Milwaukee – Previous President Donald Trump — who left the White House only after an unprecedented campaign to undermine the results of his 2020 election defeat, culminating in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — has completed one of the most disturbing comeback stories in American politics, accepting the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination in Milwaukee, just days after surviving a scratch from an assassin’s bullet.
Trump, a convicted felon who was twice impeached as the 45th president, spoke Thursday night at the Republican National Convention while riding high in the polls, hoping to become the 47th chief executive of the United States. His speech was long — at more than an hour and a half, it was the longest in the convention’s history — low-energy, and filled with rambling deviations from his prepared remarks. Much of it was largely indistinguishable from his rallies, despite talk this week of Trump softening his approach and focusing on unity after Saturday’s assassination attempt.
The former president began his speech by thanking his supporters for their sympathy and well-wishes in the wake of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I’m going to tell you exactly what happened and you’re never going to hear it from me again because it’s too painful to tell,” he said, before giving a highly detailed account of the shooting as he lived it. “There was blood everywhere. But somehow, I felt safe because God was on my side — God was on my side,” Trump said, adding: “The bullets were flying overhead, and yet I felt calm.”
“Ears bleed more than any other part of the body,” the former president added. “And for some reason, doctors told me that ears bleed more. So we learned something.”
Trump was struck in the right ear by a gunman, killing one audience member — former fire chief Corey Comperatore — at the rally and seriously wounding two others. After his lengthy description of the shooting, the former president led a moment of silence for Comperatore, along with a display of his firefighting jacket and helmet — which Trump accepted when he first took the stage.
Trump then Obama lost momentum. His speech became a long, rambling tirade in which he praised the previous night’s speakers individually as if he were hosting a private dinner at Mar-a-Lago. His actual convention address was slow, soft, and sleepy, and he began to lose his intensely partisan audience—so much so that even his familiar lines of applause were not met with a standing ovation.
The lack of crowd energy was unbelievable given the version of Trump who took the stage Thursday, presiding over a Republican Party that has transformed far from the one eroded by his candidacy in 2016. With the 2020 in-person Republican National Convention canceled during the Covid-19 pandemic, the eight years between Trump’s 2016 candidacy and 2024 have seen the Republican Party transform in his own image, banish party power players who had long opposed him, and assert American nationalism as the dominant force in conservative ideology.
The four days of the Republican National Convention leading up to the former president’s speech were a festival of Trump worship — featuring everything from Republican lawmakers explaining how God sent Trump to save America, to a golf pro at Trump’s club bragging about how hard he could hit a putt, to Hulk Hogan taking off his shirt to reveal the new Trump-Vance threads underneath.
The former WWE star and other speakers at the Republican National Convention repeatedly referred to Trump as a tough guy, in part because of how he responded to the assassination attempt the previous Saturday during a rally in Pennsylvania. In the wake of the shooting, Trump said: Washington Examiner And New York Post He “threw” the original draft of his speech at the Republican National Convention in order to focus on “unity.”
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was supposed to be amazing,” Trump said at a news conference. “Frankly, it’s going to be a very different speech now.” examiner“This is an opportunity to unite the country,” he added.
When Trump finally got to the unity part of his speech, it was largely a general demand to drop all charges in the ongoing criminal trials against him. “If Democrats want to unite our country, they must abandon this partisan witch hunt, which I have had for so many years,” he told the crowd. “And they must do so without delay and allow for an election worthy of our people.”
The former president accused Democrats of “destroying our country,” called former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “crazy,” and described Washington, D.C., as a “horrible killing field.” It took more than 30 minutes before he finally got to the crux of his campaign theory — his policy positions — which often included listing more grievances. Trump again claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him, accusing Democrats of using “COVID to cheat” him out of victory. He claimed that immigrants kill “hundreds of thousands of people a year,” and that “illegal aliens” are “taking jobs from our black population.” [and] “They’re also taking our Hispanic population away from us.” He also called the Green New Deal a “green new scam” and criticized electric cars.
Despite efforts to present a more moderate face for his movement at the convention, Trump pushed a conscience-shocking agenda that included detaining millions of undocumented immigrants. He claimed that these residents were “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and promised a mass deportation campaign unlike any in America’s dark and often xenophobic history. Attendees at the Republican National Convention held up official party signs reading “Mass Deportation Now!” and Trump spent much of his speech demonizing immigrants.
Trump is the first candidate in history to have a criminal record — 34 felony convictions related to his attempt to cover up hush money payments to a porn star — and he also faces a slew of criminal indictments for election interference, both federally and in Georgia. Still, most of the GOP elite who attended Thursday seemed to have all but declared a preemptive victory in the 2024 campaign against struggling President Joe Biden. Still, some in the national party and the conservative donor class who were here to celebrate their leader couldn’t shake the nagging fears that Trump might manage to “blow up” the race after all — and then end up facing actual prison sentences on the other side of the presidential election.
Trump himself admitted that he “better finish the election strong, or we will fail.”
Thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, Trump now enjoys—and will enjoy during his potential second term—immunity for any crimes he committed in his official acts as president. Trump has threatened to act like a “dictator” upon regaining office, as well as to carry out a campaign of retaliation against his political opponents. He has waged repeated crusades against the left as the “enemy within” of the United States.
But this week at least — for a campaign keen not to alienate many critical swing voters in the final stretch of the race — Trump and his associates have tried to put a softer, gentler face on the outright authoritarian, vindictive platform on which the former and possibly future president is running. Just hours before Trump began his speech, many of his fans, prominent conservatives, and Trump family members mingled, socialized, and joked in hotels and bars near the sports arena in downtown Milwaukee, talking excitedly about Hulk Hogan’s scheduled Thursday night speech before Trump. In the hotel lobby area surrounding the convention site, internationally known model Fabio — dressed in a suit and tie, and for some reason wearing a media badge — posed for photos with passersby and talked about how excited he was about Trump’s speech and how he was looking forward to checking out the after-party scene.
“I am so excited!” said the world-famous model.
In the current Trump era of Republican politics, this was a fitting image of how an ambitious authoritarian state has presented itself as “Make America Great Again”: cloaked in reality TV-style celebrity culture, in order to partly mask the spectacularly brutal political implications that come with the Trump brand.
