In the Blood

Trump and Vance make the case for Herrenvolk Democracy

Photo by Gage Skidmore

“That was some weird shit.” So said George W. Bush after watching Donald Trump’s inauguration speech in person in January 2017, and he might have said the same thing if he watched Trump give his 2024 convention speech in Milwaukee. 

For days leading up to Trump’s address, we were told by laughably credulous reporters that the failed assassination attempt last weekend had changed Trump, made him more thoughtful and reflective. We would see a new man on the stage, eager to reach out to the other side and bring America together in common purpose. 

But there was no new Trump, because there never is. The speech in its written form was what any sane person would have expected: some vague, nakedly insincere words about unity up top, followed by the red-meat speech Trump had always intended to give. But rather than anything resembling a traditional convention speech in form and structure, this was a Trump rally speech, familiar to anyone who has watched one on TV — and an unusually dull one at that. 

Here’s how it works: His aides load a prepared text in the teleprompter, and Trump uses it as a scaffold on which he hangs rambling digressions, familiar jokes, bizarre preoccupations, and commentary on the written words themselves (“So true, so true”). He speaks a few of the written lines, then wanders off like Mr. Magoo, then returns to speak a few more of the lines, and wanders off again. 

It’s hard to overstate how strange it was that Trump used this extraordinary opportunity, with tens of millions of Americans watching, to offer little more than the umpteenth version of the rally speech he has delivered hundreds of times. Did he say to himself, “Oh, I’ve gotta use the Hannibal Lecter joke, that one kills”? Well he did. We didn’t get the riff about sharks and electric boats, but he did describe a fictional event in which he supposedly visited a shipyard in Wisconsin and on the spot redesigned naval destroyers to make the bow more pointy:

And Wisconsin, Wisconsin, just like I gave you that massive ship contract, and you’re doing a very nice job, governor, right? Thank you, governor. And they’re doing a great job. In fact, I had a little design change and we gave them a tremendous for, essentially, what we used to call destroyers. These are now the most beautiful. They look like yachts.

I said, “We have to take the bow, and we have to make it a little nicer, and a little point at the top instead of a flat nose.” And the people at the shipyards said, “This guy sort of knows what he’s doing.” We had the most beautiful ships, right, governor? And everybody sitting over there? And it was a big contract that everybody wanted. I gave it to Wisconsin, but we’re going to have a lot of that built right here in the state of Wisconsin and all other states.

The “governor” Trump was talking to, who is supposedly “doing a very nice job” is Scott Walker, who hasn’t been governor of Wisconsin for five and a half years. 

But the beating heart of any Trump speech is the part about immigration, in which he tells lurid tales of beautiful white women murdered by immigrants and claims that we’re being invaded by a horde of monstrous aliens come to lay waste to everything and everyone you love. There may be no part that pumps up the crowd more, and convention organizers printed up signs reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” for the delegates to wave, lest anyone miss the message. But in the details, what Trump said Thursday was utterly familiar, which is why I want to shift to the part of his running mate J.D. Vance’s speech that addressed immigration in a way just as disturbing if far more eloquent. 

Blood and soil

That Donald Trump is a genuine bigot passed beyond argument long ago; his contempt for those who are unlike him in race, religion, and nationality is too obvious to deny. While I can’t say for sure, I doubt that J.D. Vance’s innermost feelings on the subject are quite so powerfully rancid. Nevertheless, Vance has been working hard, in his advocacy for dramatically reduced immigration, to offer a justification for the re-whitening of America that is more subtle than Trump’s grisly tales of rape and murder, but just as dangerous.

In his acceptance speech, Vance repeated something he has said in other speeches; he recently did it at the far-right National Conservatism conference. In a move unusual for a politician, he explicitly rejects the oft-repeated notion that America is a nation founded on ideals. No, he says, America is about blood and soil, the land and the people who have been here for generations. 

The fact that his wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants is a little inconvenient, so he says briefly that his in-laws are the good kind of immigrants (without elaborating on what makes them so), while emphasizing that “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” Things get real when he talks about his family’s cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky:

Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.

This is genuine herrenvolk democracy stuff. Screw your ideals and principles; the true America is in the blood of the people — or at least some people. 

This is why Donald Trump won 62 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2016 and 71 percent in 2020, despite having done precisely nothing in those four years to improve the quality of their lives. This is why he won nearly two-thirds of the votes of whites without college degrees in both elections. You may feel that the economy or the culture has left you behind, Trump and Vance tell them, but you are the realest and truest Americans. It’s in the blood. 

And the rest of you? We’ll allow you to be here, but only on “our terms.” For now.