Marble! Mirrors! ‘The Music of the Night’! Trump’s plan to Trumpify the GOP convention
In only his second full day as the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump managed to spice up the sleepiest stretch of any presidential election year — the long slog between the end of the primary battle and the beginning of the general election — by tweeting out a photo of himself eating a celebratory Cinco de Mayo meal:
Interpreting Trump’s lunchtime selfie as a tone-deaf attempt to connect with “Hispanics,” who have long shunned his candidacy, the Twittersphere instantaneously erupted — in laughter, in scorn, in existential disbelief.
“This cannot be real,” wrote James Poniewozik, a television critic for the New York Times. “This cannot be real. This election isn’t happening.”
“A taco bowl is just a taco with a big, beautiful wall around it,” the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty explained.
“Can’t wait to see how he handles Yom Kippur,” added David Freedlander of the Daily Beast.
If Trump can melt America’s political media with a single tweet about a glorified Taco Bell Fiesta Taco Salad, just imagine what he’ll do when he gets his short-fingered mitts on an entire Republican National Convention.
Fortunately, we won’t have to rely on our imaginations much longer.
In a phone interview Wednesday with The New York Times, Trump revealed that he is already scheming about how to make this summer’s GOP convention classier and more tremendous than the “extraordinarily boring” conventions that preceded it.
“The site has been chosen and the arena is fine, but I’d want to have — you know, the last Republican convention was extraordinarily boring,” Trump said. “And we’re going to come up with some things that will make it interesting and informative, but also smart and different.”
(Previously, the tinsel-haired mogul told CNN “it’s very important to put some showbiz into a convention, otherwise people are going to fall asleep.”)
Trump added that he would look to organizations like IMG, a global talent management company, to help with the production.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that he would select his running mate before the convention. The following day — perhaps sensing that nothing could imbue Cleveland with as much suspense as a VP unveiling — Trump pushed back his deadline.
“I will announce it at the convention,” he told the Associated Press in an interview. “A lot of people are interested.“
The shift is a clear sign that Trump is thinking about how to maximize the drama in Cleveland — and attract as many viewers as possible.
According to Republican National Convention Communications Director Kirsten Kukowski, the process of transferring control to the Trump campaign is already underway.
“We’ve been in Cleveland for almost a year and a half now and have divisions taking care of delegations, guests, housing, events, communications and digital planning, media operations, all operations, production, etc.,” Kukowski tells Unconventional. “Now we will start working with the Trump campaign to lay out all of the planning we’ve been doing and move forward together over the next 75 days.”
Trump has tasked one of his top aides, Michael Glassner, with overseeing convention planning. Glassner and other members of Trump’s team plan to visit Cleveland next week to start hammering out the details.
What exactly those details will be is anyone’s guess at this point. Trump’s past, predilections, and present-day connections offer some clues.
The Donald has a long history in “showbiz,” as he calls it, and in recent decades, he has proven to be a more successful promoter and entertainer than real estate developer.
Trump’s first foray into the professional world, as a 23-year-old Wharton grad, was producing a failed musical on Broadway; he tried again and again to return to Broadway in the four decades that followed. He has been a big supporter of — and participant in — World Wrestling Entertainment since the late 1980s; he once bodyslammed WWE owner Vince McMahon. As his real estate business faltered in the 1990s, he began to buy up beauty pageants; he has owned or co-owned Miss U.S.A., Miss Teen U.S.A., and Miss Universe, and he once had his sights set on the Miss World competition as well.
And then there’s Trump’s greatest entertainment coup: “The Apprentice,” a reality show in which he starred for 14 seasons as a pouting, squinting, tanned titan of industry who liked to say, “You’re fired.”
Or at least “The Apprentice” was his greatest entertainment coup. Then came his current presidential bid. “Over the course of Trump’s campaign,” estimated The New York Times, “he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history.”
In other words, the guy knows how to get good ratings.
It’s a fixation that should help Trump cook up a convention that will, at the very least, keep viewers awake. In 2012, Mitt Romney took the baton a bit earlier in the convention-planning process, around the middle of April, and wound up, over the course of four days — each with a milquetoast “theme” such as “We Can Do Better” and “We Believe in America” — parading a dutiful stream of typical GOP politicians across the stage in Tampa, Fla. Ten of the 17 Republicans who would go on to run for their party’s 2016 presidential nomination, including John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio, spoke to the delegates that year. Former GOP nominee John McCain addressed the attendees as well. Former Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush were honored with a gauzy video tribute.
It’s safe to say that fewer establishment politicians will be appearing at the podium Cleveland. In part that’s because of Trump’s antiestablishment, pro-pizzazz bias. But mostly it’s because fewer establishment Republicans will be coming to Cleveland. Romney’s out. So is McCain. So are the Bushes. And even the pols who show up may be reluctant to take the stage with Trump.
From Trump’s perspective, this is probably more of a feature than a bug; it would free up more space in the schedule for “showbiz” types. Trump has no shortage of celebrity friends and endorsers to choose from. Kirstie Alley could reach out to female voters. Former Ultimate Fighting Champion Tito Ortiz could reach to Latinos. Dennis Rodman could reach out to African-Americans. Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme could curry favor with the all-important 1980s action-hero demographic, while Gary Busey could do the same for voters who like their reality TV stars to be less sane than Trump. Hulk Hogan, Mike Ditka, Tila Tequila, Scott Baio and Jon Voight — surely Trump could find some use for them as well.
Trump is also likely to pay close attention to the convention’s soundtrack. He obsessively curates the classic rock, opera, musical theater and adult contemporary music that scores his rallies — The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” “The Music of the Night” from “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Nessun Dorma,” sung by Luciano Pavarotti — and will almost certainly do the same in Cleveland, eschewing the standard, consultant-driven political choices (U2, contemporary country) in favor of songs he actually likes. And though Trump never seems to play anything by his musical endorsers — Loretta Lynn, Ted Nugent, Kid Rock and Wayne Newton, among others — there’s no reason he couldn’t book a few of them for the convention. (On the other hand, rapper Azealia Banks — who endorsed Trump while simultaneously describing him as an “evil” “piece of s***” — probably won’t receive an invitation.)
We can also expect an unusual level of attention to visual detail from Trump. Remember Barack Obama’s much-derided Greek temple stage set from the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver? If past is prelude, The Donald’s own rostrum ought to make Obama’s Doric columns look modest in comparison. When he was constructing Trump Tower in New York, Trump himself selected an unusual reddish Breccia Pernice marble as the building’s signature element; his homes and apartments are full of crystal chandeliers, bronze statues of Greek gods and goddesses, floor-to-ceiling mirrors and 24-karat-gold-plated everything. It seems unlikely that Trump will be able to resist exporting at least some of his gilded “L’etat, c’est moi” aesthetic to Ohio.
Beyond that, who knows? It remains to be seen, for instance, whether Trump can top the most entertaining moment of the 2012 Republican convention: Clint Eastwood conversing with an empty chair.
Eastwood has also endorsed Trump, so he could surprise and delight the delegates by reprising his role in Cleveland. Or Trump could simply ask another famous supporter, legendary Indiana University basketball Bobby Knight, to throw the chair across the stage instead.
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