There were calls for unity among politicians and pundits alike at the Republican National Convention last week.
The change in messaging was connected with the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. However, the efforts to focus on a united country were often overshadowed by the divisive rhetoric that has come to define the Republican party in recent years.
From the stage at Fiserv Forum to the Convention Fest just outside, far-right talking points about the dangers of immigrants and LGBTQ+ people were shared alongside the unity messaging.
To look into this issue, Lake Effect’s Joy Powers and Xcaret Nuñez spoke with Peter Montgomery, the research director for People For The American Way, and a senior fellow with Right Wing Watch. He was in town for the convention when they spoke with him.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joy Powers: What are some of the ideologies that far-right extremism encompasses?
Peter Montgomery: It encompasses aggressive Christian nationalism. It can include white nationalism. I think, just sort of the grievance politics in general, which tells white people or Christians that the left hates them and they are persecuting them. That certainly contributes to a lot of the atmosphere that we have today.
Xcaret Nuñez: What are some of the characteristics of far-right rhetoric?
Montgomery: I think some of them are divisiveness [and] othering — you have real Americans, and you have these other people. Some of the rhetoric I've heard this week is, “They're coming for your children.” Tucker Carlson said at the Heritage Foundation policy fest, that the left wants to kill Christians, that that's who your opponents are. He's talking to people that they want to kill Christians. I mean, it's really pretty stunning to hear that kind of rhetoric and at a time when, supposedly, the party is moving to unify the country. I [also] think this rhetoric, we've often seen around reproductive choice, that people who support reproductive choice are baby killers and support infanticide. We see it around some of the rhetoric opposing LGBTQ+ equality. I heard some of this at the Moms for Liberty event, that people who [are LGBTQ+] are groomers and pedophiles, everything else. So that kind of rhetoric. I think there's a real gaslighting going on at this convention about who really uses demonization rhetoric, which is a hallmark of Trump, the MAGA movement, and a lot of his supporters, and yet they're claiming to be the victims of it. It's pretty astonishing.
Powers: What’s the rhetoric that's coming specifically from the speaker stage at the RNC that is indicative of some of these far-right ideologies?
Montgomery: One of the things that has happened because of the attempted assassination of President Trump is that the rhetoric around him being “divinely anointed” has just been amped up. We've been hearing this from the religious right since the 2016 campaign — that he was chosen by God, that he's anointed to lead the country. I mean, we had so many speakers from the main stage say that he was spared by God's direct intervention, that he's on a divine mission from God. So what does that make of his political opponents — that means you're God's enemy, right? You're fighting God, you're not just fighting Trump and his agenda. It's dangerous, and it's really imbued the convention, so far. There's also been a tremendous amount of demonization of immigrants and immigration, happy smiling, people waving signs, mass deportation. Now, some of the vibe and the energy around that has been pretty disturbing.
Nuñez: Like you mentioned, there has been this theme of divine intervention when talking about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. What’s the impact of viewing politics through such a religious lens and having that lead policy?
Montgomery: I think that's a really important question because one of the dangers that I always see about viewing politics as spiritual warfare is something that I alluded to, which is, if you view politics as spiritual warfare, and the people on the other side of the aisle are not just disagreeing with you on policy, but they are literally agents of Satan, enemies of God, then how do you work with them? How do you find compromise? How do you cross that divide? And I think that's really been a problem with rhetoric from the Christian right. It's certainly now part of the problem with the rhetoric of the MAGA movement. The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins was kind of on this bandwagon of “we should be using more united rhetoric now and people should stop criticizing Trump so harshly.” It was a month ago, when he was on TV saying the Democratic Party is aligned with the devil and we should not be afraid to say so.
Powers: As we look at the official platform of the RNC … part of the backdrop to this is anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. The RNC’s official platform says “Republicans will end leftwing gender insanity,” can you contextualize that statement for us, because I think people could understand that in a variety of ways depending on their beliefs.
Montgomery: Gender ideology, gender insanity, all of that language is deployed to oppose the advancement of LGBTQ+ equality, particularly, as part of the campaign to purge libraries and schools, of books or curriculum that promote understanding or tolerance or even just acknowledgment of the existence of LGBTQ+ people. And it has become one of the main culture war strategies of the right to demonize particularly trans people. The right knows that they basically lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on gay people. Because Americans, by two-thirds, support marriage equality. Trans people are a lot harder for more people to understand, it's a newer movement, and so they have identified that as a weakness, and they're going out as hard as they possibly can to make trans people seem weird, to make allies of trans people seem like groomers and child molesters, and people who are mutilating kids.
