'Creepy': Reagan speechwriter rips RNC for displaying GOP’s 'cultish' transformation

Veteran conservative columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan has often been critical of former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Noonan has noted that she didn't vote for either Trump or the Democratic nominees in 2016 or 2020, and she expects to submit her "third consecutive write-in this November."

In her Friday column for the Wall Street Journal, Noonan stresses that the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee shows how thoroughly Trump has remade the GOP in his image.

"This wasn't a divided party, it was a party united," Noonan argues. "It wasn't only Mr. Trump's party, it was an explicitly Trumpian party. We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world's most powerful nation."

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Noonan adds, "It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie."

Noonan, however, is critical of the "creepy" and "cultish" aspects of the convention.

"It should be added that it was creepy to see members of the Trump family dominating prime speaking slots all week," Noonan observes. "This was carelessly cultish, and in its carelessness insolent."

Noonan continues, "Mr. Trump's speech was surprisingly muted, scattered and low-energy. It lacked drama even though he was narrating what it is like to be shot."