Cleveland
At a certain point during Donald Trump’s address to the Republican National Convention Thursday night—somewhere in between his harangue against trade deals and his praise of miners and steelworkers—a trio of Wyoming delegates sat, slightly slumped, in their seats on the convention floor. They periodically applauded, following the lead of the crowd, but by this point were scrolling through their phones.
“Twitter says he’s got 25 percent left to go,” said one delegate.
“Twenty-five minutes!?” replied another, mishearing her friend as Trump said something about renegotiating NAFTA. “How does Twitter know that?”
The omniscience of Twitter is a mystery. So was the reason why the Republican nominee for president was still talking, droning on long past primetime and long past my own ability to watch from the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena (I headed back to my seat while Trump was promising to fix the TSA). The capstone event of the strangest week in politics dragged on, with seemingly no end in sight. The filing out of the Trump family from their seats in order to join the patriarch on stage was a welcome signal the end was near. I should have told the Wyoming delegation.
Even though they were, the Republican delegates shouldn’t have been bored. They were a pro-Trump crowd, as evidenced by the hall’s loud booing for Wednesday night’s address by Ted “Vote Your Conscience” Cruz. The chatter of a walk-out during Trump’s speech by anti-Trump delegates was just that—chatter. Kendal Unruh, the Colorado delegate and leader of the failed effort to unbind delegates, had stuck around for the final night. But most of her compatriots, she told me, had left town earlier in the week or had had their credentials revoked by their delegate chairs. “For being troublemakers,” said Unruh, who had a ribbon reading “troublemaker” hanging from her own credentials.
Why was Unruh still here? “Because I don’t want to forget it,” she said as the convention waited for Ivanka Trump to take the stage. Perhaps Unruh felt differently by the end of the night.
Trump began the speech with plenty of goodwill. Ivanka had delivered a well-executed introduction for her father, which built up the excitement for his arrival on the dais. When it was clear he was about to emerge, an array of smartphones were thrust into the air to capture the historic moment.
Trump’s delivery was plodding, and he hewed more closely to the script than normal for him, but the audience of delegates remained rapt for the first several minutes. It was an interruption from, of all people, the anti-war Code Pink agitator Medea Benjamin from the press gallery that did it. Trump paused in his speech as Benjamin shouted—about building bridges, not walls—before security came to take her away. Those of us in the arena closest to Benjamin decided watching her struggle to keep her banner up was more interesting than Trump’s continuing his address. After that, at least on our side of the hall, he never got back our full attention.
For the rest of the speech, the delegates in my view looked down at their phones or chatted among themselves, jumping up intermittently to clap and cheer at a Trump applause line. As I watched them listen passively to the man they had just selected to be the nominee of the party of Lincoln, it struck me they might as well have been watching the proceedings passively on the couch, in the comfort of their own homes—probably on cable news.
