Last week’s Republican National Convention marked a further hardening of the fascist base of that Party around the leadership of Donald Trump and his openly violent white supremacy, hatred of women, and hatred of immigrants. The fact that Trump survived an assassination attempt two days before the convention was treated as a miracle delivered by “God” by the delegates who came to Milwaukee. As Bob Avakian has said, this assassination attempt is “a kind of social and political ‘earthquake’ that is bound to continue profoundly affecting the situation in the country (and indeed in the world as a whole) as things continue to unfold.” And some of those implications were on display last week.

On the heels of the assassination attempt, the people around Trump sensed a chance to spread the fascist movement to millions of new people. They switched out some of the original more blatantly fascist speeches of various speakers at the last minute to play down conflict and emphasize “national unity.” They aimed to draw more people under the fascist umbrella with a very temporary softening of the bloody-jawed Republican message. 

But the actual content of the convention still made clear—that “national unity” is to be on fascist terms. 

Here are five takeaways from the Convention and its actual content:

1. The religious lunacy at the core of Trump support got even more fanatical. There were statements that “God” spared Trump from the assassin’s bullet and that Trump himself was “providential”—that is, sent by God. These are the words of people ready to fight a holy war for their prophet…one to impose a nightmare “vision” of white supremacy, patriarchy and xenophobia (hatred of “foreigners”). Like all religious warriors they view any violence they do as commanded by “God,” and all attempts to hold them to justice as demonic.

2. A toxic mix of aggressive patriarchy and patriotism ran through the veins of the convention like political meth. The main introductions of Trump came from the wrestler Hulk Hogan and the mixed martial arts tycoon Dana White. Hogan said that “when Donald J. Trump becomes the President of the United States, all the real Americans are going to be nicknamed Trumpites because all the Trumpites are going to be running wild for four years. With the power of Donald J. Trump and all the Trumpites running wild, America is going to get back on track and like Donald J. Trump said, America is going to be great again.” Trump even entered the convention to James Brown’s stupid patriarchal anthem “It’s A Man’s World,” and the entire convention tried to put that in practice, from Tucker Carlson on down. The whole convention focused on Trump as a “tender, loving but tough patriarch who would fight for his country as he would fight for his family.”

The one true thing Trump said was this: “There is an INTERNATIONAL CRISIS the likes of which the world has seldom seen. War is now raging in Europe and the Middle East, a growing specter of conflict hangs over Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and all of Asia, and our planet is teetering on the edge of World War Three, and this will be a war like no other...” But after this veiled threat, he then immediately blustered that he could prevent wars with a mere phone-called threat to any leader. Here Trump does what seemed impossible: he takes the suicidal lunacy of the imperialist reliance on nuclear weapons which could end ALL life on the planet to an even more delusional and insane level. (See Bob Avakian’s article from 2020, “Patriarchy And Patriotism—Aggressive Male Supremacy and American Supremacy—The Danger and the Immediate Challenge”) 

3. The hatred and “scapegoating” of immigrants descended to new depths of viciousness. Both Ted Cruz and Trump himself whipped up the crowd by recounting several cases of “illegal” immigrants allegedly raping and murdering American women and claiming this happened “every damn day.” They conveniently left out these cases of mass slaughter of immigrants by white men and the “inconvenient truth” that in fact so-called “illegal” immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than native-born Americans. And they consciously ignored the actual prevalence of rape and murder of women on the dangerous routes of flight that U.S. policy has forced people onto. But it went even further. Trump and his minions painted immigrants as the culprits of everything bad from opiate addiction to housing prices. This is channeling Hitler’s blaming the Jewish people for everything wrong with Germany—which led to the Nazi program of industrial scale execution of 6 million Jews in a few short years.

4. The poisonous deceptions of Black people pimping for Trump became even more shameless. For the last 20-plus years, hip hop has been increasingly dominated—you could say suffocated—by what Bob Avakian has called the 3Ms and P—Me, Money, Misogyny, and Patriarchy. Trump has bribed some rappers with legal pardons. More than that, he has encouraged an identification with him as the biggest “gangsta” of all—and in the putrid hip-hop scene of today this has gotten over to a degree. This was put on display by Amber Rose and others.

At the same time, the fascists have brought forward a corps of religiously fanatic and violent Black Christian fascists, ranging from the ranting religiosity of Tim Scott to their candidate for governor (!) in North Carolina who said at a campaign event, “Some people need killing,” but who toned it down for the convention and the sake of the “new message of unity.”

5. Trump promised to destroy the environment at an even more suicidal pace than Biden. The attitude is best summed up by this clip, where Trump leads his faithful in a chant of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” —in other words, calling for greatly increasing the production of oil at a time when people are dying from heat in record numbers all over the world. Beyond that, you almost got a sense of people gleefully saying “let’s just plunder everything for our profit now and fuck the planet and future generations—God’ll take care of it!”

The Republican Convention draws a living picture of the truth that Bob Avakian outlines in the urgently importantly set of new social media messages that are featured in this issue: 

All this is an expression of the fact the way this country has been ruled for generations, by a basically unified ruling class, can no longer hold. The outcome of all this is very likely to be a radical change, of one kind or another. The crucial question, as I have said before, is whether this will be a radical reactionary change, further intensifying the already terrible oppression and horrific atrocities built into and continually committed by this system of capitalism-imperialism—or will it be a radical revolutionary change, opening the way to abolishing the basis for all this atrocity?