On February 13, 2021, American history was about to change. Like in one of those comics from the Marvel series What If? (What If?), which ventured alternate timelines for its superheroes, it is tempting to imagine what this country would be like today if on that day just 10 more Republican senators had voted in favor of the second impeachment trial. (impeachment)against Donald Trump. Many had openly criticized the still president for his role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, but that day they did not dare to sign what would have been a political death sentence.
It is also tempting to think about what the Republican Party would be like today if three and a half years ago they had turned the page on Trump. These days, the party is meeting in Milwaukee for its national convention with a double objective: to close the ballot for the November elections, which will be completed by the vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, and to pay tribute to the leader, who has become a martyr and a mythical, almost immortal figure, after surviving a live attempt at an attack at a rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday.
Hailed unanimously as a candidate for the White House on Monday by the nearly 2,500 delegates present in Milwaukee, Trump will deliver his big speech on Thursday evening, about which little is known beyond the suspicion that he will try to give a certain image of moderation. After all, it is no longer a question of convincing his own people, but the rest of those who could vote for him. This speech will be the high point of a triumphant four-day meeting that is taking place without the dissent with which, as a newcomer, he was received at the 2016 convention, nor the anxiety of the pandemic that overshadowed the 2020 one.
Otherwise, everything is designed this time to pay homage to the great leader in the basketball stadium where the convention is being held. There are photos of him everywhere in (super)life-size, and the shops and street stalls are overflowing with a merchandising which glorifies him even in his condition as a convicted criminal. There is the Trump lobby and the Room 47which refers to the number he would receive as president of the United States if he wins in November.
The delegates have only good things to say about him, and praise flows freely from the speakers’ podium. As would be expected at such a meeting, none of the party’s past tutelary figures, such as former President George W. Bush, are expected on the stage. Dissenting voices are only allowed if, like Nikki Haley, his most serious rival in the primaries, they bring a speech of regret for having confronted Trump in the past.
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One only has to look at the podium where the candidate sits – with a bandage on his ear that, although it is hard to believe, has become an accessory for some of the attendees – to see to what extent Trump has shaped the party to his whim in recent years. There we have seen the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and some of the most extreme congressmen on Capitol Hill, such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, both at the end of their journey from the margins to the centre of power, as well as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the ultra-Catholic Mike Johnson. He is the third authority in the country and on Tuesday in his speech he painted a future for the United States dangerously similar to that of a theocracy.
Kevin McCarthy ―old-guard Republican who preceded Johnson in the post of speaker until a rebellion led by Gaetz claimed his head – was amazed on Tuesday in a meeting with foreign journalists by the path taken by Trump since the assault on the Capitol (after which McCarthy also criticized him without reservation), as well as the strength with which he arrives at this moment, when there are less than four months left until the date with the polls; almost all the polls give him as the winner in the elections that will face him in November against the worst possible version of Joe Biden, whose physical and mental abilities have been called into question since his disastrous performance in the debate that faced both in Atlanta. “I am even surprised by how much his disposition has changed since the assassination attempt; [el expresidente] “He’s a different person,” McCarthy added.
The attack, whose investigation still leaves many loose ends, is the penultimate chapter in the astonishing story of Trump’s fall and rise, which begins with its protagonist at his lowest point: flying almost secretly over the skies of Washington on January 20, the day of Biden’s inauguration, aboard the presidential helicopter heading for a gilded exile: Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach (Florida).
The mansion has been the scene of Trump’s worst moments. Among them, the FBI search for the confidential papers he took without permission from the White House and which are at the origin of one of the four lawsuits that this Monday, just in time for the Milwaukee party, were dismissed by the judge appointed by the former president. Palm Beach has also been visited by almost all those who at some point turned their back on “kissing the ring,” an expression used by Haley when she said she would not go through that… until she ended up doing it.
Mar-a-Lago was the place where the tycoon launched his candidacy for the White House in November 2022. He did so early to cover up the poor Republican results in the midterm elections. At that time, apparently isolated and reduced to his angriest and most resentful image, the tycoon seemed doomed to irrelevance, and that a new face, that of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (another who on Tuesday swallowed the toad of speaking at his rival’s convention) would be able to dislodge him. It was just a mirage.
The announcement in March 2023 that a New York grand jury would try Trump on an old matter — paying porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a sexual relationship between the two — began the former president’s ordeal of pending criminal accounts: then came the indictments in Florida, for the Mar-a-Lago papers; Washington, for his attempts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election; and Atlanta, for his attempts to rig the election in those months in the State of Georgia.
The latest investigation produced his mugshot, the first of a president in US history. It quickly became an icon. At the New York trial, he was convicted of 34 serious crimes. His sentence was due to be announced last Friday, but a lifeline thrown by the Supreme Court (three of whose nine judges were appointed by Trump) delayed it. Six justices voted in favour of extending the immunity of his actions as president, and that also removed the possibility of holding the rest of the trials before the elections, which Americans will go to without knowing whether or not one of the candidates will be sentenced to prison.
“The dismissal of the Mar-a-Lago Papers case proves once again that this is all a witch hunt,” Kevin Cabrera, who served as Trump’s Florida campaign manager in 2020, said Wednesday in Milwaukee. “None of the lawsuits concern political matters that had to do with his performance as president, and they are part of the strategy to bring him down from the day he came down the escalator.”
Cabrera is referring to the theatrical announcement of his first presidential bid in 2015, when the reality TV star descended before the cameras against the gold backdrop of Trump Tower in Manhattan to announce his intention to be the next president. No one took it too seriously at the time.
On those stairs began one of the most astonishing political stories of our time, a story full of moments in which his rivals gave up on him too many times and too soon. Thursday’s speech will be his first as a candidate and as a survivor of an attack. And who knows if it will also be the start of the chapter in his story that will take Trump back to the White House.
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