah, a safe space for one last singalong. He was on his final tour, an aged rock star singing the greatest hits in a croaky, failing voice. But it was an act even he had grown bored with. “We’re gonna have a good time listening to music because I’m tired of politics now,” he said before swaying along on stage as the opera tenor Christopher Macchio belted out “Nessun Dorma”.
As the golden balloons fell, I took the stairs back down to the Daily Wire bar, where black-souled talking heads for right-wing television told me that they take their orders about what to say live on air directly from the Republican National Committee. These are political mercenaries, mouths for hire. “I try not to think about politics, unless I’m paid to think about it,” one told me. The chatter in Washington DC right now is about the number of staffers fleeing for the private sector. Everyone on the Trump train now thinks it’s a joke – the only question is whether they can make a quick buck while it lasts.
In search of moral redemption, I wandered down the road to a more “exclusive” party. Picture a bar in a mid-range, suburban country club taken over by B-list Maga influencers. Upstairs, one venture capitalist marvelled at the gigantic returns he was realising from agentic AI companies and then thanked me for replenishing America’s gene pool. It was unclear whether this was due to my presence in America or because he thought I had children. Either way, it was flirtation via eugenics. I quickly escaped downstairs past a Trump-loving billionaire and got talking to a man whose friends nicknamed him “Mossad” because they said he was Jewish. When “Mossad” was not complaining about English councils banning the St George’s flag, he was boasting about his $1,200 cowboy hat, which was made from the felt of a beaver.
This crowd better represents the future of the Republican Party than the aged fans looking to be entertained by the old man in the Oval. It had an irrepressible lust for transgression, something Vance is acutely aware of. Trump is no longer able to satisfy his supporters’ need for recognition – that spirited desire to be respected which the Greeks called thumos. He once had a unique ability to speak to those who felt shunted from the political discourse. It is what Vance is now trying to harness.
Back in Washington DC the next day, I went straight from the airport to the Maga redoubt, the restaurant Butterworth’s, for the launch of a new publication called Persona. Professor Francis Fukuyama was there speaking about his new memoir. Fukuyama thinks that this need for recognition is one of the causes of the Trumpian age. “It is the revolt of the Last Man that really drives a lot of extremist politics,” he told a room of intellectually curious politicos. The Last Man is the bored, stilted, ambitionless being we become in the embrace of technocratic consensus. Trump was the leader of that revolt for a decade. But he is no longer transgressive enough to lead a generation who increasingly view him as part of the establishment.
When Vance asked the audience in Dallas to stick with him, he wasn’t asking Mr Wall. He was asking the venture capitalists, the online right – all those who were now revolting against Trump – to elect him as their leader. What happens, however, when Vance can no longer appease them? Who will lead their revolt then?
[Further reading: Will AI kill us all?]
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This article appears in the 16 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Will AI kill us all?
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Subscribe here to commentKudos to Freddie Hayward for braving the MAGA pseudo-convention to report on it. The lava chicken sounds like some of the substandard offerings at the Great American State Fair last summer.
If the GOP does as poorly in the midterms as many pundits expect, it would be interesting to hear from some of the people he connected with at the Dallas convention after November 3rd. They may still be fuming about their idol being passed over two years in a row for the Nobel Peace Prize.