If it’s Saturday afternoon, this must be a mass rally for Donald Trump somewhere in the United States. The former president had an appointment with his supporters today at a packed stadium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but this was no ordinary campaign event. This was Trump’s first rally since exactly seven days ago he was the victim of an attack at another event in Butler, Pennsylvania, which almost cost him his life. It was also the first time he was accompanied by the vice-presidential candidate he had chosen last Monday: Ohio Senator JD Vance.
Trump appeared on stage twenty minutes late and without the bandage he had worn all week, which he had replaced with a band-aid on his right ear. He had arrived straight from the Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee, on the other side of Lake Michigan. “They say I am a threat to democracy,” he said at the beginning of the rally. “How can they say that? Last week I was shot in the name of democracy!”
The four days of the triumphant conclave (“I think there has never been a more united and loving convention,” said the Republican candidate) served to certify that the party is entirely at his feet. There, the former president appeared calm, with a magnanimous appearance, as if the assassination attempt had wrought a profound change in him. It was only a mirage. Trump displayed his usual style on Saturday, and the calls for “national unity” that he launched after the assassination suddenly seemed a thing of the past.
During his 100-minute speech, he was energetic and mocking, even faster than usual, making his followers laugh and attacking his enemies: the press, Joe Biden (whom he called “stupid” several times), Kamala Harris (he called her “crazy”), Mexico, immigrants… The image contrasted with the one he offered on Thursday on the stage of the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, during his acceptance speech for the White House nomination. Then he spoke (and a lot: at an hour and a half, he broke the record for the longest such speech in history) with a sombre calm.
Michigan is one of the key states (along with Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania) that will decide the November elections. To win the vote in the three of these states that are part of the Rust Belt, once home to American heavy industry that globalization swept away, Trump has chosen Vance, with his lower-class origins and his history of overcoming, which he picked up in the Hillbilly best-seller, a rural elegyand took him to Yale University, first, and then to Silicon Valley and Washington.
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Vance is from Ohio, so he was greeted with tepid boos by some of those at Saturday’s rally because of the state’s sports rivalry with Michigan. “I picked him,” Trump said, “because he cares about working people, people like you, who have been forgotten for too long, although not while I was in the White House.”
The presidential candidate then went on to describe how he experienced the attack, although he did so in a much less emotional manner than in his speech at the convention. “I am here,” he explained, “only by the grace of the almighty God. Something very special happened.”
First medical report
Before the rally, the Republican candidate had shared on his social network Truth the first medical report to be made public after the assassination attempt. It was signed by Ronny Jackson, who was his doctor in the White House (as he was before Barack Obama and George W. Bush) and is now a Republican congressman from Texas. In that report, one could read: “The bullet went through, less than a quarter of an inch [0,6 centímetros] of entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear. The trail produced a wound two centimeters wide, which extended to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. (…) Due to the highly vascular nature of the ear, there is still intermittent bleeding requiring the placement of a bandage. Due to the wide and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required.”
The rest of the speech in Grand Rapids was a souped-up, souped-up version of a classic Trump rally. He promised the biggest tax cut in American history, to bring patriotism back to schools, to raise tariffs on China and, as always, to Make America Great Again. He talked about the border and how he plans to “crush migrant crime.” “The only good thing about these criminals they send us through millions of other countries is that they make our gang members and criminals look like decent people,” he said, before saying that immigration had “saved his life.” The former president recalled that last Saturday at his rally in Pennsylvania he turned around to look at a graphic on the issue and that prevented the bullet that came closest to hitting him.
Trump also made a strong case for economic isolationism, which was clearly aimed at Michiganders who lost so much from industrial relocation. He sold himself as the only one capable of avoiding a third world war and promised to build an Iron Dome to defend the country from foreign missiles, “like the one they have in Israel.”
He praised autocrats such as Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping, the president of China, whom he described as “a brilliant and intelligent guy”, a “fierce man who has 1.4 billion Chinese people under his thumb”. In another of his classics, he told an anecdote about the French president, Emmanuel Macron, whose French accent he enjoys mockingly imitating. According to the Republican candidate, one day, while he was president, he forced the French president by telephone and under threats to reverse some tariffs approved by parliament “or wherever they pass the laws in that country”.
He spoke without pause, except for brief moments when he pulled out a volunteer in a union T-shirt and turned the floor over to two state politicians facing off for the Senate; one of them had received Trump’s endorsement, so the other announced on air that he was dropping out of the campaign. And then, an hour and three-quarters after he began speaking, he ended the rally to the tune of Hold On, I’m Coming, by Sam & Dave. He has taken a liking to that Southern soul beat. The message in the lyrics is clear: “Hold on,” Trump seemed to say to his supporters in Grand Rapids on Saturday. “Hold on, I’m on my way to the White House.”
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