Donald Trump closed the Republican convention on Thursday with a call for unity, but a unity around himself. “The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound by a shared fate and destiny. We rise together. Or we fall,” he said, in a speech marked by the attack he suffered last Saturday. “I am running to be president of all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he added in a speech that was peppered with his usual lies and hyperbole. Trump immediately returned to the attacks, presented an apocalyptic image of the United States and presented himself as a savior.
Except for the first 15 minutes, when he made that call to heal wounds and recounted with some emotion how he experienced the assassination attempt, it sounded — and lasted — like any of his rallies, only in a minor tone and perhaps more boring. He spoke for more than an hour and a half, the longest acceptance speech ever recorded, until the blue, red, white and gold balloons that had been waiting all week for their moment descended from the roof of the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee (Wisconsin). The public gave themselves over, but no more than at any of his campaign events.
Trump had already hinted that he would soften his message in the wake of the assassination attempt at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally. And at first he did. “I stand before you tonight with a message of confidence, strength and hope. In four months, we will win an incredible victory and begin the best four years in the history of our country,” the candidate said. “Together, we will begin a new era of security, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed,” he added, before referring to the attack.
“Let me begin tonight by expressing my gratitude to the American people for their outpouring of love and support following the assassination attempt at my rally on Saturday,” he said. The former president has been on stage wearing a helmet and firefighter jacket that belonged to Corey Comperatore, who died during the attack. Trump paid tribute to the attack victim by reaching out to his suit and kissing his helmet and asked for a few moments of silence for him.
“As you know, the assassin’s bullet was a quarter of an inch away from taking my life. Many people have asked me what happened, and so I will tell you what happened, and you will never hear it from me a second time, because it is too painful to tell,” he said before recounting how he experienced the attack. He explained that turning to look at a graphic about illegal immigration saved his life. “Something hit me very, very hard, in my right ear,” he said. “There was blood everywhere, and yet in a way I felt very safe because I had God on my side,” he explained. “The bullets were flying at us, but I remained calm. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God,” he added.
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He also highlighted how he stood up shouting: “Fight, fight, fight.” At that moment, the audience began to chant that slogan. The first quarter of an hour of the speech was spent talking about the attack, in his first public appearance after suffering it. In the eyes of the Republicans, Trump emerges from the attack as a “hero,” as a “lion,” according to many of the speakers at the convention.
“Nothing will stop us. I will never stop fighting for you and for our great country,” he continued, as a transition to change the subject. After talking about the attack, the former president again called for unity, but to drop the criminal charges against him and end what he calls the “witch hunt,” with charges he considers unconstitutional. He welcomed the judge’s decision to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago papers case. The call for unity comes, moreover, after days of frontal attacks on Biden and Harris at the convention. And although he avoided most of the authoritarian drift that has marked his speeches in the last year, he immediately launched into attacking Joe Biden’s government again.
Democrats, through Vice President Kamala Harris, had anticipated that Trump would appeal to that idea of unity and had already criticized the fact that the former president, the most divisive figure in American politics, now presents himself as a unifier. “If you intend to stand for unity, you have to do more than just say the word. You cannot claim to stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives entire groups of Americans of freedoms, opportunities and dignity,” she said Thursday at a rally in North Carolina. “You cannot claim to be in favor of unity if you are trying to overturn a free and fair election,” she added, referring to his attempts to reverse the 2020 election result.
Trump only mentioned the president’s name in one passage: “I say that if you take the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States, the 10 worst, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done.” He did not mention Kamala Harris. Despite this, he criticized her “incompetent leadership” that has made, as he said, the United States “a country in decline.” The one he mentioned a couple of times by name was the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, whom he called “crazy,” demonstrating that her supposed moderation has a limit, shortly after saying that there was no need to “demonize political disagreements.”
Much of the speech seemed like a rehash of any of his rallies, with his proclamations in favor of fossil fuels, promises of tax cuts, plans for import tariffs (he particularly mentioned cars), closing the border to illegal immigration and one of his latest signature promises: tax-free tips. He did not mention the assault on the Capitol, but he did spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He also avoided talking about abortion.
