The Midweek Update - Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and a Republic Reborn - July 17, 2024

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Directly from Milwaukee, Susan Kokinda reports on the ineffable transformation of the Republican Party taking place. This is a change which most delegates themselves don't even understand, but it is a change which has the potential to create our Republic and its economy anew.

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2024 GOP Platform

Transcript: The Midweek Update - Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and a Republic Reborn - July 17, 2024

Susan Kokinda: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. This is Susan Kokinda and today is July 17th and here's your midweek update broadcasting this week from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I'm attending the Republican Party Convention as a Trump delegate from the Detroit area. The first thing I want to report is the tenor of the convention.

It can be summed up simply by Donald Trump's words in Butler, Pennsylvania, Fight, fight, fight. The Michigan delegation was right below the area where President Trump, his family, and J. D. Vance were sitting. And the sense of resolution, determination, and really a sublime commitment to this republic and to the future was palpable.

Susan Kokinda: As for the attempted assassination [00:01:00] itself, Barbara Boyd has already written and spoken extensively about this on our website. And we will continue to bring 50 years of counterintelligence experience to bear as the investigations unfold. On one level, delegates and speakers have reflected that this is a historic turning point and this convention, Trump's presidential campaign and his future presidency mean that this is a transformative moment.

There is also an at least implicit recognition that a new Republican party is being born, a party, which as the dedication of the platform, declares is to the forgotten men and women of America. And the first evening presented the face of that new party. Black Republican members of Congress evoke the party of [00:02:00] Lincoln.

Trade unionists address the producer spirit of America. Other minority communities were also represented. And of course, Donald Trump's choice of J. D. Vance embodies this new Republican party. And it's not surprising. That there was a behind the scenes knife fight right up to the end on the vice presidential choice with the old guard trying to hang on to the ability to, if not today, At least someday drag the party backward.

But on a deeper level, people do know that the existence of the Republic is at stake and they know that this is a fight of good versus evil. Now, the evil has been expressed clearly for all to see. From the near assassination of Donald Trump to the death of the spectator, to the average Americans who spoke from the podium [00:03:00] about the loss of loved ones to fentanyl, or murdered by illegal immigrants.

Last night, a Black mother spoke of the loss of her Army veteran son, who had survived Afghanistan only to be killed on the streets of New York. Her justified fury at the Democratic policies and politicians responsible, and her passionate support for Donald Trump shook the arena.

Others spoke of the less tangible, but no less real evil. of the destruction of the American dream. And there have been very inspiring invocations of the antidote to that, namely the reestablishment of the principles of our republic. Speaker after speaker spoke of our dedication, our founding documents dedication, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, the question of defeating [00:04:00] evil with good reminded me of a key section of Plato's Republic. Were after exploring various hypotheses of how to create a republic, Socrates suddenly stops the discussion and says, We've forgotten something extremely important, in this whole exploration, which is, what is the purpose of government?

And he asserts that it is to do good. But then he asked the question, what is the good? And Socrates says, this is a pitch too high for our wings. In other words, as mortals, we will not know the good completely, but we can participate in a search for the good by using our minds and our reason to discover less imperfectly, how God's universe works and how to therefore organize a government, in coherence with that.

Now, I bring that up because I think that is the [00:05:00] task that will come out of this convention and that is where we here at Promethean PAC will play an indispensable role because while the historic nature of this convention is felt by everyone, the actual content of the change underway is understood by only a few.

Donald Trump and those of his closest advisors who drafted the brilliant platform, which was adopted on Monday, are of course, among those. They know that they are creating a completely new Republican party. A party of producers, of creators, and innovators who can reclaim this nation from the grip of empire and from the central banks and the financial parasites that they serve.

The platform, as I discussed last week, is a powerful composition, that reasserts the [00:06:00] basic direction of our American system. But I can tell you that almost no one, including members of the platform committee itself, with whom I've had several conversations, actually have a clue about what it is that was passed.

Michigan GOP Chairman Pete Hoekstra was the person who put forward the motion on the floor of the convention for adoption of the platform. And he motivated it by comparing the work he had done with Newt Gingrich in composing the Contract for America, which was a manifesto on how to govern a shrinking industrial economy, on behalf of the Fed and Wall Street and the growing class of financial parasites, he compared that to this platform.

In reality, this platform is the complete obliteration of everything that that contract, we used to call it the contract on America, stood for. Now, the [00:07:00] process of producing the platform itself left a lot of long time conservative activists upset.

