MILWAUKEE — I don’t know whether the folks who tried to sell “vegan barbecue” from a booth in the strip of concession tents outside the 2024 Republican National Convention got bad advice or simply took an ill-advised leap of faith. Either way, I’m almost surprised they were allowed to do it. Doesn’t vegan barbecue sound like exactly the sort of Obama-era DEI woke outrage that Donald Trump would like to outlaw or defund, or at least humiliate into nonexistence?

But the cognitive dissonance of this convention goes well beyond that forlorn, misbegotten entrepreneurial venture. (I was relieved to see, at last, a couple of actual customers approach the booth; definitely journalists.) Amid all the obvious headline drama of the 2024 presidential campaign, which has already seen one candidate survive an attempted assassination and the other still struggling to survive an attempted intra-party coup, the RNC has so far been a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event.

Famous last words, I know. Trump’s closing-night speech on Thursday — rumored to be a lengthy stemwinder on a 19th-century scale — will no doubt be intended to rouse and unite the GOP faithful and send them forth to victory over whatever forces they believe are oppressing them. That’s approximately what happened at the 2016 convention in Cleveland, which was poorly organized and often dull before Trump’s “I alone can fix it” acceptance speech, which was genuinely traumatic to sit through as a supposedly dispassionate observer. (I described it at the time as a 7.8 on the Nuremberg scale.)

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But the differences are much bigger than the similarities. Both inside the arena and out on the Cleveland streets, the 2016 convention had the chaotic, unhinged, angry energy of a can of Mountain Dew vigorously shaken by a malicious six-year-old and left out in the sun. There was a distinct sense that worlds were colliding — the world of so-called mainstream politics and the MAGA revolution, the old Republican Party and the new one, in its just-hatched larval form. History was clearly being made; it was marvelous or terrible or both at once, according to your taste.

History is not being made here, so it must be going on someplace else. This convention is underpopulated, overpoliced and entirely devoid of drama. For........

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