The 2016 Republican convention let extremists in. In 2024, they took the stage

In Cleveland, Ohio, in 2016, Donald Trump received the Republican presidential nomination as the leader of a successful political insurgency against the party elites, and far-right extremists the party had once tried to ostracize crossed the convention’s threshold for the first time.

Along with the likes of the far-right media figures Alex Jones, VDare’s Peter Brimelow, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was a prominent attendee that year, and he told the Washington Post that he and other extremists had enjoyed “one big, bourbon-fueled party” in unofficial side venues around the convention center.

Last week, at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, there was no parallel party circuit for the jubilant far-right. Instead, in the view of some observers, extremists have actually dominated the main stage, as well as nearby venues where powerful non-profits have detailed the agenda they are preparing to press on a future Trump administration. Rightwing extremist rhetoric has moved from the sidelines to being trumpeted from the main stage, and from obscure activists to top party figures.

Joe Lowndes, a political science professor at Hunter College and the author of several books on the American political right, said: “In 2016 [Maga] was an effective movement which was insurgent and combative … Now they have the space to work out new forms of far-right politics.”

It starts with the ticket itself.

Related: Conspicuously absent from Republican convention was any mention of abortion

JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, may have dialed back his delivery in his acceptance speech, in accordance with Trump’s desire to pivot to a message of national unity. In the past, however, Vance has expressed the desire that abortion be nationally banned, and he has resisted exceptions for rape or incest. In February he told an interviewer that if he had been vice-president in 2020, unlike Mike Pence, he would have overturned the results of the 2020 election.

In 2022 Vance publicly fundraised for January 6 defendants while falsely claiming that many were being held without charge. Last December he demanded that the justice department investigate a columnist for being critical of Trump. Earlier, he made a speech praising Alex Jones as a truth-teller and asserting that “the devil is real”.

Other elected officials who spoke this week have a history of advancing similarly extreme positions.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s main stage convention speech on Monday night was full of falsehoods and distortions about immigrants and LGBTQ+ advocates and dog whistles about “globalists”, and it featured a gratuitous assertion that “there are only two genders, and we are made in God’s image”.

Her past includes advocacy of the QAnon conspiracy theory (which Greene has since repudiated); claims that the Parkland mass shooting along with earlier ones in Las Vegas and Sandy Hook were staged; and a claim that the California utility company PG&E had conspired with the Jewish banking family the Rothschilds to start wildfires with lasers in 2018.

Trump has been given a license by party elites and voters to figure out an authoritarian politics that will work

Joe Lowndes, political science professor

Greene’s flights into conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes are well known, but other speakers with similar views have only achieved a national profile more recently.

North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, is now the Republican gubernatorial nominee in the state and also spoke on the convention stage on Monday night. Just weeks earlier, Robinson told congregants at a church in the town of White Lake that “some folks need killing”, apparently with reference to perceived political adversaries , such as those who espouse “socialism and communism”.

Robinson, who is African American, has a long history of social media posts railing against LGBTQ+ people, Jews and Black people. Those posts included assertions of links between homosexuality and pedophilia, that Black Democrats were “slaves”, and that the Black Panther comic character was “created by an agnostic Jew” and the film based on the comic was “created to pull the shekels” out of Black people’s pockets.

On Monday, the night Robinson appeared, the convention stage played host to a string of speakers of color in a way that may not reflect the current Republican coalition, but which Lowndes said may reflect Trump’s ambitions to expand it.

“In the broadest sense, they are trying to build a multi-racial far-right coalition,” he said. Trump has marginally increased his levels of support in communities of color, and “he’s responding, and testing his current audience by putting these speakers in front of them”.

The Guardian reported this week that one such speaker, the California lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, was greeted with a barrage of hateful tweets from Trump’s far-right supporters after performing a benediction with a Sikh prayer the same night.

Beyond elected officials, other convention speakers have contributed mightily to normalizing extremists and their ideals in conservative circles.

Charlie Kirk spoke on Monday night. His Turning Point Action Pac’s event last month hosted the likes of Candace Owens, the rightwing commentator with a lengthening history of antisemitic remarks; the Pizzagate conspiracy theory peddler Jack Posobiec, who has extensive links to extremists; and Alex Jones.

Away from the main stage, extremism is just as evident in the party’s grassroots.

The chair of the convention’s Arizona delegation, Shelby Busch, said in March of a Maricopa county election official, also a Republican, that if he “walked in this room, I would lynch him”. The remarks, reported last month, were recorded at a public meeting.

Busch is an inveterate denier of the results of the 2020 election and co-founded the We the People AZ Alliance Pac, which state records indicate has raised just shy of $1m since it was founded in 2020, from donors including the MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell, and from organizations linked to Lindell and his fellow Trump associate Michael Flynn.

Blocks away from the conference, the Heritage Foundation, one of the richest and most influential conservative non-profits, reasserted its comprehensive Project 2025 plan to remake the US government in the radical right’s image, spelled out in 922-page document first issued in April.

Among other things, the 922-page document proposes that the new administration expand the president’s executive authority over governmental bureaucracy. On this score, it recommends a “vast expansion” of political appointees in agencies including the justice and homeland security departments, which would give the president more direct control over the justice department’s criminal investigations.

The plan would also allow political appointees to apportion funds, and institute a White House review of military promotions to screen out officers who are too concerned with the climate crisis or “manufactured extremism”, a term the document uses to imply that domestic extremism in military ranks is a media fiction.

Discussing the plan earlier this month, the Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, said that a “second American Revolution” was under way, adding that it would be bloodless “if the left allowed it to be”.

Trump has endeavored to distance himself from the document in order to blunt criticism of his perennial extremist associations, with his senior adviser Chris LaCivita describing it and Heritage as a “pain in the ass” on Thursday.

JD Vance is a long-term ally of Heritage, however, and the organization is a cornerstone of what Politico called the “alternative conservative establishment” he is building in Washington to establish the so-called new right – which seeks to take Trump’s populism “in an even more radical direction”– as the dominant force in conservative politics.

The welter of competing authoritarian ideas may not be coherent, but Lowndes says that may be the point.

“The Heritage document itself is incoherent, but in some ways it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Assaults on liberal democracy have come from every direction since 2016. Now Trump has been given a license by party elites and voters to figure out an authoritarian politics that will work.”