And in fact, the vote on the platform on Monday was the only vote where there was a significant, although obviously a minority, Number of nays. But the reality is Donald Trump wrote this platform and it was delivered to the platform committee as a whole. And at this moment in history, it had to be that way.

Donald Trump has a vision for a thorough transformation of this nation and of the party into something new for our time that is not something that can be cobbled together by different groups, lobbying for this position or that, however noble those issues may be. At a moment like this, an inspired leader has to take the reins and lead in a completely new direction, [00:08:00] and that is what is happening.

The other aspect, which is certainly not yet understood by enough of the base, is what Donald Trump is doing with the trade union movement. Now, Bobby Bartels, who is an officer in a New York steam fitters local, brought down the house with a ringing endorsement of Donald Trump. Sean O'Brien, the head of the Teamsters, closed the convention with Trump standing in the balcony during O'Brien's speech.

But when O'Brien spoke, there was a lot more tension in the room. Because he didn't take any prisoners. He took no quarters in terms of his defense of the necessity of actually having a trade union movement that can protect, that can fight for, the needs of workers. And he made a very interesting point.

He said the Chamber of Commerce is like a trade union, it's like a union for the corporate bosses. And he went after the big globalist [00:09:00] conglomerates like Amazon and others. But again, he gave no quarter on the question of the necessity for trade unions. And you could feel tension in the room.

There, people were happy that he was there and he was speaking, but you didn't get the same kind of eruption that Bartels got. And of course the Teamsters have not endorsed Trump, probably won't endorse anybody. But O'Brien's speech was extremely important, and obviously Donald Trump gets it. He gets that this is the party of Abraham Lincoln, which is being reborn.

A party of workers, which the platform, again, dedicates it to. Now, there are other paradoxes arising as well, which are shaking up broader layers. I was interviewed twice, once before the convention, and once on the floor of the convention. I was part of a panel of delegates for a PBS discussion [00:10:00] which took place on Saturday afternoon, which topic was, how do we solve the divisiveness in the country?

And PBS is now rethinking all of its programming in the wake of the assassination attempt, so it's not at all clear that it'll be aired. But what was interesting is that what kept coming up with the other delegates besides myself in the discussion was the connection that their families had to John F. Kennedy.

And I made the point when the moderator, Judy Woodruff, asked, well, what is it going to take to bring the country together to end the divisiveness? I said, we have to have a mission for the country. It's not a question of, we need more civil discourse. There's nothing wrong with that, but we need a mission for the country.

And I said, did you notice how many people brought up John Kennedy? This was the last time we actually had a mission for the country. [00:11:00] And I stress that the platform rededicates this nation to that kind of mission for the future, for the nation. And. It was very clear that this, this was not the kind of response that the producers at PBS actually expected from a bunch of Republican delegates.

But then again, on the floor, I was interviewed by the New York Times. They were looking for someone from a swing state, and I was standing under the Michigan sign, and they wanted to know how J. D. Vance will play in a swing state like Michigan. And they just could not wrap their minds around how black workers will relate to JD Vance, a white Republican.

And again, I brought up this question of a different identity for people, that when you have a producer's identity, you relate differently to the entire [00:12:00] political process. And again, I brought up the arc from Kennedy to Trump, and they really, really could not wrap their minds around the fact that there was a connection from John Kennedy to Donald Trump in terms of this question of a mission for the country.

Well, it is fun to see the mainstream media circuits blown, but the more important task is to push Republicans, Democrats, and Independents through the paradoxes of this transformation. The old labels are finished. The left right metric is over. The empire's game of imposing British liberal philosophy on us and dividing us against each other on the basis of categories of race, religion, being pro trade union or anti trade union.

This is over. Donald Trump is saying that with his choice of J. D. Vance. They're putting an exclamation point on the [00:13:00] fact that that that old game is over and something new is emerging and it is powerful and it's what the British Empire and all empires before have feared for millennia. And it is based on the good.

Your job as a citizen is to understand the content of that. A good place to start is by reading the Republican Party platform from beginning to end and thinking about it. It's only 16 pages. And share it with others. And we will take up Socrates challenge to explore the nature of the good. We're going to have to go deeper with a more profound understanding of history, economics, and culture.

And that is our mission here at Promethean Action. So, I want to thank you for listening. I'm going to sign off from Milwaukee and see you again next week with an [00:14:00] After Action Report.