The Battle for the Future of the GOP Is No Contest

Annie Lowrey: The party of no content

But if Scott’s hope comes from his family’s story, many in his party have put their faith in a different family. An hour before Scott took the podium, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump campaign’s finance chair and the eldest Trump son’s partner, was shown in front of those same American flags, shaking her head. “Just take a look at California: It is a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation, and immaculate environment. And the Democrats turned it into a land of discarded needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes,” Guilfoyle said. She raised her fists to the sky and her voice to a yell as she proclaimed that the only way to avoid this dystopian hellscape spreading across the country was four more years of a Trump administration. “The best is yet to come!”

Thirty-five minutes later, Guilfoyle’s boyfriend, Donald Trump Jr., bounded onto the stage. He approached the lectern and spoke with his hands, punctuating sentences by rocking side to side. “Joe Biden and the radical left are now coming for our freedom of speech,” he said. “They want to bully us into submission. If they get their way, it will no longer be the silent majority. It will be the silenced majority.”

Scott and Haley spoke late in the night, during the hour that broadcast networks aired the convention, which suggests that the event’s organizers wanted a broad universe of potential voters to hear the two speakers. But in tone and content, both spoke to the fringes of the president’s coalition—the Republicans who need to be persuaded to hold their nose and vote for Trump, the Republicans and independents who might not vote for him at all. Haley and Scott may be effective messengers, and they might help Trump win. They’re not necessarily the future of his party, though.

Read: Republicans’ ‘canary in the coal mine’

Many Republicans like Scott and Haley, traditional politicians who focused on expanding opportunity, lowering taxes, and bringing the country together, ran against Trump in 2016. They all lost. And the Republican base doesn’t even prefer their less combative political style within the Trump family. In public appearances and carefully managed relationships with the media, Ivanka Trump has long tried to soften the president’s most inflammatory rhetoric; to distance herself from his most unpopular policies. But as my colleague McKay Coppins has written, Don Jr., who imitates the president’s language and manner, has become his father’s “most skilled warm-up act” and most natural political successor. Way-too-early polls of the 2024 Republican primary tend to show Don Jr. well ahead of Ivanka in the race for the nomination.

Last night, Don Jr. pinched his index finger and his thumb together as he steered into fear. “Anarchists have been flooding our streets and Democrat mayors are ordering the police to stand down. Small businesses across America, many of them minority-owned, are being torched by mobs,” he warned. But, he told viewers, it didn’t have to be that way. “It starts by rejecting radicals who want to drag us into the dark and embracing the man who represents a bright and beautiful future for all.” The embrace of Trump is a complete and lasting one—and no one gives tighter hugs than family.

Adam Harris is a staff writer at The Atlantic.