Dallas is the GOP’s last chance to remember why Trump won

The battle for the soul of the Republican Party and the America First coalition is already under way. The midterm convention in Dallas this week gives anxious voters a chance to see what the party thinks it is fighting for now — and what comes next.

Democrats are building a case around what might be called Republican DEI: data centers, Epstein, and the Iran war. The examples differ, but the attack line is the same. Republicans, Democrats say, are beholden to special interests and major corporations, indifferent to the struggles of ordinary Americans and increasingly consumed by self-dealing and vanity projects.

Republicans have a chance to get their groove back before the midterms — the last federal election cycle that will shape Trump’s presidency.

Politics is a contact sport, and the Democratic Socialists of America are ascendant. Their critique will not be answered by dismissing it or by pursuing policies that seem to validate it.

The accusation is simple: Republicans protect the people who finance them. They will do unpopular things if donors want them done and avoid popular things if donors object. That critique has worked before — remember Mitt Romney’s collapse — and it can work again.

The Dallas convention is an opportunity to reconnect the Republican Party with the insurgency Donald Trump launched in 2015: opposition to a special-interest-dominated GOP, a focus on the economic and cultural condition of forgotten Americans, and resistance to mass migration that intensified those pressures.

Somewhere along the way, that focus shifted — in policy and in tone. Consider President Trump’s post last week on Truth Social, touting data centers: “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”

That sounds uncomfortably close to Barack Obama’s notorious quip about struggling small-town Pennsylvanians who “cling to guns or religion” because their communities had been left behind. Obama’s mistake was not noticing the economic pain. It was treating the people living through it with contempt. Republicans should not repeat it.

RELATED: The left uses primaries. The right wastes them.

id-work/iStock/Getty Images

Data centers are polling disastrously across party lines. Candidates are flipping positions and racing to oppose them. Put aside the merits of any individual project. The political signal is obvious: Americans do not trust the political and economic system to protect them from another massive technological transformation.

Their anxiety is not a messaging problem. It reflects lived conditions. Many Americans have watched factories close, wages stagnate, housing costs soar, communities deteriorate, and successive technological revolutions enrich people somewhere else. When they hear promises that AI infrastructure will make everyone richer, they remember how often “everyone” turned out not to include them.

That is why the socialist critique has traction. Too many Republicans reinforce it by behaving like the government-relations arm of Fortune 100 companies. Americans who feel abandoned by institutions will rage against the machine — and increasingly, against the machines themselves.

So Dallas arrives at the right time. To borrow an underrated movie title, Republicans have a chance to get their groove back before the midterms — the last federal election cycle that will shape Trump’s presidency. The convention should answer a basic question: What and whom does the Republican Party stand for?

RELATED: Republicans keep losing because they won’t take hostages

Win McNamee/Getty Images

The answer does not require a new slogan. It requires remembering the old promises. Trump’s rise was built on reindustrialization, immigration enforcement, hostility to corrupt special interests, and a conviction that government should pay more attention to the people who live in hollowed-out towns than to the institutions that profited from hollowing them out.

That agenda should again be squarely focused on working Americans whose finances have worsened, whose communities have been transformed, and whose confidence in the country’s institutions has collapsed. Reindustrialize. Enforce the border and remove the millions of people who have no lawful right to remain. Break the grip of special interests over the political class.

The midterm convention is an opportunity to assure voters that the Republican program is still about getting their country back — not telling them they are backward or poor for objecting to what Washington and corporate America have planned for them.