The former president reiterated his usual apocalyptic portrait in which he says that the United States is suffering from “an invasion,” referring to illegal immigration of immigrants who “come from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and asylums, and with terrorists at levels never seen before,” presenting them as cannibals and linking them to crime, in the repetition of one of his demagogic lies. He promised the largest deportation in the history of the United States. He also said that the planet is on the brink of a third world war, another of his classics.
He concluded by assuring that the Republicans would win. “We are going to save our country,” he said. “Nothing will stop us,” he continued, ending with his slogan, inherited from Ronald Reagan’s campaign: “We are going to make America great again.”
On the way to the White House
The former president is the first convicted felon to be elected as a candidate for one of the two major parties. He leaves Milwaukee with a big shout-out, while a good part of the Democrats have launched an operation to harass and take down President Joe Biden to prevent him from running for re-election.
Following Biden’s attempts to cling on to the nomination, leaving open only extreme hypotheses of withdrawal, the pressure from Democratic leaders in Congress has begun to bear fruit. Biden has had conversations with his party’s leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer; with the leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries; and with the last speakerNancy Pelosi, a Democrat, that seems to have weighed on his mood. He has begun to show himself receptive to her warnings that he has little chance of defeating Trump and that he can drag the party down with him. With this, he seems to begin to accept that he may have to pass the baton to avoid the triumph of his 2020 rival. The Washington Post, Pelosi has told some lawmakers that Biden “might” soon become convinced that he needs to leave.
Trump is looking forward to returning to the White House after the triumphant convention in Milwaukee. A party that is often dysfunctional, which has experienced a thousand and one internal battles in Congress over the past two years, has given an image of almost impeccable unity, only disturbed by some minor episodes and altercations. The candidate wants to avoid at all costs scaring away moderate and independent voters. He knows that his supporters are mobilized, especially after Saturday’s attack, so he tries to show his more friendly side, but he doesn’t quite succeed.
Nevertheless, Thursday’s session was marked by a confrontational dialectic before his speech. The extremist television presenter Tucker Carlson took part, presenting Trump as “the leader of a nation”, especially after the attack. “Everything is different after that moment. America is different. The world is different,” he said. Also appearing were wrestler Hulk Hogan, who tore off his shirt, and the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a martial arts competition. Shortly before Trump’s speech, Kid Rock performed a rap with the chorus Fight, fight (Fight, fight), in reference to Trump’s words after the attack with his fist raised.
Between a wrestler and a rapper, Melania Trump, the candidate’s wife, arrived with music from the Ninthto greet her. It was her first appearance at the convention, but she did not give a speech, as is customary for spouses of candidates. She appeared dressed in red, the color of the Republican Party and the color of her husband’s tie. She then went up on stage at the end of the rally and gave her husband a kiss that seemed somewhat elusive.
Trump has chosen as his running mate JD Vance, senator for Ohio, author of Hillbilly: A Rural Elegy. At 39, Vance brings youth to the table, but above all, he is someone the former president believes can help him win the elections in three key states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. There he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he was able to attract the vote of unskilled white workers, but Biden beat him in 2020. In his acceptance speech, isolationist and anti-globalization, he mentioned those states again and again.
They are part of the so-called Rust Belt, the industrial region of the Midwest whose factories have suffered under globalization, and many of whose voters share a similar background to the vice presidential candidate. Democrats now call those three states the Blue Wall, the color of their party, because retaining them has become practically the only way to win the elections and stop Trump’s rise.
Trump referred to Vance in his speech, telling him: “You’re going to be doing this for a long time,” thus confirming the role of successor that he indirectly assigned to him by choosing him as his number two.
Throughout the convention, virtually the entire Republican Party has rallied around Trump. The vast majority of the candidates who challenged him in the primaries have endorsed him, including his two most prominent opponents: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. “You don’t have to agree with Donald Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him,” Haley said in her speech. Most at the convention in Milwaukee this week don’t even have to ponder that.
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