Again, it's very violent rhetoric that’s used to describe people who just want to help kids get through their adolescence. We even have states that are criminalizing parents who are supporting their kids. So, that kind of [language], gender insanity, gender ideology, is an attempt to totally otherize a group of people that many Americans probably don't understand well, or don't have a lot of direct interaction with.
Nuñez: We both spoke to some delegates about Project 2025 and they were all a bit cagey about it, many saying there's no association between Trump and Project 2025. The Heritage Foundation is the organization behind this platform, and they have historically had a relationship with the Republican Party. They are also one of the sponsors of the RNC. Is it your expectation that Project 2025 is the platform of the GOP?
Montgomery: Project 2025 is absolutely the operating platform of the GOP and of the broader right-wing movement that has mobilized to put Trump back in power. It is an astonishing amount of gaslighting that is going on at this convention around Project 2025. Even by Donald Trump, trying to disavow it and pretend he doesn't know otherwise. This is something that was written by his former aides, people who are prepared to come back into positions of power in the administration. They laid out what they're going to do when he gives them that power. And I think it was really their arrogance that they felt like they could just put it all out there are — 900 pages — every right-wing fever dream of what they could do if they had the power and the support of a president who's willing to bend the rules, break the rules and use power aggressively. That's part of this.
They want to give him authoritarian power to fire tens of thousands of federal employees by executive order restricting them of their civil service protections, replace them with loyalists who will do what he says unquestioningly and just get rid of checks and balances. And, on top of that, they named J.D. Vance the vice president [nominee]. J.D Vance is very close to Heritage, he's praised Project 2025 and he is showing that he shares Trump's worst authoritarian impulses.
He has talked about firing all these civil servants and said directly that if the courts intervene, Trump should just ignore them, that he should ignore the Supreme Court. I mean, I think it's the combination of the push for an authoritarian, dictatorial presidential control over the executive branch, along with this deep policy, to cut federal agencies of their ability to protect Americans from corporate wrongdoing from polluters, that really makes Project 2025 so scary.
And I think the fact that people really started paying attention to it is why Trump is trying to disavow it. And why, even at the Heritage Policy Fest, almost nobody even mentioned Project 2025, at a day, that was basically devoted to promoting its ideas. So the truth is getting out, it's not helping them and so they're trying to run away from it. And I think between now and Election Day, there's gonna be a lot of effort to not let them run away from it.
Powers: This interesting dichotomy has emerged in which Republicans, especially in light of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, are supposedly calling for unity, but then are still espousing these beliefs that people should be fired based on any of their personal beliefs that might contradict what the Republican Party… do you anticipate this idea of unity extending beyond the convention?
Montgomery: I think it's just a shameless ploy to take advantage of the unfortunate assassination attempt on Donald Trump. I don't think the Republican Party has any intention of giving a unity message between now and the election. I don't think Donald Trump does, but he's who he is. And even if he was changed somewhat by that experience, he is who he is. He is not a uniter, he has built his entire campaign on political career, and brutally dividing people, on demonizing his opponents, on cruelty and mocking, and all of those things. That's who he is. And we saw that from the other speakers, even while they were saying that “We're going to unify the country,” we had speaker after speaker, demonizing opponents, demonizing immigrants, that's who the MAGA Republican Party is in the age of Trump.
In the same way that they're gaslighting around this word unity, this huge gaslighting going on around the idea of the word freedom. They keep talking, “We're the party of freedom, We're the party of freedom.” I heard that again at the Moms for Liberty event.
So on one hand at Moms for Liberty, you have people saying “We're the party of freedom,” and then you had Ron DeSantis, talking about how proud he was, not only is he telling K-12 schools what they can teach, but that he's telling public colleges and universities what they can teach.
The freedom lovers who want to take books out of libraries, the freedom lovers who want to strip women of any ability to control their reproductive life, and families to make those kinds of decisions, who want to reverse the gains toward full equality that have been made by LGBTQ+ people.
This is not a party that loves freedom. Donald Trump and his fans talk about how much they love Viktor Orban, strongman in Hungary, who has crushed the media, who has crushed civil society, who was not in line with him. Donald Trump has threatened to go after media outlets that criticize him. This is not freedom. And yet they present themselves as freedom lovers.
Project 2025 has a telling thing from the introduction by the President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, where he says “Freedom is not the freedom to do what you want. It's the freedom to live as you ought.” And that's so telling. That's like, “Well, we're for freedom, for you, Americans, IF your idea of freedom is the same as ours, and if your idea of how you should live is the same as our particular interpretation of the Bible.” That's what they mean by freedom.
