DALLAS — Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is near total, and for two days this week, it filled an arena. A decade in politics has let him redefine what it means to be a Republican and escape responsibility for an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his own supporters, mounted after he tried to overturn an election he lost. What his party offers voters this fall is him.

Republicans regrouped here for a midterm convention brought to life by Trump and for Trump, and that faithfulness was the point. They called him the greatest president in the nation’s history, thanked God for him winning again and even had the chance to buy a hat in his familiar shade of red saying he “was right about everything.”

“I don’t think we will ever — ever — have another president with this type of character, and I think it’s refreshing,” said Matt Long, a conservative Texas radio voice. “And I’ve loved every minute of it.” 

It was two days of Trump-tenored programming, a display honed since he beat a Bush, a Clinton and a field of governors and senators to first win the White House. The goal was to convince the country that Trump and his party should keep control of Congress — even though what’s happened in Washington is unrecognizable to allies of the last Republican president who came before him.

“They’re not even remotely close to conservative,” said Marc Racicot, the former Montana governor who led the Republican National Committee during George W. Bush’s first term and has turned to supporting several Democrats in recent years. “They’re mean, they’re suspicious of everything. They’re angry and bitter, and carnival barking usually is what they’re engaged in.”

Trump’s time on the political scene has been animated by those he deems an antagonist. First it was Barack Obama, whom he maligned with a racist falsehood in 2012. Then it was the Republican establishment in the 2016 primary, before he turned to Hillary Clinton and kept her from becoming the nation’s first woman president.

His defining rival may still be Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, who ousted Trump from the White House in 2020, a loss so shocking to the president and his allies that they tried, and failed, to overturn it. Biden remains the only candidate of either party ever to beat Trump in a campaign. And even as Trump returned to power in 2024, chasing Biden from his re-election bid after a disastrous debate and then defeating Vice President Kamala Harris that fall, he never got the chance to defeat the man who had defeated him.

The party Biden led has spent the two years since asking how it lost to Trump again, after all it had done to center its strategy on running against him.

“Looking back in the history books, I hope that Trump is seen as one of the most divisive presidents our nation has ever seen, and that he should have never been re-elected in 2024,” said Jane Kleeb, a national Democratic party leader from Nebraska. “And obviously as Democrats, we have a responsibility that we own of allowing him to be re-elected, that we lost touch with so many voters that they lost faith in us as a party that they thought that he was the only hope to put more money in their pockets.”

Absent a main opponent this November, Republicans have gone looking for one. In this, they’ve taken two tacks. 

First, they’ve reached back to the last one. “To the American people, look: I know many of you are still struggling thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats,” North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, the leader of the House Republican campaign arm, told the crowd. Visible during the convention were signs saying “Biden & Harris Broke It — Help Is On The Way.”

But it’s precisely the absence of Biden or any single defining leader that has left Democrats riven and opened room for a surge of democratic socialism among those who concluded that the party’s old blend of center-left and progressive ideas was no match for Trump. That, in turn, has given Republicans a foil, if not a lone foe — one they can describe as aberrant — and license to cast Trump as the only route to a prosperity they say is otherwise out of reach.

“To the American people listening, I say: If all you want out of life is what little these communists are offering, I guess that’s your right,” House GOP Majority Whip Tom Emmer told the audience in Texas. “Or you can join Donald J. Trump and Republicans, and have the opportunity to realize your greatest dreams, to achieve your greatest potential, to live free in the greatest country the world has ever known.”

Trump used his own turn onstage to ask the country to defy the gravity of a midterm year, when the president’s party is usually rebuked, and keep siding with him instead. On the convention’s first day, he promised a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen if Republicans hold both chambers of Congress — a proposal with neither a plan to implement it nor accounting for how it would be paid for, let alone the ethical concerns it raises.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell,” Trump said on the second night of the convention, earning laughter from the arena. “You know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

Among his supporters, some come for the policy, and some for the bluster. The convention had its share of attendees in MAGA-coded red, white and blue, attracting the attention of cameras. It also had people who back him for the plainer reason that they believe he has made their lives better.

“He is probably a once-in-a-generation type of person. Love him or hate him, I love him, but you know the other side doesn’t,” said Laura McCravy Hunter, a South Carolina Republican. “It is impossible to say that he has not had an extreme impact on the party.”

Not every GOP candidate who will decide control of Congress came to Dallas. Some stayed home to keep the focus local, aware that Trump drives Republican passion but draws out opposing voters, too.

Stewart Rhodes, the Texas man whose sentence for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was commuted almost as soon as Trump returned to office, made his way around the arena one evening this week. Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, was found guilty of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison before the president’s wide-ranging clemency for those convicted over that day.

Almost all the Republicans in Congress who tried to hold Trump accountable for the stolen-election falsehoods that led to the riot have since left office or lost.

Yet hours before Trump spoke in Dallas, there Rhodes was — a reminder of how the president has wielded his power, as Republicans ask voters to stick with them and the man they follow.

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