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.
